Malema spells out 2019 conditions
EFF leader will work to push out ANC ‘kleptocracy’
Spaza shop owners must be given shares in township malls
The ANC cannot count on the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) for support in the 2019 general elections.
EFF leader Julius Malema has for the first time revealed on what grounds his party will form a coalition government with other opposition parties.
Malema was addressing the annual conference of the South African Property Owners Association in Cape Town yesterday.
He said the EFF would only join an opposition coalition if its terms of establishing a state bank, nationalisation of mines, expropriation of land and free education were met.
Failing that, he said, the EFF would give the opposition its support to at least stop the current ANC “kleptocracy”.
Turning to property issues, Malema said township spaza shop owners should either be given shares or space in the township malls that were bankrupting them.
He did not mince his words about what the EFF would like to see from property owners in the future.
“When I was younger, there were many black-owned spaza shops in the townships, but the township shopping malls are putting them out of business,” Malema said.
“They must be given shares in these township malls and every mall should have rent-free space set aside for spaza shops,” he said.
He made it clear the EFF saw itself as the representative of those without property, rather than of the audience he was addressing, and that systemic and lawful reallocation of property was the only way to correct the systematic dispossession characterising colonial wars of conquest and apartheid.
Malema told the audience it would be in their interest to support the EFF, which he classed as the only true opposition to ANC state looting, that would kill the economy.
“The problem with liberation organisations is that they have nothing more to add after liberation.
“After that, they are out of ideas and expect people to vote for them simply because they had liberated them, as we see with the ANC currently,” said Malema.
He called on property owners to agree to have the state act as trustee of all land, to be allocated to people for good usage in a non-corrupt manner, listing the example of a farm close to his home in Seshego, Limpopo, which had been lying fallow for 20 years before being invaded and shared between the invaders and the owner.