South Africans need to reflect on what South Africa's struggle for liberation is. Our struggle is a national struggle for liberation. It is not supposed to be a struggle in which different African groups and individuals are pitted against one another like it is currently.

If African people at rallies stand in front of television cameras and hurl insults at each other, it is music to the ears of the white ruling families in South Africa and the West. It is tantamount to losing focus of the objectives of the struggle. Why, for example, are there 46 political parties led by African people and only two political parties of white people, the DA and FF Plus? Why have African people succumbed to the colonialists’ machinations of divide and rule? To register for elections, these political parties led by African people paid R27600000.00. After unnecessarily spending such a huge amount of money (R27.6 million), Africans go to address rallies and insult each other. Insulting each other at rallies is a red herring.

I still want to hear of young white men in South Africa, Europe or America standing in front of television cameras and hurling insults at their kleptomaniacs, miscreants and white supremacists such as, for example, F.W. De Klerk, Wouter Basson, Eschel Rhoodie, H.F. Verwoerd, J.B. Vorster, Paul Kruger, Cecil John Rhodes, Oppenheimers, Ruperts, Jan Smuts, Bertrand Russell, Albert Pike, Adolf Hitler, Mussolini and many others.

In the Sunday Independent of 20 August 2017 I wrote, “In his Inside the South African Reserve Bank: Its Origins and Secrets Exposed, Stephen Mitford Goodson laid bare the money FW de Klerk stashed in a bank in Switzerland and that in the early 1990s, Nelson Mandela had £20 million at Barings Bank and continues to write that the Rothschilds obtained South Africa for petty cash.”

Former President Jacob Zuma has been accused of corruption and looting state coffers and it is not going to help him to keep on asking what wrong he has done. There is a commission of inquiry probing these and other allegations. But De Klerk and the Rothschilds are not a subject of an inquiry. When is EFF leader Julius Malema going to accuse De Klerk and the Rothschilds for corruption and looting South Africa’s wealth? When is he going to direct his wrath at the West and its ruling elite and insult them for looting South Africa’s wealth?

I think once he can do that – and I doubt he can do it – all South African television stations are going to go for a commercial break or focus attention away from him. But because the object of derision is Zuma, everything is hunky-dory. This cannot be right. This man is a husband, a father and a grandfather. Just imagine how his family feels when he is insulted and ridiculed in front of millions of viewers and you see some people laughing. Just imagine how he feels. Walk a mile in the man’s moccasins.

When Malema was President of the ANCYL, I was once upset when Zuma laughed when Malema did to others what he is doing to him now. I wrote in the Sunday World that if he failed to reprimand Malema when he insults other people, one day Malema would insult him. Now that the shoe is on the other foot, I guess it hurts. However, this should not be about “I told you so” but about decorum and civility. As the saying goes, “Civility costs nothing.”

Zuma is not the only one to blame for Malema’s behaviour but the entire ANC because it is the ANC that groomed him. Similarly, the woes that South Africa was thrust in cannot be blamed on one man. It is the ANC that must be blamed for the country’s problems.

I think South Africa is the only country in Africa where young people can stand on public platforms and hurl insults at older people and broadcast the insults live on television. They do not give two hoots if the young ones are watching. If insults are going to be broadcast live on television and radio, I think political party rallies should no longer be broadcast live especially because they are done without pecuniary benefits to the media houses that broadcast them live. Moreover, they only broadcast about seven rallies when there are 48 registered political parties.

What goes around comes around. One day it will be Malema on the receiving end from the youth of tomorrow. Last week on World Press Freedom Day, a television show anchor played two clips on the newly established television station Newzroom Afrika, one clip of Malema calling a white BBC journalist a bastard and referring to Shell House as “a revolutionary house” and another of his deputy Floyd Shivambu throttling a white journalist outside parliament last year. The television anchor described their behaviour as unacceptable. Malema was wrong, Shell House has never been a revolutionary place. It is an ANC headquarters where the looting of state coffers is planned.

Malema invariably defends himself by saying he was young when reminded of his previous outrageous behaviour. This kind of defence mechanism does not wash.

Some political parties pretend we have achieved the objectives of our struggle for liberation when we have barely scratched the surface. If we achieved the objectives of our struggle for liberation, why don’t  those people parties talk about expropriate land and amend the constitution to expropriate that land? Who drafted a constitution that needs to be amended? And how do they expropriate what belongs to the African people? This expropriation of land is just gimmicks.

Suffice it to restate some of the objectives of the struggle of the African people are:

Restoration of land to its rightful owners not expropriation. Eradication of white supremacy, colonialism, imperialism and capitalism. Decolonisation. The right of the African people to self-determination or the right to determine our destiny.  

By Sam Ditshego

sam412d@gmail.com