Baby-kissing season brings out the worst in Malema

IT IS that mad season of elections again. Many politicians will put on their best behaviour, something that not even the gods themselves have seen in them.

Babies are going to be kissed whenever there is the slightest chance of the grinning politician being photographed.

Failing which, said politician will have his own hangers-on clicking away on their smartphones and tweeting furiously to broadcast to the world the story of a caring person. Over the next 14 months the poor and the frail will be bombarded with so much love and attention from our politicians that they will find themselves checking their mirrors to see what has suddenly changed about them to make them so attractive.

Sometimes cash will be dished out to grateful citizens who have been paid a visit by “important leaders”.

Alongside the baby-kissing extravaganza, the most ridiculous of promises will be made to finally deliver that “better life for all” that has been a feature of election campaigning since before 1994.

This will be accompanied by many rallies, to which faithful followers will be bused in large numbers to hear the speeches of their leaders. At these rallies even more elaborate speeches and promises will be made.

However, many politicians will also increase their vitriolic assaults on the soft belly of the nation. They will use the electioneering environment for heightened publicity opportunities. Among these lessdesirable characters will be the leader of the Economic Freedom Fighters, Julius Malema.

This is a man who has risen on the back of hate and threatening violence against sections of society and anyone, even within his constituency, who dares disagree with his stale and outdated ideas.

The heightened electioneering environment and the many publicity opportunities it presents, and the loss of Malema’s greatest campaigner, Jacob Zuma, will bring out the worst in the former leader of the ANC Youth League.

Whenever Malema opens his mouth in front of clicking and rolling media cameras, one is reminded of such murderous a character as Eugene Terre’Blanche, of a now-dead Afrikaner rightwing party.

While Terre’Blanche went to great lengths to publicise his hatred and contempt of black people during the 1990s, whenever he was aware of media cameras nearby, in private he seemed a completely different man.

Not only did Terre’Blanche’s alleged intimate relations with some of his black farmworkers tumble out of his Ventersdorp farm at his death, but those black people who encountered him in their daily lives in the small dorpie told of a different image to the one widely known in an SA in transition.

Similarly, those who know Malema personally tell of a man who is patently different to the rabble-rousing loudmouth the public has come to know.

But this loudmouth is like all empty tins. Bereft of workable and constructive ideas, Malema hides behind a loud and divisive voice in order to intimidate his opponents and excite the less discerning of his followers.

For he has no ideas to work, and lead, a modern economy in the 21st century. Malema’s only weapon is to threaten to take from those who have and give to those who have not.

Indeed, nobody who is honest in SA today can legitimately deny the urgent need to redress the dispossession of black people.

What Malema needs to remember in his haste to grab power through his racist and divisive posture is an old African proverb, for our ancestors were wise in their low voices: “A fly that has no advisers will follow a corpse into the grave.”