GARETH VAN ONSELEN: Mapping Malema’s lies and hypocrisy

By now everyone pretty much knows the biggest Julius Malema hypocrisies. The defining example is, of course, Jacob Zuma — once a god, now a devil. Malema’s position on Zuma represents a profound about-turn, around which he has fashioned an entire political career. But there are many others examples besides: Thabo Mbeki, Robert Mugabe, Busisiwe Mkhwebane, there was even a time Pravin Gordhan enjoyed the support of the EFF leader, before he rounded on him with so much hate and bile.

Each of them epitomise three things: The absolutism of Malema’s rhetoric (they were each at one time or another either totally virtuous or completely villainous, he does not do shades of grey); his amoral dexterity (in so easily and profoundly changing his position); and, as a result, his lack of judgment (Malema has issued a long list of feigned apologies for his poor judgment, none of which seems to have resulted in the establishment of a commensurate reputation).

But, examine the public record, and the examples of Malema’s hypocrisy and double-standards are truly remarkable in their depth and breadth. To the extent that you are forced to ask: is there anything he has been consistent on? In turn, is anything he says worth believing?

Take, for example, the recent outpouring of vitriol and ridicule aimed at the DA’s chief whip, John Steenhuisen, who does not possess a university degree.

You would think the EFF, in general, and Malema, in particular, would be the greatest advocates of university education SA has ever seen. Then you remember that in 2009 Malema said this: “If Jacob Zuma is corrupt, then we want him with all his corruption. We want him with all his weaknesses. If he is uneducated, then we want him as our uneducated president.”

Not just that, but he was entirely hostile to the idea that political excellence and degrees were in any way reliant on one another. “You don’t need qualifications to lead in the ANC”, he said.

Of Mbeki, his bête noire at the time, he would say, “You can have many papers [degrees] but be useless. You can have a master’s in economics from London and be very useless and not know how to solve the problems of our people.”

Later he would bemoan Zuma as “uneducated” and “illiterate”, Mbeki as the greatest president the ANC had ever produced and university degrees as quintessential. All of which is funny in a detached kind of way, until you realise he actually played a primary role in getting Zuma elected and thus the very real decade of uneducated destruction that followed.

None of this matters of course. The only institution worse than Malema is the media, which inevitably presents whichever view he has embraced on the day without context. So, on any given day he is what he woke up believing and is cleansed of his own hypocrisy by a commercial whitewashing machine that cares only about sensation and intrigue. Malema has no history, because the South African media has no memory. It has facilitated the perfect environment for his particular brand of crude sophistry.

One of the by-products of this myopia is that most of the expedient nonsense Malema produces isn’t even recognised for what it is, because no one really listens to half the stuff he says anyway. The focus, always, is on the possible headline that lurks somewhere in the middle of a speech or press conference. That is what one looks for. Once locked onto, everything else becomes mere background noise.

When Malema had his teeth into Zuma and the umpteenth motion of no confidence appeared to actually have some small chance of success, Malema was as fierce a promoter and defender of a secret ballot you ever did see. It was essential he argued in a letter to the speaker, to help “protect the integrity of the result of the vote‚ security and livelihood of MPs”.

But, of course, he cares nothing for such principles. When he wanted Mbeki expelled, Malema said that, should it come to a motion of no confidence in parliament, “there is no secret ballot there”. He added: “Even if it is secret, we will know how everyone votes. Those who don’t vote properly would be called in for disciplinary hearings. They are deployed there to carry [out] the mandate of the party.”

But who thought to check, when Zuma’s head was on the chopping block, whether Malema was talking with a forked tongue. The media, itself totally politicised on the subject, wanted the axe to fall too. And so Malema’s contemporary position worked just fine. It gave the headline the press wanted and exemplified principles it agreed with. And so, one of Malema’s greatest tricks has been on occasion to turn the media into an extension of his own hypocrisy.

Take the judiciary, for example. Malema has said a great many contemptible things about judges, least of all that they are all prone to bribery and political favouritism: “Judges can be spoken to by any other person”, he said when the Nicholson judgment was overturned, “knowing the tendencies of those ones who are against us. They, the ‘dark forces’, travel at night. They have got the potential to do anything.”

When the Constitutional Court delivered its Nkandla judgment, Malema would hold up the constitution and declare, “This is our Bible”. Post his Zuma infatuation, he has said, “At least we still have judiciary in SA, which Zuma didn’t contaminate with his corruption tendencies. The judiciary is still independent and looking at matters through the facts presented before it.”

The judiciary is poisoned when it rules against him or his interests, pure and untainted when it upholds them. Malema fairly sweats hypocrisy. The stuff is in his blood.

After having established the groundwork for the EFF and having apologised for giving SA Zuma (“a very stupid mistake”), Malema tried a more mature approach to Zuma for a brief while: “There are many things we said which showed that perhaps we were undermining him personally, and we apologise for that.” He said: “We shall continue to disagree with him, but with due respect as an elderly person.”

