Fiona Forde Gets to Know Julius Malema – and Likes What She Finds

October 19th, 2009 by Ronel S

Shock! A weekend passes without a memorable utterance from ANC Youth League president Julius Malema. But that doesn’t mean he wasn’t in the news. Journalist Fiona Forde caught up with the “bright young turk in Gucci” and delivered this sympathetic take on the firebrand leader to the Weekend Argus:

At 28 and his politics to one side, he is a likeable sort. Affable. Hugely entertaining. Witty. Brutally honest. A chancer. At times a fibber. And a charmer. Self-deprecating. Sometimes irascible. Often unrelenting, but to his credit always willing to go in just about any direction a conversation will take him. And the furthest thing from the buffoon he’s often portrayed as. A polished English speaker he may not be, but an astute politician he certainly is.
Though Flora’s death had left him reeling, it was soon followed by the birth of Ratanang, Julius’s only child. On October 14, 2006, his then girlfriend gave birth to the boy.
He hadn’t planned on becoming a father so young and when she dropped the bombshell that she was pregnant, he remembers the blood all but drained from him.
“Yo, I didn’t know what to do, or who to tell,” he says. “I never thought it would happen like that.”