So the ANC disciplinary committee reined in Julius Malema. However, the jury remains out whether, as the stuttering process now goes into the appeals stages, we are going to have Tedious Julius or Rejuvenated Juju.

Meanwhile, the ultimate loser will be the ANC, as division grows and the general mess it is in only gains greater exposure. Disciplinary action is not enough, what the movement really needs is something much more far-reaching, something like a truth commission.

Or from another viewpoint, its failure to use the facilities provided by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the 1990s to retool and cleanse itself, and especially its youth wing, is now coming around to haunt it.

In the Mandela years truth commisions were very much part of the South African model for resolving conflicts. The designers of the process, such as Alex Boraine, were in great demand and travelled all over the world to lecture on it.

In spirit at least it became part of the decade of African democratic revival, when elections proliferated and some dictators actually began to step down. There were attempted commissions in countries like Nigeria, and successful ones in countries like Liberia. In Rwanda, the unique gacaca system was a truly African solution to an African problem.

These bodies all demonstrated that probably the key benefit from any legal process, is the knowledge it generates, beating more obvious social functions such as  public justice. What is less obvious is that such knowledge strengthens communities, to the point where they could forgive perpetrators of crimes. In the case of the TRC, communities gained the ability to integrate into a new dispensation which in many respects did not deliver the justice they deserved.

On the other side, it helped white communities to transform and reinvigorate themselves. The TRC may have created a scapegoat, the Eugene de Kocks and Dirk Coetzees, which turned into the stereotype of the middle-aged, white Afrikaner male, as irrevocably racist. This has destroyed much potential for the mentoring that is so essential to build capacity or capability.

But it allowed white communities to rid themselves of this oppressive patriarch, and liberate all the energies suppressed by his Protestant, settler version. The patriarchs benefited too: FW de Klerk helped himself to some Greek salad, and Piet Koornhof went for the Cape bobotie, goes the old joke, the joke itself an expression of the new freedom.

It is not far-fetched to say whites were the chief beneficiaries of the TRC process, not because they were let off the hook – they weren’t – but because the revulsion over death squads in their midst gave many the impetus to reinvent themselves. For instance, whereas in the old dispensation women power was acknowledged, but suppressed anyway, affirmative action to redress gender shortfalls have had so many good outcomes one does not know where to begin to list them.

Such beneficiation occurred because it was part of a juridical regime already well established in white society – the sophisticated dispensing of judicial services versus the almost complete lack of it in black societies, was one of the worst imbalances of apartheid.

This is where the ANC lost out. Instead of using the commission to pacify all the ugly energies released in any violent struggle, they were just as defensive as the National Party and just as uncooperative as Afrikaner secret societies and, it must be said, the media.

The main area of “revolutionary” activity that needed the light of exposure and reason, was the terrifying disciplinary activities of the various youth organisations – part of the whole “liberation before education” doctrine, to the extent that one may call it a doctrine.

One of the worst forms of execution in the history of mankind, the necklacing, was swept under the carpet. In my book about the uprising in KwaNdebele in 1987, I included various eyewitness accounts of such horrors (the homeland was the area with the highest incidence.) Although I was unable to do proper research during the states of emergency in the 1980s, it was clear from this sample that only a handful of the 300 odd were carried out for “valid” political reasons. The rest were for quite opportunistic and used to settle petty grudges.

Had these acts been brought before the commission, or any other public body, I believe we would have had a much different youth movement than the one that is threatening all of our futures with its ideological vapidity, ignorance and lack of political nous.

It would also have been a much stronger movement. Because the truth about the ANC Youth League under Malema is that it is so weak. Its emblem is the bare buttocks exposed on the stage when he was first voted in as president at the same FW Reitz hostel where black servants were shown to be as servile and obsequious as ever in the cruel Youtube “initiation” video.

The league lacks the feedback mechanisms enabling it to move beyond infantile rhetoric based on a badly mistaken faith in its own historical importance. It wants to burden itself and the state with the nationalisation of a severely depressed segment of the economy because it does not know any better.

The real danger for SA is that this weak movement may yet gain the ascendancy.

It needs much more than disciplinary action against its leaders. It needs a truth commission, although it is probably too late for that now.

Tags: #ANC, #Julius Malema, #truth commission