The range of personal Zuma-insults that followed in the next few years would fill a telephone directory if you had to list them all.

Addressing the Oxford Union in 2016, Malema had the audacity to complain that, “if the president in SA does not like a corruption-fighting institution called Scorpions they go and close down that Scorpions so he can steal more than R250m”.

This was the same Malema who personally presented to parliament the ANC Youth League’s (ANCYL) submission as to why the Scorpions should, in fact, be shut down. He said then, “There are people who served apartheid who are using the Scorpions and our laws to further the interests of the imperialists to serve the interests of the defeated minority.” Malema alleged that some ANC members had been “misled” by the unit, which was in fact, “serving the agenda of the imperialists” while fooling them into believing it was serving the interests of the majority.

Malema whitewashes his own political crimes with zero regard for truth or facts. It is difficult to tell whether he is even cognisant half the time of the degree to which he purges himself of any and all responsibility for the mess he played no small part in fashioning. Words spill out of his mouth, any words, they are stripped of meaning, just play things. Tim Cohen argued in Business Day this week that Malema had taken a leaf out of Donald Trump’s playbook. Wrong. Malema wrote the playbook. Trump has been playing catch-up for years.

“My blood is black, green and gold. I will never form a political party. Neither will I take a posture that seeks to oppose the ANC. I will never do that. I will die ANC. I don’t need a card to be ANC. I’m born ANC. I will die ANC.” 

Whatever.

In 2010, China was for Malema, the great redeemer: “The rise of China has set better global economic conditions for developing countries to determine their political and economic direction. China, unlike the US and EU forces, does not interfere with local politics for them to invest. They respect the terms and conditions you set for them and only concentrate on doing business.”

Five years later and the country was suddenly a manipulative, ideological force for hegemonic control, no different from the imperialist West: “Now we thought we had resolved, everybody understand that colonialism is bad, colonialists must be ‘falled’, we need to have an African state, led by Africans, the economy owned by Africans, as if that is not enough, the Chinese are knocking at the door now. They too are looking for some special arrangement to re-colonise Africa and do as they wish. And they are actually, it looks like they are going to be worse than what Britain was to us.”

All this, and much else besides, exists in a vacuum. Each quote, an isolated moment of inherent truth that burns brightly — if not briefly — only to be extinguished and quickly replaced in the public mind with the next firework.

Malema oversees a political lie factory. It churns them out on a grand scale, on every conceivable subject. And it runs a profit, not a loss. Try think of a subject, any subject. Whites? Sure, we can do whites. White people are, according to Malema, the root of all evil: “We’re unemployed because of them. We’re dying of diseases because of them. We’re illiterate because of them. We’ve surrendered to drugs because of you.” Of whites, Malema says, “We can agree they are criminals and must be treated as such”; also, “They must pay for making us slaves. We must punish them.” At the very least, he argues, they are “just visitors here” and the EFF should hold off killing them all, “at least for now”.

Then again, he says, “we don’t hate white people” and “we want to live like whites; we don’t want to chase them away — we want to live with whites and like whites.” His is an aspirational kind of murderous hate to be sure.

Here’s a fun quote from Malema: “You must never role-model a rich person who can’t explain how they got rich.” Here is Malema again, when asked about where his money came from, “It’s none of your business … you must mind your own business.”

One could go on, and on, and on. Malema once said, “I don’t go round spreading lies. Once I say something, you must know, that is a killer point. I’ve got them.” He is right and wrong. So much of what he says turns out to be ephemeral, but then, where the media is concerned, he has “got them”. All he need do is open his mouth.

So long as the media continues to operate in an ahistorical fashion, Malema will continue to get away with all this deceit. The question, then, is what is to be done? There is unlikely to be a definitive solution but one strategy, adopted by The New York Times and The Washington Post to try and contextualise the endless lies that flow from Donald Trump’s mouth, is to document them all in one living document that exists online.

There are various iterations of it. Some track his lies (“Trump’s lies”, some track his “false and misleading claims” and some his attacks on individuals (“The 547 People, Places and Things Donald Trump Has Insulted on Twitter: A Complete List” 

These kinds of things force the media and the public to place any given statement from Trump into context and to measure it against his previous positions. It is exactly this kind of thing we need in SA and with reference to Julius Malema. If the truth really is as important, and the media makes it out to be, it is almost inarguable that one media house or another should invest some serious resources in this kind of undertaking. It would, at the very least, begin to provide some sort of framework to better understand Malema and the EFF.

We need to force ourselves to do this because we care nothing for history. That is a great shame. But it is one way to start to engender the right kind of appreciation for truth, consistency and political responsibility in the public mind. Who knows, it could even elicit a change in behaviour on the part of Malema himself. Then again, perhaps not. Worth a shot though?

• Van Onselen is the head of politics and governance at the South African Institute of Race Relations.