Why Julius Malema deserves nothing in election 2014

By Rejoice Ngwenya

When millions of South African voters get into a polling booth on Wednesday, 7 May 2014, they will most likely be confronted with a picture of Julius Malema and hordes of his Economic Freedom Front [EFF] sidekicks on the ballot papers.

This will signal the beginning of that country’s precipitous acceleration towards a collision with rogue political meteors. Tragically, thousands of those voters may be deceived into vouching for fascist ideologues cleverly disguised as pro-poor crusaders.

At this stage, I do not know Economic Freedom Front [EFF] electoral promises enough to make erudite judgment whether or not Mr. Malema will accomplish his mission to ‘liberate black South Africans from the clutches of white capitalist interests’. Moreover, being a black ‘neo-liberal’ myself, it would be extremely difficult to make a fair assessment of an individual who readily applies his democratic right to denigrate my context of true economic freedom.

It may be that, like Richard Eskow, Malema accuses me of being a believer in “fanciful theories that have never predicted real-world behaviour”, but my libertarian leanings are solidly grounded in individual self-expression, small government that lives within its fiscal means and non coercive regulation. Is this bad? I really think an obsession with commandist, centrist-type of human control is hazardous for a ‘new’ nation.

I am aware that Malema claims that his “EFF will emancipate South Africa from institutionalised starvation, structural unemployment, political directionless and mediocrity, institutionalised corruption, and hopelessness of the youth”. There is no doubt in his mind all this is caused by ‘capitalist white interests’ in complicity with ‘undesirable elements’ in the African National Congress [ANC]. His observations about ANC are the closest thing to earthly truth, but he loses it by then taking the same direction in a different lane – by paying homage to Robert Mugabe’s destructive ‘neo-feudal’ policies.

I was born, went to school, now etch a living and probably destined to die in Zimbabwe. I therefore have empirical evidence that any South African politician – unless they are suicidal – who bases his or her political philosophy on ‘Mugabenomics’ is leading the country into an irreversible catastrophe. Malema has made several pilgrimages to Zimbabwe – privileged to be hosted, wined and dined by Zimbabwe National African Union Patriotic Front [ZANU.PF] apparatchiks.

He probably was chaperoned to their expensive city homes in the exclusive suburbs of Harare; took a trip in expensive four by four ‘Western’ vehicles to their ‘successful’ farms and ended the errands at their ‘indigenous’ mines. It is therefore easy to understand why in his mind Mr. Malema wrongly believes the Zimbabwe Model of ‘economic empowerment’ is the ideal blueprint to offer to sympathisers of EFF.

In its own cruel way, fate has been generous to give South African voters a sneak preview of why it is fatal to afford EFF the luxury of even one vote in May 2014. If a politician is going to say ‘vote for me so that I can turn South Africa into a modern-day Zimbabwe’, it is akin to saying ‘you are better off bunji jumping without the inconvenience of a rope around your ankles’! The outcome is sudden death.

I am not saying this merely because I am an ungrateful Zimbabwean ‘aggrieved’ with Robert Mugabe’s ‘successful land reform’. My interest is that as an African in this part of the region, I am eternally proud to be neighbours with the biggest economy in Africa – a country that is the only destination for thousands of politically and economically distressed Africans, hosting in excess of two million of my countrymen who have fled Mugabe’s so-called ‘pro-poor’ policies. A vote for Malema and EFF means guaranteeing South Africa medieval status.

I condemn outright the intention of EFF to ‘Zimbabwenise’ South Africa on the basis that Malema chooses to conveniently ignore the poverty, misery, death and destruction that Mugabe’s authoritarian dictatorship has inflicted on my country. It is reprehensible that a political party can urge South Africans to vote so that ‘our country will be like Zimbabwe’.

Malema will avoid mentioning that since 1980 when Zimbabwe ‘gained their independence’, there is still no piped water in most rural villages; most public schools are dilapidated; villagers have problems with transport because roads are now inaccessible; rural clinics have very little or no electricity; and as we speak now, two million Zimbabweans will require food aid bought from South Africa!

It is inconceivable how a typical ‘smart’ voter in Gauteng or Kwazulu-Natal, can vote for Malema who wants to turn Durban or Johannesburg into Bulawayo or Harare. In these two Zimbabwean ‘towns’, some homes are now only accessible with ox-drawn wagons; residents get an average of three hours of electricity per day and most, if not all in ‘exclusive’ suburbs like Glen Lorne and Greendale in Harare last received piped municipal water in 1998.

If EFF are claiming that the ‘Zimbabwe Model’ will reduce wealth and income disparities of South Africans, why is it that Cuthbert Dube who runs a company funded by public servants but controlled by Mugabe’s henchmen takes home a monthly salary of two hundred thousand United States dollars?

