Give a thug a loud-hailer...
AS we digest this week's decision by the ANC disciplinary committee to suspend Julius Malema from the organisation, it is worth casting an eye back a decade or so.
President of the ANC Youth League Julius Malema and ANC president Jacob Zuma at the youth league congress in Nasrec, Johannesburg. Picture by Sydney SeshibediA young Malema was then leader of Cosas and the student body had some gripe or other with the authorities.
Malema led a march of several thousand pupils down the streets of Joburg to present a memorandum to the government.
Along the way the crowd became unruly. Shop windows were smashed. Motorists were harassed. Pedestrians fled in terror. And, most sickening of all, the marchers looted wares from poor hawkers.
The enfant terrible had announced his arrival on the scene in the ugliest manner possible, an ugliness that would come back to haunt us years later.
During that period, Gauteng education MEC Ignatius Jacobs banned him from coming within 500m of schools in the province.
That episode should have indicated to the nation exactly what kind of a monster was in the making. It should have been a warning light to the high-ups in South Africa's governing party.
But no.
Malema was to then become a powerful figure who was feared, not because of his acumen, but because of his bluster and bullying tactics.
As secretary of the ANC Youth League in Limpopo he would become a czar in the province, influencing key political appointments in the party and in the government.
As newspaper investigations have shown, he seems to have also played a key role in influencing the direction of government spending and contracts.
When he became president of the youth league, he gained control of the national discourse.
His utterances made talkshows buzz, consumed acres of newspaper space and moved market perceptions of South Africa.
Just this week Moody's downgraded South Africa's rating, citing "the continued negative impact on private investment deriving from calls for interventionist actions aimed at quick fixes for black economic opportunities".
This was basically a long-winded way of saying nationalisation and land reform demands as enunciated by Malema et al were hurting our prospects as an investment destination.
He polarised race relations with his racially charged rhetoric.
He heightened tensions between political parties with insults aimed at opposition leaders.
He damaged relations between the ANC and its alliance partners and poisoned the atmosphere even within the mainstream ANC.
In short, he has been bad for South Africa.
And through all this, nobody would touch him.
He could cause as much damage as long as he served the purposes of those in power, primarily [President Jacob] Zuma.
Then came Thursday.
The verdict was predictable. He was always going to be found guilty. It was the five-year suspension that hit the nation like a hot klap.
This week's verdict marked the first time since the Jacobs ban that the ANC acknowledged the danger that resides inside the human being called Julius Malema.
So what lies ahead for the two men whose fortunes were most affected by Thursday's events.
For Zuma, a dangerous foe has been dealt with.
His supporters will be toasting this weekend, saying that one hurdle to re-election is out of the way.
But the president is not home and dry.
There is a groundswell of opposition to Zuma in the national leadership, in the provinces and in local structures of the ANC.
A consensus is building that the party and the country cannot have another five years of his dithering leadership.
The forces ranged against Zuma were not solely dependent on a Malema taking him on.
A lot of groundwork has been done and will continue to be done in the run-up to the ANC conference in December 2012 to ensure that a second presidential term does not happen.
Therefore, there will be no time for him to rest on his laurels.
As for Malema, we can rest assured that he will now take this battle to ANC structures in the same way that Zuma did after [former president Thabo] Mbeki fired him from the Cabinet.
He will, however, not have the same support as Zuma. At the time Zuma was the rallying point of those who wanted to get rid of Mbeki and he therefore had a united bloc behind him.
Malema does not have that.
What Malema has is disgruntled youth who feel cheated by a democratic order that has enabled very few to climb out of poverty.
Malema will find it extremely difficult to make his way back into influence in society.
He will continue to make noises and sound more militant than everybody else but at the end of the day he will be a weaker Malema without the engine of the ANC.
And, most importantly, there is the criminal investigation into his financial affairs, which is gaining momentum.
The lessons here for us as a country is that we must see demagogues coming from afar and reject them for what they are.
They need not necessarily be silenced.
Genuine democracy does not allow for that. But they should not be given the loud-hailer that comes with high political office.
