Juju, your cheap political points may come at a big cost

We shouldn’t be surprised – given our history of colonialism and apartheid – that the ghost of racial enmity is far from dead and buried.

Yet the angry racist attack on the South African Indian community by EFF leader Julius Malema is still shocking.

Malema deliberately chose KwaZulu-Natal – home to the biggest Indian population in the country – to launch his venomous tirade against the community.

He claimed that “our people” (presumably he meant Africans) were being ill-treated by Indian business owners who were “worse than Afrikaners were”.

The EFF leader tried to say that his comments were “the truth” because Indians didn’t pay people who worked for them, but rather handed out food parcels.

The EFF would not apologise for Malema, vowing that “each time we come across the suffering and oppression of our people, we shall not mince our words, nor tiptoe around false minority feelings”.

It seems evident that the reason Malema made his race-baiting comments was a good, old-fashioned political one: his organisation is doing badly in KZN and he needed a “hot button” issue to stoke up anger and, perhaps, increase EFF membership.

It is worrying that he, as a senior politician, either does not appreciate, or chooses to ignore, the incendiary potential of statements like this in our current political and economic climate.

And who says that the deliberate targeting of minorities might not well come back to haunt you, Mr Malema?

Imagine a situation where a politician from KZN decided to attack you and others like you because you are not Zulus … Remember that before the genocide in Rwanda exploded, members of the Tutsi minority were derided by Hutu politicians as “cockroaches”.

Let us not, as South Africans, start down that slippery slope.