While President Jacob Zuma’s advocate was backing down on Nkandla and agreeing to pay back the money in the constitutional court in Johannesburg, Julius Malema was the subject of a different court action in Pretoria.

There he was interdicted against threatening the physical safety of the Gupta family after his call at a media conference that they be driven out of the country.

Malema’s case — that this was just politicking — lost the day. But what he has succeeded in doing is summoning up the next big crisis for Zuma and setting the agenda for the year. It’s going to be a two-pronged assault on the cronies that have attached themselves to the Zuma state for financial gain and on ‘white capital’.

Let’s first go back to the “pay back the money” scandal. When Malema and his fellow MPs tore up the parliamentary rule-book and chanted “pay back the money” at Zuma almost a year ago in the 2015 state of the nation address, the South African political establishment was caught off-guard.

On the one hand, Zuma’s flagrant disregard for the public protector’s ruling represented a new low point for a South African president. On the other, they reasoned, the institutions of democracy deserved to be treated with some dignity.

While the chattering classes dithered, out there on the streets and particularly out there among the disenchanted youth who find themselves on the economic margins, it was a no-brainer. They supported the EFF. At the end of the day, this was the constituency that mattered to the EFF and it is the constituency that ought to matter to every political party wanting to make a future for itself.

The goings on in the constitutional court confirmed that the EFF was right about paying back the money. And perhaps right to overturn the parliamentary applecart. It is now abundantly clear that parliament has been diverted from its role of keeping the executive in check into the role of the president’s public defender.

Outrage over the spending on Nkandla dominates. But surely the greater outrage here is that the very cornerstone of the new democratic order has been turned into a vehicle for the fulfilment of the greed and ambitions of one man? One can only hope that the Constitutional Court will recognise this moment for what it is: An opportunity to make a very clear statement about the duties and obligations of parliament in a constitutional democracy.

The brilliance of the EFF’s strategy was that it recognised before others that Nkandla was an issue worth going to the trenches for, worth tearing up the rule book for, worth the painful blows inflicted the white-shirted security guards, because there could, at the end of the day, be only one winner.

Other parties who called for decorum and who tried to maintain the pretence that parliament was still a functioning organ in the democratic body politic, were drowned out and lost momentum.

They are in grave danger of suffering the same fate as Malema sets the new “Gupta” agenda and they will be out of the money when he launches his all-out assault on ‘white capital’.

Unlike the DA, Malema does not have to appease the establishment. He knows he will never get the votes of the old order. His eye is firmly on the prize: Mobilising the great mass of young voters to enter formal politics and back him at the polls.