On March 21, EFF leader Julius Malema – a rabble-rouser of note – disrupted SA’s national peace and comfort when he chanted the controversial political slogan “kill the boer, kill the farmer”.
One thing for sure Malema knew too well that no one, not even AfriForum, could haul him before the courts.
In 2022, AfriForum lost the legal battle after taking the EFF and Malema to the SA Equality Court over the public chanting of “Kill the boer, kill the farmer”. The predominantly white-aligned civil rights group had argued that Malema’s chanting of the Struggle rendition in public incited violence against white Afrikaner farmers.
However, Justice Edwin Molahleli, who presided over the matter, could find no evidence of a link between the chanting of the slogan and the attacks or murders in SA’s farmlands. The court ruled that the song, or chant, was a Struggle-related historical and cultural expression rather than a direct incitement to cause harm to the white farmers of SA.
Since Malema chanted the controversial anti-apartheid slogan on Human Rights Day, March 21, there has been a loud chorus of disapproval especially from the sections of the White community. The brewing brouhaha has caused me to reflect on SA’s continuous pretention to racial harmony in post-apartheid SA.
It is all well that despite the glaring race-based inequities, SA continues to soldier on in commendable efforts for an all-inclusive yet evasive Uhuru. What Steve Biko described during the SASO/BPC Trial as a “place for all of us at the rendezvous of victory”.
Politically, the 1994 dawn of the first ever democratic elections ushered in a new, hopeful period of optimism for equality before the law. Politically, we all may exercise our individual right to cast a vote in the new democratic order. This is a tremendous achievement when one looks at the centuries of racial subjugation by a tiny minority over the majority through colonialism and apartheid. But the truth ought to be laid bare at all material times. Lest we forget.
Political freedom that is enjoyed by all in SA pales into insignificance when juxtaposed with the lingering cruel effects of economic inequality. The glaring economic injustice is the singular most causal factor behind the ever-present political tensions across the racial lines.
I look at Malema and I kind of get it. I can see that in an endeavour to state the views of his EFF party on the current unjust set of national circumstances, chanting “kill the boer, kill the farmer” will trigger the greatest sense of discomfort among his target audience – the white community.
I don’t know Malema at a personal level, but knowing him and his politics from the national discourse, I can bet he would continue to create dialogue aimed at publicly assessing the state of our post-1994 statehood. Like him or loathe him, his mission is simple: To trigger debate irrespective of how uncomfortable this could be.
Many people who are described as Previously-Disadvantaged have been kept silent by the relative comfort of their newly-found plush personal circumstances, mainly achieved through political machinations.
Such people are of course in the minority, but powerful nonetheless. When they speak, their words make national headlines. They are society’s chosen few, having left behind throngs of those they fought alongside with in the trenches. Worse still, many in the high echelons of our country’s political spectrum were hardly involved in the anti-apartheid Struggle.
They ascended to the top through the incorporation of the former Bantustans into the new order. Life can suck just like that. Phew! In many instances the cooks never make it to the dinner table to share the meal. The doers are seldom the beneficiaries of their hard labour, to borrow from my Setswana epistemology. It is all the stuff that prompted George Elliot to pen his seminal novel, Animal Farm.
Until the letter of SA’s Constitution is embraced to the fullest – in word and in deed – the lingering anger borne out of the injustice of inequality will serve as oxygen to Malema et al. The massive support that Malema and his EFF enjoy is not accidental. Our political elites and society’s most enlightened should take it as a flashing light, a warning about the lurking danger.
South Africa holds the ignominious title of being the most unequal society in the world. This factor is hardly ever debated in our national discourse. I suspect it is because the reasons, the causes for this are an open secret. Ten percent of the population controlling 90 percent of the national wealth is a persisting anomaly that was secured and guaranteed by the Sunset Clauses of the pre-democracy CODESA negotiations. Several ANC administrations had sadly failed to destroy the remaining vestiges of apartheid. Not even when the Thabo Mbeki-led ANC won a two-thirds majority did the temptation to trigger amendments to the Constitution ever became a factor.
Today, under the Government of National Unity, the implementation of the wholly pro-poor agenda is extremely difficult. Unity to the left of our political spectrum is also a pipe dream. There appears to be no hope in sight for the amelioration of the lot of our people. The light that had shone so brightly during the early years of our country’s democratization has sadly been dimmed by the growing culture of nepotism, greed and wanton fleecing of public resources. Inevitably, the biggest losers are the majority, the hoi polloi of South Africa’s supposed new promising dawn of equal opportunity. Alas!, too many dreams of great men and women have gone down the drain. Hani, Sobukwe, Biko, Winnie, the list is endless.
This is a great pity. There is very little that holds together our fledgling democracy. When the Springboks win on the world stage, we create an inauthentic aura of a united rainbow nation that becomes the envy of many globally. But when we retreat to our sleeping destinations, reality dawns instantaneously and mercilessly. Abject poverty in many towns and villages serves as a constant reminder of what the Social Sciences refer to as the “disordered faults of progress”. On paper our government and rulers appear to mean well. Yet in practice the opposite is a painful reality.
This, my fellow South Africans, is the reason why Malema’s chant of “kill the boer, kill the farmer”, find resonance among the poor, the disenfranchised, who are the majority.
Until the wealth of our land is shared fearlessly and equally, there will always be nationwide cold winters of discontentment.
The starving masses will not always be in their good behavior as they raid the dustbins searching for food. In the same breath, the rich can never claim eternal peace behind their high walls in the rarefied atmosphere of their leafy suburbs where each day, they throw away their left-overs in the dustbins.
Malema’s provocative chants can therefore, in my opinion, only be stopped by marked improvement in the material condition and living standard of all South Africans, and not the few who thrive on the magic of old money thirty years after the dawn of the new era that promised so much and delivered so little thus far.
