BARNEY MTHOMBOTHI: Malema's bigotry comes out of the Verwoerd playbook
'His crude racism is an act of desperation which should be rejected with contempt'
EXTRACT
It is the EFF's increasingly racist rhetoric that should be of concern to every South African. It's the sort of bigotry that comes straight out of Hendrik Verwoerd's playbook, and to which, we had hoped, the new dispensation had dealt a fatal blow. The starting point of every liberation movement was to unite the people, in fierce opposition to the National Party dogma of dividing them according to race.
Even the Black Consciousness Movement's aim was to achieve solidarity among the oppressed so that ultimately they could join white people on an equal footing. Malema has rammed a bus through such a sacred tenet in search of cheap votes. His crude racism is an act of desperation which should be rejected with contempt.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, the most powerful man on Earth - he's got Donald Trump in his back pocket - was in town this week for the Brics summit while Jacob Zuma, his prized asset, was, to use a delicious Zulu expression, greeting the judge at the High Court in Pietermaritzburg. It's an extraordinary turn of events. One wonders what the inscrutable Russian made of it all. And, of course, with Zuma in the dock, the nuclear deal is all but dead. Thankfully our wobbly president was able to pluck up enough courage to tell Putin in a nice sort of way the deal was off the table, for now. Which was just sugarcoating the pill. It's off, period. It's not doable. We can't afford it. Time for extravagances is over. Putin has been left to rue his missed chance.South Africa, even in its perilous state, has what Russia lacks: an independent judiciary able to declare the nuclear deal unlawful, and a democratic system which turfed a sitting president out of office, thus denying Putin the ke...
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