BESIDES the spectacle that punctuated President Jacob Zuma's ascendancy to the presidency, his dramatic trial for rape and his epic electoral victory in Polokwane in 2008, nothing has so expansively occupied the South African media landscape and arrested public attention more than the controversial personality of Julius Malema and his volatile political discourses.

From both his detractors and sympathisers, the young Malema evokes extreme reactions and intense emotions.

Those who resent Malema do so openly with noticeable energy that fits the definition of fundamentalism and his supporters back him with fanatic zealotry.

The question which burdens this article, and one which I hope to contribute to answering is: What exactly is Julius Malema's problem, if it is a problem, which has resulted in him being the subject of intense political hatred and extreme fanatical support at the same time.

Clearly, it is possible that Malema missed basic lessons in African political politeness or he is deliberately refusing to observe the unwritten rules of African political decorum.

For me, this is what makes Malema a rare gift that history has given to South African and African politics.

Any vibrant democratic society needs its Malemas, the courageous or careless talkers, depending on where one stands.

Malema's propensity to discharge bare-knuckled and pugilistic political talk that has earned him as many enemies as friends, makes him an asset to any society that enjoys and builds itself up with hard truths.

Malema's lack of, or refusal to observe African political politeness has steered around him stormy controversies that have made him supper for the media who feed fat on this kind of spectacle and relish popularity and notoriety, qualities that Malema carries with equal ease.

When he is not singing Dubul' ibhunu, Malema is counselling that South Africa should seize farmlands from whites - even without compensation.

Or he is advocating for the nationalisation of mines and loudly announcing that the ANCYL will soon be providing vigorous solidarity to those in Botswana who are pushing for regime change?

It is easy, but it is not enough, to suspect Malema of political attention-seeking or of being a dangerous demagogue of the Idi Amin and Robert Mugabe category.

There is something to Julius Malema, we like him or we detest him; that deserves analysis and understanding, lest we concentrate on the dust of words he raises and miss some hard truths about ourselves as a society that has produced him - for better or for worse.

In Africa when a respectable elderly person breaks wind in the presence of his children and grandchildren, the disgusting noise and the foul smell are blamed on the nearest baby or toddler.

If there is no toddler or baby nearby to carry the cross, all who are present suffer the smell in silence and collectively pretend that nothing has happened.

That is good old African politeness. We knowingly blame the innocent or endure smelly realities peacefully rather than name and shame the gods.

Some truths are not told, no matter how obvious and well understood they are.

For me, Julius Malema is comparable to that rare villager who will not only admonish the elder for unhygienic behaviour, but will name exactly where the disturbing noise and foul smell is coming from.

Such candour attracts from the villagers the kind of intense attention that Malema has attracted to himself in South African politics - by raising those issues that all of us know but are either too polite or too cowardly to say them out loud.

Take, for example, former president Thabo Mbeki's famous speech, South Africa: two nations, in which Mbeki lamented the social gap between the whites and the blacks in one country.

That paradox of the South Africans in Sandton swimming in obscene prosperity, while the South Africans across the road in Alexandra drown in abject poverty, when on a daily basis we sing the same national anthem and profess loyalty and patriotism to the same rainbow nation.

In his polite manner, Mbeki suggested that constitutional ways should be found that will address inequalities that have been inherited from the past era.

In addressing the same issue, Malema does not use polished linguistic embellishments to sweeten his message, nor does he avoid directly blaming the whites for the poverty of the blacks.

He sings Dubul' Ibhunu and threatens a new revolution while branding himself an economic freedom fighter of Chris Hani proportions. The meaning of Malema's message and that of Thabo Mbeki are not fundamentally different, but the language that carries it is.

While the polished Mbeki is cautious and polite, raw Malema is direct, but is he wrong, is the question?

Winnie Madikizela-Mandela did not dispute having an off-the-record chat with journalist Nadira Naipaul, but what she could not agree to be associated with are the politically impolite remarks that were later attributed to her.

African political politeness could not permit even the mother of the nation to live with allegations that suggested that she could have said "Mandela went to jail as a revolutionary, but look what came out."

Because of African political politeness, I am even shivering writing this.

Almost every thinking South African knows that our independence remains an incomplete assignment and that the rainbow nation that we so exalt is more in our collective national imagination than in the reality of our economy and lived existence.

We are so comfortable in celebrating our imagined unity and reconciliation that we will criminalise anyone like Julius Malema who wants to suggest that we are celebrating our own collective national funeral and not the miracle of reconciliation that weimagine.

It is possible for that reason that Winnie Madikizela-Mandela could not accept ownership of sentiments that "Mandela let down the black people" and even unwisely jointly accepted a Nobel Peace prize with his "jailer".

It is not easy in South Africa and in Africa at large to publicly criticise Nelson Mandela and still keep your good name among family and friends.

It takes the proverbial impolite villager or a rare Julius Malema to remind a society that "it is not yet uhuru".

For promising forceful solidarity with those in Botswana, who are pushing to overthrow the heavy- handed and militarised regime of General Ian Khama, Malema is being dragged kicking and screaming into disciplinary hearings.

Senior ANC leaders cannot suffer while a youth is putting in danger the old and polite relations between South Africa and Botswana.

That the ordinary people of Botswana are deserving of robust political solidarity against a dictatorial regime, just as well as we deservedly got support against the apartheid regime, does not come into the question.

Whether Malema should be debated and not condemned in our colourful democracy is not even being considered.

Or have we considered how many South Africans actually agree with Malema but do not have the platform or ability to articulate their thoughts?

At the end of the day silencing, depending on where one stands, careless or courageous communicators like Malema is like covering a septic wound and pretending that it is healed.

A wounded society like ours needs to allow the free expression of bottled up thoughts and ideas, no matter how volatile they are, which can then be openly debated as part of our maturing democratisation and indeed the healing process.

The long and the short of my take is that Malema is just another casualty of our intolerant African political politeness.

• Mpofu is a media, journalism and public relations consultant.