Africa-Press – South-Africa. Making no secret the EFF would use future coalitions to reach the party’s own ends, EFF leader Julius Malema told delegates at the party’s provincial conference in the North West they would have to kiss a lot of frogs to get to where the party is going.
Where that is, he did not say, as he closed the conference on Sunday in a typically wide-ranging monologue of about an hour, which included railing against “white monopoly capital” that, according to Malema, controlled the ANC, DA and media.
In a recent interview with News24, Malema opened the door to a coalition agreement with the ANC after the 2024 elections.
Initially, he said he did not care who led the ANC, but he later added he would prefer it to be treasurer-general Paul Mashatile who is is expected to contest the ANC’s deputy presidency in December.
In an apparent reference to the interview, Malema said he was asked whether he could work with ANC president Cyril Ramaphosa or Mashatile.
Malema believes Mashatile would make a ‘better’ ANC leader than Ramaphosa
“You are giving me two devils. Two. I must choose one. I choose the lesser devil. ‘Malema says he wants Mashatile’. I want nothing Mashatile. You are giving me two names of which one is better. Yho! These things are worse,” said Malema.
“For us to get where we are going, fighters, we are going to have to kiss a lot of frogs on the way, for us to arrive where we are.”
“As we make tactical moves, you must never think the leadership has abandoned the strategic objective of the EFF. There is always strategy and tactics.
“We are trying to manoeuvre things, because we don’t have numbers. So, we must use what we have to arrive where we want to arrive.”
In the same speech, he said the ANC was a dying organisation.
Taking a swipe at Ramaphosa, who on Saturday was in Delmas, Mpumalanga, where he participated in “filling” potholes as part of an ANC volunteer programme, Malema added: “Leave the so-called potholes. There can’t be potholes where there are no roads. And, therefore, to say you are going around patching potholes is actually misleading.
“How do you patch potholes on a gravel road? You must first build a road. And therefore, there are no proper roads in South Africa, and the patching of potholes is nothing else but pretentious way of wanting to be seen to be doing something while you are busy with nothing.”
Presidential pothole duty – Ramaphosa helps to fix streets in Delmas for ANC campaign
Ramaphosa’s fledgling career as pothole fixer was not the only bone Malema had to pick with the president.
He told the North West delegates to ensure “the only thing” on their minds when they met were “the brutality that was unleashed on our people in Marikana and the poverty that constitutes the daily lives of our people”.
“How do we practically support the widows of Marikana, who have opened a case against Cyril Ramaphosa and are making claims in a very justifiable way of why Ramaphosa should also pay them money for having paid a central role in the killing of their husbands,” Malema said.
He also wanted Ramaphosa to account over the Phala Phala scandal and criticised him for refusing to answer a question about it in Parliament – the body the president is constitutionally obligated to account to – while he answered questions about it for other agencies.
“When [the] EFF says Ramaphosa must go, you must know that the EFF has declared war against the favourite of white monopoly capital.”
He said Ramaphosa appeared to think he was above the law.
“We cannot have anyone above the Constitution of South Africa. All of us, we are a subject of the Constitution, and therefore there is nothing special [about Ramaphosa]. He must be treated the same as everybody else in South Africa.
“So, fighters, we must cleanse our society of this rotten leadership of the ANC. And not only the leadership! The whole of the ANC is rotten to the bone marrow. And therefore, you will never fix the ANC.”
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Malema also had a go at the anti-immigrant organisation Operation Dudula.
He said they claimed to be fighting for jobs, and questioned who “owns the jobs”, adding they were “fighting to work for baas”.
“We do not want to work for the white man. If anything, the white man must work for us, because we are the rightful owners of the land!”
Malema said anyone who said Zimbabweans were taking jobs was a “small dreamer”.
“We are the big dreamers! And the big dreamers dream about owning the land, the natural and mineral resources of South Africa and the whole African continent! Because there will never be economic freedom – selectively! – to South Africa alone.”
He added he did not care if this stance cost them votes, saying they rather wanted to save lives than obtain power.
Malema said his party’s discipline put the ANC to shame.
“You are able to meet: the chairs are not flying. You are able to meet, there are no members of the EFF who are in court, who are trying to interdict their own people’s assembly.”
Malema also extolled the virtues of the Leninist concept of democratic centralism, saying all members were bound by the decision of a higher structure.
Subsequently, the decision of the North West provincial conference was binding on all members, Malema said, “whether you like them, or don’t like them”.
“The organisation is not going to die tomorrow, like the ANC.
“You see, the ANC people are fighting because they can see this thing is dying. So, before it dies, [they think] let me be something as well.”
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