Youth League leader Julius Malema is a product of the ANC's failed education policy and will eventually become a casualty of its infighting, DA leader Helen Zille said on Friday.

"The ANC has failed Julius Malema and his entire generation. While Julius was getting a 'G' for woodwork in a disadvantaged school, the ANC leaders (for whom he is prepared to kill), were making sure that their own children escaped the consequences of the ANC's education policy," Zille said in her weekly newsletter South Africa Today.

She said the children of ordinary African National Congress voters, on the other hand, were not taught the values of hard work and discipline and therefore had no prospects.

"Like Julius, the only hope they have is to rely on their political connections for a foothold on the ladder of life."

The Democratic Alliance and the ANCYL leader had been involved in a bitter slanging match since Malema last weekend called Zille "a racist, colonialist and imperialist".

It degenerated further when Zille said he was as immature as an "inkwenkwe" or uncircumcised boy, prompting him to ask how she could know that much about him.

"It is tempting to dismiss Malema"

On Friday, Zille described him as "a man who opens his mouth only to change feet". "It is tempting to dismiss Malema as a political lightweight; a harmless buffoon prone to delivering crass sound bites," she added.

In fact, Zille said, Malema was the logical but disturbing product of a "closed crony system" that had evolved in the ANC around party leader Jacob Zuma.

She said Zuma's closest allies in his power struggle with former president Thabo Mbeki "were propelled into all the key positions of power to reinforce each other in the inner cabal that inevitably leads to corruption and the criminalisation of the state.

"Zuma's interests are Malema's interests, because they both belong to a closed circle based on reinforcing mutual interests, which inevitably results in power abuse.

"As long as Malema promotes those interests, he will flourish in the ANC."

But in the end he would become a victim of the very system that spawned him, she predicted.

"Poor Julius. He thinks he has reached the top rung of the ladder; he doesn't anticipate how soon it will be knocked out from under him. And he will have nothing to fall back on. He will hit the ground hard.

"His fall will either be the result of the ANC's internal wars between competing crony factions - or the consequence of voters using their power to hold people like Julius Malema to account, and voting for the DA."