At The Mail & Guardian Ferial Haffajee pulls no punches in condemning “the infantilization of politics” in South Africa. A taste:
If there's one thing driving me into the arms of the ANC –Mark2, it's Youth League president Julius Malema and his ilk. And I’m not alone.
As he announced UDI last week, former ANC chairperson Terror Lekota was applauded only when he verbally klapped Malema, asking why we should be harangued and frightened by children.
He's so right.
In the post-Polokwane universe it is the rantings of Malema, which have scarred the body politic. From his injunction to kill for [ANC president Jacob] Zuma to his loose invocation of the phrase “We are willing to lay down our lives for ” and his lax approach to the independence of the judiciary, the young man with the dead eyes has, for too many months, been allowed to bully this nation. His understanding of power is not that it is a stewardship granted by citizens to leaders, but that it is a force to be unleashed across the land like a disciplining whip.
Commentary such as this makes one wonder just how much support a new party will have (and by extension the ANC will lose) when everything finally settles. Undoubtedly the ANC will continue to maintain a majority. But that majority party makes a mistake in taking a sanguine approach to the challenge it faces.
