EFF leader Julius Malema invited a huge crowd to a Covid-19 super-spreading event in Pretoria last Friday. What is his objective? To save lives or to achieve a political end?

My take is that Malema is given to self-serving and achieving his own political desires. The march on a health regulatory body last week had nothing to do with saving lives. If you are interested in saving lives, you desist from inviting adherents to political rallies.

Former US president Donald Trump did exactly what Malema is doing, inviting Americans to his political rallies. Because of this recklessness, America lost more than 500,000 of its citizens to the dangerous pandemic. Malema is a gravely irresponsible leader.

He is a political demagogue at work, desperately seeking to achieve for himself a political capital at the expense of the ignorance and gullibility of the masses. He argues that vaccines from China and Russia should be approved by the regulatory entity.

But if this were the case, what stops him from engaging or dialoging with the government, the national health department and the regulatory body, to sort out bottle necks? In the midst of a dangerous pandemic, he organises a march he knows could easily become a virus super-spreader, and therefore endanger the lives of the many.

What can we read from his dangerous and irrational stance? Could it be that his main preoccupation is focused on local government election due to take place later in the year, and that the dangerous march is simply a political ruse?

Jo-Mangaliso Mdhlela, email