Malema's white boy

2012-04-01 15:45

Julius Malema and his white protegé, Jonathan Ovadia. (Nelius Rademan, Rapport)

Carien du Plessis, City Press

Johannesburg - He might not be wearing the beret (yet) but the young student from Johannesburg has already learnt a lot from his “mentor”, Julius Malema, about handling the media.

“I don’t talk to the press, thanks,” was all an apparently shy Jonathan Ovadia said before hanging up when City Press called him at the arranged time yesterday (Saturday) morning.

Ovadia – according to his Facebook page a former student of King David High School in Johannesburg and studying business at Harvard University – shot to fame when Malema introduced him during a ANC Youth League event at Wits University on Friday night.

Malema’s protégé was nowhere to be found at first mention, but later knocked on the hall doors to enter and was called to the stage by a delighted Malema. Ovadia left again soon after his stage appearance.

Malema introduced an apparently nervous Ovadia as the “white youngster I had taken under my wing”.

Presenting Ovadia to the audience, Malema said: “This is Jonathan. I have mentored him in radical politics and a non-racial South Africa.”

Malema added that they should both live side-by-side and share the country’s riches.

Malema has recently gone out of his way to woo white people, telling the National Press Club a week ago he didn’t want to drive whites into the sea.

On Friday he said: “If we say the land belongs to us, it doesn’t mean white South Africans should be driven to the sea. If you chase them away, where would they go?

"They have no option, they are stuck here with us,” he said, to much laughter and claps from the almost exclusively black audience.

Malema said whites should share their land.

- City Press