We’ll step up land invasions – Juju
MALEMA: EFF WANTS TO INCREASE PRESSURE, BUT NO VIOLENCE, HE SAYS
EFF leader Julius Malema says his supporters will increasingly seize land to pressure government.
Economic Freedom Fighters’ (EFF) leader Julius Malema has vowed his supporters will increasingly seize unoccupied land to put pressure on the government to redistribute land to black people.
Malema warned that poor, young South Africans felt abandoned by the country’s post-apartheid politics since the end of white-minority rule in 1994.
“It’s a completely new generation running out of patience,” Malema told AFP in an interview at the Johannesburg headquarters of the party he founded in 2013 after being ejected from the ANC.
Land reform has become the country’s fiercest battleground ahead of elections next year, when President Cyril Ramaphosa will try to revive fading support for the ruling ANC.
But Malema said land seizures in South Africa would not be violent – unlike in neighbouring Zimbabwe where brutal farm invasions wrecked the economy under Robert Mugabe.
“There won’t be violence. I think (white farmers) want to give up land as black and white are talking to each other about how we can resolve the land issue.”
Malema said he had led land seizures near his home in Polokwane, with more than 3 000 families settled on land whose owner lives in Canada.
“He came back and wanted to start negotiating,” Malema said.
He claimed that the EFF – which won just over 8% in the 2016 local elections, and hopes to make a major breakthrough in the 2019 general elections – “said to our people the most practical way to get land is to occupy the unoccupied land to put pressure on the state, and it has worked”.
“Now the state and the owners of the land are beginning to say ‘maybe we should do something’.”
He said: “The EFF came at the right time because it was able to amass all this energy into a party to agitate for economic struggle.”
Malema, 37, is renowned for his fiery speeches and attacks on whites as he builds a support base among the poor.
But his party’s flagship stance of demanding radical land reform has been overshadowed by Ramaphosa’s recent announcement that the constitution would be changed to explicitly allow for the expropriation of land without compensation.
“Cyril says this today and says something else tomorrow, depending on where he is speaking,” Malema said, describing Ramaphosa’s new land redistribution policy as “fake”.
“We say the same thing all the time, and they keep on changing.”
He reiterated the party’s stance that the state should be the owner of the land.
“We are going to share the land, but it must first be owned by the state and reallocated back to all of us – black and white.”
His comments about non-violent land invasions may do little to calm fears among potential investors and wealthy South Africans over Malema’s ambitions, and he still relishes taking a dig at the privileged lives that many white citizens enjoy.
He suggested white people could not emigrate to Europe as they cannot afford domestic staff abroad.
“In 1994, people thought white people were going to leave South Africa. They are still here. Where will they go?” he said.
“White people with money in South Africa are poor people in Europe. They are so used to being fed and looked after, they can’t clean after themselves.” –
White people with money in South Africa are poor in Europe