The firebrand youth leader expelled from the ruling African National Congress two years ago is now preparing to ignite a political wildfire in the bushveld. On July 11, former anc leader Julius Malema pledged a comeback with a new party dedicated to land reforms in the style of President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe. This party—to be known as the Economic Freedom Fighters (eff)—will also be dedicated to the nationalization of South African banks and platinum mines.

Malema and his eff party have attracted considerable publicity by sporting red berets, using Communist jargon and advocating the state assets seizers of Zimbabwe and Venezuela.

“We are a protest movement,” Malema told a July 11 press conference in Johannesburg. “We have got a completely different plan. Ours is expropriation of land without compensation. We want to nationalize, and those mines we want to nationalize, we are not going to pay for them. Our enemy No. 1 is monopoly capital.”

According to the party’s manifesto, the South African government should “transfer all land to the state, which will administer and use land for sustainable development purposes.” Once the land is under state control, the manifesto dictates that those wishing to use land would have to apply for a land-use license, which would be valid for 25 years and could be renewed based on whether the land was being used as planned.

Though Malema has invited white South Africans to join in his planned socialist revolution, saying “nobody who will be driven to the sea,” he has a past track record of stirring up racial hatred. In 2011, he was tried by South Africa’s Equality Court for singing a song that calls for the shooting of white farmers with machine guns.

Considering the fact that more white farmers are murdered each year in South Africa than have been killed in Zimbabwe since Robert Mugabe came to power, Agriculture Minister Tina Joemat-Pettersson has already tried to calm tensions by assuring the media that the government will take action if Malema’s followers start occupying agricultural land.

As unemployment soars, Malema’s new party is primarily targeting the 50 percent of young black South Africans who are out of work and whose living conditions have not improved in the 19 years since the end of apartheid. Even political analyst Nic Borain—who described eff leadership as “the clowns and fools of our politics”—said the party could take up to 5 percent of the vote in the 2014 election.

Such a percentage would be enough to influence any future government in a more racist/Marxist direction as a means of gaining more votes. As Frans Cronje, deputy chief executive officer of the Johannesburg-based Institute for Race Relations, said in a 2011 interview: “It doesn’t take a majority of black South Africans in order to drag the country into a racial mess. It takes a few characters like Malema with the tacit consent of the anc.”

For more information on the future of South Africa, read our online booklet South Africa in Prophecy.