SA yearning for a secret ballot

Malema’s true malevolence

JULIUS Malema again attacks the Indian community like low-hanging fruit. He has a malicious streak, rabblerousing his faithful disciples and merely blurts out what they want to hear – an exalted shepherd corralling a herd of unthinking sheep to the slaughterhouse.

He is endowed with the bile and envy of an envious and ignorant man, the stench that he thinks he has disguised with mordant wit, except that his mordancy is no sharper than a sledgehammer and his wit is not wit at all, but the railing of intellectual flop, a popinjay who wheezes when he thinks he pops.

He carefully chose Durban for the EFF’s fourth anniversary celebrations. Who can blame me for thinking that he is no different than despots Robert Mugabe and the late Idi Amin of Uganda?

Mugabe took back the land from white farmers and now his country is starving.

Amin called Indians “slippery creatures who must swim back to India”, and once provided a jetliner for them, giving them 24 hours to leave the country. But it was he who eventually took flight.

Malema’s continued rhetoric is fuelling division and hatred that could one day combust.

He is scared of Indians because of our oozing dynamism, family values, entrepreneurial spirit and emphasis on education.

We have what he dreams of for his people. He is the embodiment of unreasoning malevolence.

But something is brewing here. I can’t seem to get my finger on the pulse, but the uneasy tic is there. At a time when some of his formative members have defected to the ANC, a cock-sure Malema breezes into town and pays homage to the Zulu King, whose subjects are ANC and IFP followers.

Then he babbles about an ANC-EFF coalition on condition that Jacob Zuma will be charged for corruption. Are these the words and actions of an apostate who is secretly a turncoat?

Will this toadying panjandrum one day turn into a political quisling and throw in his lot with the ANC when they lose their majority? KEVIN GOVENDER

Shallcross ALLOW me to address our Speaker of Parliament, Baleka Mbete.

I do this with due apologies to the poet Leigh Hunt, who created Abou Ben Adhem, the source and inspiration of my letter.

Madam Speaker, I urge you in all sincerity to think deeply and seriously and, if I may add, solemnly about the history-making secret or non-secret saga being played in the theatre of President Jacob Zuma.

The moral imperative compels you to sign the secret ballot order guided by your conscience.

Do not be afraid: your action will occupy a critical chapter in South African history.

And when you awoke from a deep dream of sleep, you observed an angel sitting on your bedside writing in a book of gold. You ask her, “What writest thou?” And the angel replied, “The names of those who love the Lord, South Africa and all its peoples. Anxiously you ask, “Is mine one?” And the angel replied, “Yes, yours is one.”

In the corner of your eye you see Zuma and cohorts and minions being dragged away, screaming and shouting: “We were captured, captured, captured.” And the screaming died away in the distance.

And in the corner of the other eye you saw Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng, of the Constitutional Court, sitting cross-legged, hands clasped together and solemnly muttering: “Amen, Amen, Amen.”

And, Madam Speaker, all lived happily thereafter. R MUNISAMY Isipingo Hills