WeeklySA_AdminBUILD-UP: As the 2026 municipal election fever rises in the coming months, the EFF leader is likely to face even greater adversity…
By Sandile Swana
Economic Freedom Fighters(EFF)leader Julius Malema is undoubtedly the most successful start-up politician since 1994.
His durability in parliamentary politics is phenomenal. We must accept that this track record has been built through defining his understanding of the de-racialisation struggle in the country more clearly and sharply than his detractors, even his outright enemies.
Malema’s first set of enemies were the conservative duo of former president Jacob Zuma and his then Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa who expelled him, as the leader of the ANC Youth League (ANCYL), from the ANC in 2012.
In 2012, Malema claimed he was persecuted for advocating for the nationalisation of mines, as well as demanding that Zuma be replaced as the country’s president.
Malema, Sindiso Magaqa, Pule Mabe, Floyd Shivambu, and Ronald Lamola discovered that the older generation in the ANC acted slowly to accelerate the land redistribution programme as well as to embrace Pan-Africanism and economic liberation project that would benefit the overwhelming black majority, who were looking up to their organisation for guidance.
The New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad), and former president Thabo Mbeki’s African Renaissance project had been jettisoned as a form of economic development in South Africa.
The elders of the ANC NEC were largely corrupt and drunk with prosperity with no cogent answers to political questions facing the country, and raised by Malema and the ANCYL of 2012.
I am still waiting for Shivambu to explain the fundamental differences between the ANCYL and the ANC of Jacob Zuma and Ramaphosa of 2012 and today and what the way forward should look like.
Shivambu holds himself out to be the foremost political thinker of his generation.
Statistics still show that since the Polokwane conference, the black population in the country has been experiencing accelerated retrogression developmentally and economically.
Power relations between black and white people, and social status of being black is declining rapidly. This is because black culture and languages have stopped to be vehicles of prosperity in the new South Africa.
Malema is at the centre of this conflict and chaos, as the most productive political leader of his generation.
He is not only an enemy of the conservatives in the ANC led then by Zuma, and now Ramaphosa, but also of the resurgent Western white Christian conservatives led by the US President Donald J Trump; Solidariteit, Afriforum, the DA, Freedom Front Plus, in South Africa, and a variety of right-wing organisations.
These organisations draw much of their inspiration from former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher and former US President Ronald Reagan, who were staunch supporters, with the State of Israel, of apartheid South Africa.
They were also proponents of the long-term subjugation of Africans, Chinese, Russians, Latinos, and the peoples of the Global South, generally.
The encyclopaedia Brittanica explains some of this Trump’s obsession.
The MAGA slogan was first popularised by former US President Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign of “Let’s Make America Great Again.”
US President Donald Trump coined “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) in November 2012, and later trademarked it for political purposes.
What are the core beliefs of the MAGA movement?
The MAGA movement believes the US was once great but has declined due to foreign influence. The movement supports “America first” policies, economic protectionism, reduced immigration, and what it regards as traditional American values, some of which involve discriminatory policies.
It is, thus, not surprising that a video showing the EFF and Julius Malema at the instigation of President Donald Trump was shown during the Ramaphosa’s visit to the Oval Office.
Trump is the supreme leader of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and the dominant Anglo-Saxon civilization.
Malema is one of the African leaders who openly challenges white supremacy and calls for its liquidation.
That is often intentionally misinterpreted as a call for genocide of peoples of European descent who are the beneficiaries of the system of whiteness.
Whiteness is a system of allocating the lion’s share of all resources and opportunities to peoples of European descent in all territories and areas under NATO or under the control of the Anglo-Saxons and their partners.
Malema is ultimately one of the younger African leaders who reject white supremacy in its entiret alongside Assimi Goïta (Mali), Abdourahamane Tiani (Niger) and Ibrahim Traoré (Burkina Faso).
Malema and these types of leaders are called radicals without any detailed explanation.
I am tempted to believe that the likes of Herman Mashaba, leader of Action SA; Mmusi Maimane, leader of the Build One South Africa, would describe the EFF leader as radical without explaining what exactly is so extreme about Malema and EFF’s stance on the country’s economic or political policies.
Certainly, having 13 million unemployed South Africans is extreme, but the conservatives do not call out the extremism of the DA and the ANC.
In essence, all premiers and mayors since 2009 especially have embarked on an economic genocide of the black people in the country.
Malema and the EFF have called for economic freedom in our life-time.
There is a clash between Malema and the accelerated economic retrogression of black majority and his call for total economic emancipation.
The conservative upper classes joined across the Americas, EU, Australia and their satellites in Western Asia or what they call the Middle East, have many subtle ways of silencing their economic and political enemies decisively.
The Italians for the longest time saw themselves as outcasts of white America and wanted to start their own power base – the mafia. This rebellion was not going to be tolerated in the long-term.
Al Capone was a clever mafia and the state could not arrest and prosecute him for his criminal rackets so they had to find other mistakes he was making and send him permanently to prison – not his core criminal business.
Indeed, Al Capone was arrested and ultimately imprisoned for tax evasion in 1931 after evading charges for other crimes, leading to his 11- year sentence at the federal penitentiaries in Atlanta and Alcatraz.
Malema has had a few unwise and ill-calculated run-ins with the law and establishment.
Inevitably, the establishment will seek to exploit these indiscretions and use them to criminalise him and take him out of political power while simultaneously founding and promoting centrist conservative parties.
The aim of upper classes is to create one consensus around the world led by Trump, following on the footsteps of Reagan, Thatcher, and apartheid architect Henrik Verwoerd.
That is why people like Malema can no longer get a visa to travel to the UK, and probably the US – it is a coordinated effort to muzzle those who speak against the likes of Trump and the unjust system he controls.
Malema still has a chance to appeal the current court cases and even win them. But he cannot live an unprotected or unguarded life or run an unprotected revolution as if he has no enemies.
If he did that, he risks facing a similar fate as Burkina Faso leader Thomas Sankara.
They are onto him. For now, he will still play a major role in the 2026 and 2029 elections, but there will be many difficulties in his political life.
• Swana is a political and governance analyst for local and international media, independent consultant on governance, leadership and strategy
