Malema's master class in tendering

What a wonderful land of opportunity we live in. A twenty-something who failed woodwork in high school can turn his hand to running a brace of construction companies and become a multimillionaire overnight. This is truly a vindication of the slogan “no education before liberation”.

On a smaller scale, but also inspiring to the huddled masses yearning to be rich, is that some sporting administrators managed to structure matters so that they could buy themselves Mercedes E-class limousines for only R1 each. That they achieved this while their organisation was technically bankrupt surely makes their entrepreneurship the stuff of legend and business school case study?

It is therefore most churlish of the ANC Youth League to declare closed to further media scrutiny the sum of around R140-million of provincial and local government tenders awarded to their president’s companies. Since Julius Malema has become such an inspiration to disadvantaged youths, it would be instructive if he were to share his secrets.

For instance:

While it is clear that one no longer needs the Three Rs to succeed, would a course in struggle accounting be an asset? Does Alan Boesak still offer evening classes?
Malema’s habit of driving unlicensed, unplated luxury vehicles is obviously a canny move to cut down on his large number of traffic fines. What, in Malema’s view, is a fair amount to pay a traffic cop to ignore one’s transgression of the finicky, neo-colonial imperialist licensing regulations?
How exactly does one go about giving an estate agent, attorney or bank a couple of million in cash, without causing them to scuttle off to report it as a possible contravention of South Africa’s money laundering legislation? Does one always have to pay the heinous cash deposit charge that banks have taken to levying, or can one negotiate them down if the bundles are carefully sorted and neatly banded?
As ANCYL treasurer Pule Mabe pointed out in Malema’s defence, the “best way to do business is through government tenders”. If two ANC members of equal rank happen to tender for the same project, how is it decided to whom to award the gravy? Is there some kind of tiebreaker mechanism in the looting provisions of the party’s constitution?

Malema owes it to his admirers out there, to all of us who see him as a role model, to explain these things. After all, as Malema himself so perspicaciously put it, “You must never role model a rich person who cannot explain how they got rich. In the ANC we must not have corrupt people as role models. Corrupt means a simple thing — you can’t explain the big amount in your bank account.”

This statement by Malema is admittedly not entirely original, but an echo of the views of his own role model, President Jacob Zuma. Zuma believes that “lifestyle audits” by the SA Revenue Service are brilliant way to expose corruption and undeclared income. But only of government officials, not politicians, the Big Man, believes. And not just right now.

After all, Malema has already said that he did not benefit from the companies mentioned in newspaper reports and if he did, “there was nothing wrong”. So that’s okay then.

In any case, to identify the super rich comrades as the “unethical” media has done, could place their families in danger from potential kidnappers. Not the journalist’s kids, Malema’s. No one would bother with the journos because they are small fry, forced to accept “brown envelopes” and “sleep with politicians” in order to garner the lies they spread about him.

And they certainly will never be role models.