Malema is no doubt telling South Africans that if they vote for him, he will bring ‘economic freedom’ like in Zimbabwe where ‘all commercial farms, mines and companies are now owned by indigenous Zimbabweans’. What he conveniently chooses to exclude is that the ‘owners’ of these properties either have no legal title to them or they are citizens who only have close links with ZANU.PF top leadership. He will not disclose that the ‘best’ of these farms and mines are owned by people who are in the ZANU.PF top leadership; and are financed by monies only available to ZANU.PF supporters. His obsession with nationalisation is toxic populism that will only drag South Africa into the doldrums of pariah status.

Malema will not mention that by voting for EFF to ‘take all the land from the white man like Mugabe did in Zimbabwe’ will make the bulk of the black ‘land beneficiaries’ no secure than their local church mice. The so-called ‘thousands’ of A1 and A2 farmers who ‘rake in millions of dollars in tobacco revenue’ are a small fraction of the millions of citizens abandoned and now destitute in former commercial farms. These ‘new farmers’ have no access to schools, clinics or shopping centres. Their lack of title means banks cannot offer them financial support.

As a result they have no access to farm implements and inputs other than perennial dependence on Mugabe’s benevolence. Most ‘farmers’ survive on scavenging for alluvial gold, poaching wild animals and selling firewood. Malema will thus not mention that this Zimbabwe Model of ‘land reform’ has resulted in widespread land degradation, deforestation and near extinction of wild animals. He will not mention that it is only those that have close ties with ZANU.PF who possess lucrative hunting licences.

The EFF Manifesto will exclude the information that before Mugabe’s land reform, Zimbabwe exports were driven mainly by agriculture; and the sector employed in excess of five hundred thousand people. Now because of ZANU.PF’s policies, Zimbabwe still exports tobacco, but spends almost eight billion dollars importing maize and manufactured goods from South Africa, because our industry is almost dead.

Malema will not mention that despite the ‘indigenisation’ of Zimbabwe, almost all factories in Mutare, Marondera, Harare, Norton, Gweru and Bulawayo are closed. Malema knows that because of ZANU.PF corruption, one of the largest steel makers in Africa, Zimbabwe Iron Steel Company based in Kwekwe, stopped operating fifteen years ago, thus rendering its town, Redcliff, a ghost entity. Thousands of families are now destitute.

As Mr. Malema campaigns to ‘turn South Africa into a Zimbabwe’, he will not mention that three hundred thousand young people churned out by schools and universities every year in Zimbabwe have nothing to do other than loiter. Two out of every three of their parents have no formal employment. They survive from selling vegetables and phone cards from the streets; or clothes they buy from South African mega stores. His EFF claims to have “… given hope to people who wanted to commit suicide and changed them into visionaries and hopeful citizens,” but by wanting to turn South Africa into a modern day Zimbabwe, that vision will be a nightmare while hope turns into despair.

No doubt EFF ‘policy experts’ will quote Frantz Fanon on “real political power”, “transforming the economy for the benefit of all South Africans”, redressing the ‘imbalances of the past’ while “emancipating the people of South Africa and the entire African continent.” Mr. Malema will conveniently exclude that after 34 years of ‘independence’, Zimbabwe has ‘all that’ except that levels of poverty are increasing exponentially, unemployment is rampant and though the people ‘have land’; they still have no means with which to enhance productivity.

Mugabe’s ‘expropriation without compensation’ has yielded nothing but ZANU.PF political survival. Malema’s obsession with ‘white supremacy’ is a reverse Ku Klux Khan mentality while his ignorant position on the role of World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) in development smacks of adversarial leftist paranoia. Which economy can survive “access to enterprise finance without sureties” or “high wages in the mining sector, farms, factories, the police, the soldiers, teachers, doctors, nurses, private security and petrol attendants?”

When Malema talks of ‘capitalist interests’, he refuses to accept a simple fact that these are “assets that have the potential to be deployed to create new production and increase productivity”. If EFF takes these crucial assets back to central government, they will simply revert to De Soto’s “dead capital” status. I do not for once fault Steve Biko, Robert Sobukwe and Oliver Tambo for their bellicose stance, because the struggle demanded a brand. But to claim that “It is apartheid and the white economy that has created black mass poverty and suffering” is to say that those of us in Zimbabwe who now have ‘full control’ of our resources are now immune to ‘black mass poverty and suffering’. What a lie!

My suspicion is that there is not a single political party in South Africa that will take to the podium without claiming to “put the poorest of the poor and marginalized unemployed to the forefront”. That is what all African voters want to hear. We have heard that from ZANU.PF since 1980, yet ten million Zimbabweans are still not only poor and marginalised, but also the other two million fled to South Africa! If South Africans vote for Malema and his EFF, the adage we Africans do not learn from history will have been fulfilled.