Micro-Malema, Macro-Megalomania

ANC Youth League president Julius Malema is toppling national president Jacob Zuma off top spot in the news-maker charts of 2010.  For a good 3 to 4 years now Zuma has dominated headlines, but so far this year, while Zuma is clearly not short of broadsheet coverage or mention on radio and TV, it is Julius Malema hogging the headlines. 

The mainstream media’s obsession with Malema, an arrogant loud-mouthed career politician, says a lot about South African media, society and politics.  It is emblematic of a stunted media class, bereft of freshness and journalistic vigour, that we must see Mr. Malema’s mug staring belligerently at us every day in one newspaper or another.  It is also a sad indictment on the average reader who, the journos judge, are clearly happy to soak up this sop day in day out. 

Perhaps more worrying is the overall view that Malema’s antics and animated theatrics actually mean something.  Oh don’t get me wrong, I’m sure Malema is a very popular guy, especially when he ventures into the poorer areas of our country.  There are also those who like to point out that Nelson Mandela was a co-founder of the Youth League which soon came to dominate the ANC proper and turn it into a globally recognised resistance movement.  It is also well known that the Youth League threw its weight behind Jacob Zuma from around 2005 which provided at least in part some considerable momentum behind the current president. 

Notwithstanding this, the Youth League is not the influence it may have once been in the early struggle days.  Back then ANC was a subjugated opposition party with weak leadership.  Today the ANC is the state and the state is the ANC.  The ANC is in control of every major lever of power save the Western Cape provincial government, and the balance of power no longer resides with the League as it once might have. 

However, more fundamentally, the obsession with Malema is not just daft from a pure political power perspective, but because of what it says about the mainstream view of politics and the state in general.  That we will obsess over Malema when state theft, corruption and incompetence of a far grander scale surrounds us shows that many of us don’t get the bigger picture.  For all Malema’s faults he is just the pimple head atop the bulging pustule that is political ineptitude. 

We, the hapless readers of most of this press drivel, are supposed to think that Malema’s words are scandalous and that is views are radical.  We are supposed to believe that his high class privileged Sandton lifestyle along with his populist socialist rhetoric is a ‘shocking’ and ‘outrageous’ hypocritical juxtaposition.  We are meant to feel robbed when we learn of his politically privileged tendering profits and cosy positions on back-scratching B-BBEE boards.  

We are supposed to believe that he is a bad egg to be ridiculed and scorned and spat out by the media machine onto the political scrap-heap.  In reality the jokes on us, for even if the press is able to bring Malema’s career crashing down, there’ll not only be another Malema somewhere else that becomes the pundits next whipping boy, but there’ll continue to be a hoard of politicians flying under the radar engaged in an attritional looting of state coffers and dynamic private sector wealth.  

Malema hits the broadsheets every day.  Everywhere you look its Malema this and Malema that.  Malema says this, Malema thinks that, Malema does x, y and z.  But in reality Malema is micro.  Malema is distraction.  Malema is a bad joke, a tabloid gossip minion, a baby-faced circus act. 

The real problem is what you don’t see on the front pages – the macro-megalomania of government officials in genuinely influential positions.  The coercive state arm that pervades our society from start to finish.  The “Developmental State” that has been growing in scope and ambition since Polokwane in 2007.  The get-my-own gravy train ethos of those in public service.  The legislated rubberstamped mediocrity and debilitating inefficiency of state-owned enterprises, government departments, education, health and basic infrastructure. 

The media is obsessing over the antics of one small man.  Malema may or may not have a genuine future in SA politics, but either way that’s not the point.  The point is that the entire edifice that is the Nat-inherited state behemoth and its supporting polity of cronies, career politicians, and BEE bonafides is one large coercive and oppressive juggernaut.  Meanwhile, the little guy, the you’s and me’s of all races and classes continue to toil and do the best we can to put food on the table for our families in a system of patronage, political favour, excessive taxation, monetary deception, inflationary capital destruction, and systemic discrimination through minimum wage laws. 

It’s time to take our sites off mouthy Malema and take aim at a far higher, far more malevolent, and far more difficult target, the state itself.  Slagging off Malema in 500 word op-ed pieces is lazy journalism.  It’s time to raise the discourse and challenge the very nature of the relationship between state and citizen.  The media needs to stop its cotton candy reporting and get serious about their ‘watchdog’ role.  Right now the watchdog is barking at a baby rather than attacking the intruder. 

Party HQ or State HQ?

The state is growing its reach once more, as it did under our past fascist rulers and the latest government finance data proves it.  Spending is getting out of control.  Government now decides how 1 in 3 rand is spent in the economy.  10 years ago it was only 1 in 5.  

If we’re not careful our society will slip into a progressive statism whereby freedoms become so insidiously yet profoundly eroded that genuine prosperity becomes all but impossible.  This may sound like scare-mongering now, but every new descent into tyranny, whether of the more benign or the more virulent kind, has been preceded by complacence and a blind-eye to the abuses of state privilege. 

The mainstream media loves patting itself on the back, but by obsessing over the likes of our Youth League president it deserves no such praise.  If news editors and their busy-body reporters were genuinely courageous, they would take on bigger giants. 

The medias micro-meddling may be interesting at times, but is of little strategic significance.  Freedom needs a far more intelligent media than we have right now. 

Let’s hope our blinkered journos can find some chutzpah and locate the real scandal in our nation.