by Baba Aye
'The rich have become richer, and the poor have become poorer; and the
vessel of the state is driven between the Scylla and Charybdis of
anarchy and despotism'.
- Percy B. Shelley (1820)
The National Disciplinary Committee of the African National Congress
(ANC) on November 10 passed its verdict on Julius Malema, President of
the ANC Youth League, and five other members of the ANCYL National
Executive Council who had been charged with several acts of violating
the party constitution. Malema, Pule Mabele, Ronald Lamola, Sindiso
Magaqa, Kenetswe Mosenogi (and Floyd Shivambu) were adjudged to have
acted in contravention of ANC rules and traditions and were, you could
say, duly sentenced.
The news was received with near child-like glee by many ANC activists
who had come to see Malema, or "Juju" as many of his supporters call
him, as a loud-mouthed nuisance. Many on the side of this rather
questionable "hero" of unemployed youths however see this as yet
another –and the most significant- attack against "Juju" by those who
do not want "economic freedom" for unemployed black youths in this
lifetime. Malema himself has declared that the matter is not over.
It might however be quite pertinent to muse over the question of how a
rather colourless figure such as Malema became so rather
controversial. Barely nine days before the hammer came down hard on
him he had led some five thousand youths on the platform of the ANCYL
in a march for economic justice, declaring that "if they ask us how we
want to live, we will say we want to live like the white man". After
the mass action, he jetted out to Mauritius for the lavish wedding
party of one of his millionaire friends.
It is not only his friends that are multi-millionaires Juju himself
has lived the best of lives in recent times and not a few white men
would wish to live as well as he does, even though he was not known to
have been an "empowered" black entrepreneur before rising on the right
winds of political fortune, while it lasted. Indeed Afriforum, a civil
society organisation has levied accusations of rampant corruption
against him.
Why then has he had the sort of support he seems to have enjoyed
amongst an array of South African youths? For those die-hard ANC
stalwarts who would see only what they want to see, his "support" as
they would put it, is nothing but a creation of the media. But this is
nothing but playing the ostrich with its head in the sands. Not only
were "unprecedented violent demonstrations outside Luthuli House"
(headquarters of the ANC) by his loyalists on August 30 when hearing
against him commenced, enough to cause "disruption and chaos in the
City of Joburg" according to Derek Hanekom, the disciplinary committee
chair, it is quite instructive that top ANC leaders had actually
described him as a future leader in a not too distant past.
At the heart of dubious relevance that Juju claimed, was his populist
rhetoric; "nationalise" the mines and banks, and for "economic justice
in our life time". These are crucial elements of the Freedom Charter
that used to be the programme of the ANC. But today, to demand the
nationalisation of mines is considered as "reckless" by the ANC
leadership. Surprisingly, one would have felt, even the South African
Communist Party kicks against nationalisation.
The SACP's position is that nationalisation in itself could serve
either the interests of working people or those of capitalists. This
is not incorrect, the so-called USSR and its East bloc, as some of us
have argued over the years, were no more socialist than a monkey is
human because it is a primate. Their nationalised and "centrally
planned" economies served the interest of capital personified in the
Stalinist bureaucratic states. The SACP might as well not have been
wrong when in terms of the concrete case of South Africa it expressed
the view that Malema's call for nationalisation was meant to save
black entrepreneurs in the mining sector (such as Patrice Motsepe) who
have suffered huge set-backs in the wake of the global economic
crisis.
The issue though is that, while inequality deepens in South Africa,
the liberators of yesterday, now –no less than Malema- live in
opulence supposedly waging a "national democratic revolution". The
Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci in formulating his theory of hegemony
described the "war of position" and the "war of manoeuvre". The former
entails entrenchment of forces for emancipatory change within the
civil society, while the later represents head-on struggle for power
during revolutionary situations.
The "war of position" however very often becomes a war for position,
when it is assumed that a "national democratic revolution" subsists in
post-1994 South Africa, for example. Boardrooms of a capitalist state
have replaced the streets and workplaces as the main sites of class
struggle, even as the lot of the working people gets more precarious.
Malema, the crafty young man learnt how to appear to run with the
hares while very much hunting with the hounds. He had risen to fill a
gap which the "vanguard" SACP left bare. His walk might belie his
talk, but that talk challenged the received wisdom of an "NDR" and the
constraints of its alliance-politics.
This contradiction of condemning inequality and the impoverishment of
the mass of poor blacks in South Africa, while being a major
beneficiary of the expansion of a "rent-a-black" (and other means of
primitive accumulation for a new substratum of African elite)
phenomenon, is at one and the same time a reflection of the forces
that he claimed tongue-in-cheek to fight, with or without gloves on,
as it is a condemnation of these. This more than any other reason, I
would say, is why he had to be sacrificed to the god of a national
liberation movement whose altar is in defence of capitalism.
The Inside & Out column, African Herald Express, Friday, Nov. 18
--
Baba Aye
--------------------------------------------
Labour House, Abuja
blog:http://solidarityandstruggle.blogspot.com
skype name: iron1lion
*********************************************
*"Only struggle educates the exploited class. Only struggle discloses to it
the magnitude of its own power, widens its horizon, enhances its abilities,
clarifies its mind, forges its will." - V.I. Lenin*
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