Malema retweets that Pauli van Wyk’s ‘hero’ is Satan

In an apparent response to a recent damning news article about him and the EFF, the party’s leader Julius Malema retweeted a screenshot highlighting that investigative news journalist Pauli van Wyk supposedly considers Satan her hero.

The answer came in a Q&A with Daily Maverick, “20 Questions We Ask Everyone“, in which Van Wyk replies that “Satan” is her hero because “He puts up with more than I am willing to.”

She also replied that the last person she had texted was Satan, as “He’s a man of wealth and taste”; that the reason she’d be put to death would be for building “Satan a highway”; and that the worst job she ever had was “Designing the highway to hell. Trigonometry never really was my strength.”

The answers are obviously tongue-in-cheek and satirical and she also lists her special skill as being “a space traveller; I’ll get you anyway”, while jokingly implying hell is a parallel universe. She also joked that allegedly corrupt people, such as then head of Sars Tom Moyane, had been living in a parallel universe.

She joked in her final answer that she had “used lyrics from 8 songs in this questionnaire, and you haven’t spotted them all. It’s okay. You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes you may find you get what you need,” yet another song reference.

The tweet criticising Van Wyk’s “satanic” answer was posted by longtime EFF Twitter warrior and defender @Sentletse, who apparently markets high-end furniture and interior designing while mostly spending his time promoting the EFF and its leaders while launching ad hominem attacks on the EFF’s critics.

However, the list of these critics has continued to grow, with much of Twitter appalled by the information presented in Van Wyk’s investigation of how at least about R1.8 million reached Malema and his deputy Floyd Shivambu from the now liquidated VBS Mutual Bank.

Van Wyk described this money as the “proceeds of crime” and that both men would have known this while participating in the alleged scheme involving Shivambu’s brother and Malema’s cousin through a network of front companies.

Malema had earlier denied to Van Wyk that there was any truth to her story, while the EFF itself continued to defend its leaders.

Sentletse described Van Wyk as “Josephine” Goebbels who wrote “trash journalism”, a slur comparing her to the father of modern political propaganda, the Nazis’ minister of propaganda Joseph Goebbels. He highlighted in the screenshot below that she said Satan was her hero.

Unlike in the Middle Ages, it is no longer a crime to like Satan (for which a woman accused of witchcraft would have probably found herself burnt alive at the stake). However, it is a crime in the year 2018 to loot money from banks in which the monies of poor people and municipalities have been invested.

Prosecutions for both heresy and corruption/fraud seem rather rare these days, though it’s likely the latter has a higher chance of getting a person in trouble in the 21st century – though admittedly only slightly.

Many on Twitter on Wednesday expressed a desire to see a proper investigation from and prosecution by authorities, if indeed the EFF’s top leaders have enriched themselves criminally, as Van Wyk insists they have.

She had earlier shared a tweet that Malema wanted her to share her “notes” with him on why she thought they received any VBS money. She was no doubt aware more stories would be coming.

One hopes the devil didn’t make anyone do it.

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