[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Wlh_HF2Y8E&w=600&h=373]

By now you’ve seen some version of this footage–in this case from a South African TV channel, ETV–of the events earlier today when Julius Malema, the leader of the ANC’s Youth League, kicked a BBC journalist, Jonah Fisher, out of an ANC YL press conference for interrupting him.

Malema was there to talk about his recent visit to Zimbabwe where he (Malema) publicly expressed his support for that country’s disastrous and violent leader, Life President Robert Mugabe. Malema, a loyalist of President Jacob Zuma, has been a font of racism, fascism and plain rudeness over the last few months. (BTW, on whether Terreblanche’s murder is Malema’s fault, I said my peace here.)

Among other things Malema called Fisher a “bastard,” “small boy” and accused him of having “white tendencies.”

Malema is much a creation of the South Africa’s media, but he is the ANC’s responsibility.

I’m wondering how long it will take before the ANC’s leaders kick him out?

Some think he will self-destruct or that he’ll be defeated in internal ANC politics. Zuma himself has criticized Malema in the third person thus far. (Already there are rumors that ANC higher-ups leaked the damaging stories about his corrupt dealings and ostentatious lifestyle to the country’s media).

But as a keen observer of South African politics reminded me recently that is highly unlikely: “Something tells me they couldn’t even if they wanted to.”

One reason may be that Malema is a power broker in the ANC. But even more importantly: The ANC needs him to keep a certain idea of the organization as the sole heir of the anti-apartheid movement (with its songs and memories) alive so that people won’t turn their songs against Zuma or Malema for that matter. (Thabo Mbeki did not learn that lesson.)

Malema also provides cover for the empty politics of the ANC and its unlikely allies in the media and corporate world to get by on feel-good rhetoric (“rainbow nation,” African Renaissance, rugby nationalism) and show-truth of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. As another political observer wrote to me:

in the “private sector”), what image of the future is there? On the one hand you got Malema, but on the other hand you got the ongoing, crushing racism of life in South Africa, and that’s what gives his “war talk” an audience.  So, does the ANC (or anyone else) have anything on offer besides the state-as-site-of-accumulation?

Oh, and David Smith of The Guardian also has this audio report discussing the meaning of Malema that more or less agrees with that of my interlocutors above.