(EYE WITNESS NEWS) Malema Slams Capitalism, Praises Mugabe
* Julius Malema (C) surrounded by other senior EFF leaders at a media briefing in Braamfontein, Johannesburg, 9 January 2014. Picture: Govan Whittles/EWN.
Govan Whittles & Vumani Mkhize | 4 days ago
JOHANNESBURG – Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) leader Julius Malema on Thursday said his party plans to win this year’s general elections, despite what he calls an uneven playing field. The controversial politician along with senior party leaders held a media briefing in Braamfontein in central Johannesburg.
EFF revealed campaign plans while using the event to slam capitalism and praise Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe. Malema says his fighters are ready to galvanise support for the EFF.
“Since the official launch in Marikana, fighters, commissars and organisers of EFF have been on the ground establishing structures.”
He says they have been preparing the election machinery in order to conduct “one of the most vigorous” campaigns this year.
Malema says the EFF has been inundated with support from all over the country.
“We can now announce that all provinces have no less than 10,000 EFF volunteers who will be engaged in community meetings, door-to-door [campaigns], motorcades, mini-rallies, rallies and house meetings.”
At the same time, the EFF leader hit out at capitalism, saying the system failed the people of South Africa.
He said the system further widened the gap between rich and poor in South Africa resulting in increased poverty levels.
Malema also argued in favour of Mugabe and the land reform programme adopted in that country.
Defending Mugabe’s rule, Malema said detractors should remember the effects of capitalism in the country before criticising other nations such as Zimbabwe.
“There’s no system that has worked successfully for Africans, except the Zimbabwean system. The Zimbabweans today can be hungry and poor, but at least they own property. You are eating pap and vleis here in South Africa, [but] you have nothing to show as proof that you belong to South Africa.”
Malema also suggested struggle stalwart Winnie Madikizela-Mandela should be made president of the country to lead it through a long cooling-off period.
He says he regrets ignoring warnings by Madikizela-Mandela ahead of the 2009 polls not to support President Jacob Zuma.
But he dismissed rumours the party would try to recruit Nelson Mandela’s ex-wife.
While the ANC launches its manifesto in Mbombela, Mpumalanga at the weekend, Malema says his party will be doing something more tangible by opening a house built by the EFF in Nkandla - Zuma’s hometown.
He says EFF will launch its election manifesto on 22 February in Tembisa on Gauteng’s East Rand.
(Edited by Craig Wynn)
Labels: ECONOMIC FREEDOM FIGHTERS (SA), JULIUS MALEMA, LAND REFORM
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(EYE WITNESS NEWS) Malema Slams Capitalism, Praises Mugabe
* Julius Malema (C) surrounded by other senior EFF leaders at a media briefing in Braamfontein, Johannesburg, 9 January 2014. Picture: Govan Whittles/EWN.
Govan Whittles & Vumani Mkhize | 4 days ago
JOHANNESBURG – Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) leader Julius Malema on Thursday said his party plans to win this year’s general elections, despite what he calls an uneven playing field. The controversial politician along with senior party leaders held a media briefing in Braamfontein in central Johannesburg.
EFF revealed campaign plans while using the event to slam capitalism and praise Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe. Malema says his fighters are ready to galvanise support for the EFF.
“Since the official launch in Marikana, fighters, commissars and organisers of EFF have been on the ground establishing structures.”
He says they have been preparing the election machinery in order to conduct “one of the most vigorous” campaigns this year.
Malema says the EFF has been inundated with support from all over the country.
“We can now announce that all provinces have no less than 10,000 EFF volunteers who will be engaged in community meetings, door-to-door [campaigns], motorcades, mini-rallies, rallies and house meetings.”
At the same time, the EFF leader hit out at capitalism, saying the system failed the people of South Africa.
He said the system further widened the gap between rich and poor in South Africa resulting in increased poverty levels.
Malema also argued in favour of Mugabe and the land reform programme adopted in that country.
Defending Mugabe’s rule, Malema said detractors should remember the effects of capitalism in the country before criticising other nations such as Zimbabwe.
“There’s no system that has worked successfully for Africans, except the Zimbabwean system. The Zimbabweans today can be hungry and poor, but at least they own property. You are eating pap and vleis here in South Africa, [but] you have nothing to show as proof that you belong to South Africa.”
Malema also suggested struggle stalwart Winnie Madikizela-Mandela should be made president of the country to lead it through a long cooling-off period.
He says he regrets ignoring warnings by Madikizela-Mandela ahead of the 2009 polls not to support President Jacob Zuma.
But he dismissed rumours the party would try to recruit Nelson Mandela’s ex-wife.
While the ANC launches its manifesto in Mbombela, Mpumalanga at the weekend, Malema says his party will be doing something more tangible by opening a house built by the EFF in Nkandla - Zuma’s hometown.
He says EFF will launch its election manifesto on 22 February in Tembisa on Gauteng’s East Rand.
(Edited by Craig Wynn)
Labels: ECONOMIC FREEDOM FIGHTERS (SA), JULIUS MALEMA, LAND REFORM
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(STICKY) (NEWZIMBABWE) SA’s EFF: From economic apartheid to true democracy
08/05/2014 00:00:00
by Garikai Chengu
CONTRARY to the Westernized, popular belief that South Africa is a “model democracy", it is one of Africa's most dysfunctional democracies.
South Africa's apartheid regime is remembered as one of the worst crimes against humanity of the 20th century. The economic system that underpinned it remains alive and well today. Whites comprise only 12 percent of the population but, thanks to the racist exploitation of blacks over the past 350 years, still own 75 percent of the country’s land.
US-based bank, Citigroup, recently ranked South Africa as the world’s richest country, in terms of its mineral reserves, worth an estimated $2.5 trillion. Whites and foreigners own a staggering 80 percent of this wealth. South Africa is, unquestionably, the world's most racially unequal society.
Democracy is not about holding elections, simply to choose which particular representatives of the elite class should rule over the masses. True democracy is about equalizing the economy and giving economic power back to the majority.
The Economic Freedom Fighters party campaigned for the just-ended elections on a platform of three pillars, designed to democratize the economy and overthrow the economic legacy of apartheid. First, expropriation of land for redistribution amongst the masses. Second, nationalization of mines and banks for the benefit of the people and, finally, free education and health care for all
This week marks the most important election in South Africa's post-apartheid history. The EFF is the party of the poor, and if given power by the electorate, it will do what the ruling ANC has failed to do since 1994: provide economic freedom for the poor African majority, at the expense of the predominately white capitalists.
Despite twenty years of South African democracy, five white-owned companies still control 75 percent of South Africa's stock market. It's the largest concentration of wealth and power on earth. Corporate powers, which underwrote apartheid in South Africa, are reminiscent of the great German companies that ran the Third Reich's economy. The only difference between the Third Reich and apartheid is that 'reconciliation' in Germany did not leave pro-Nazi financiers in business whereas in South Africa, those financiers are still firmly in control.
During apartheid, Britain was the single biggest investor in South Africa, followed by the United States, yielding the highest return on capital in the world. The United States and the other Western capitalist governments not only supported, but benefited from the racist apartheid regime. With economic control still concentrated in the hands of the white elite, we see no difference between the old and the new South African regimes. Blacks have reclaimed the political crown, but whites have remained with the crown jewels.
Today, Western media demonizes Julius Malema, the EFF's commander-in-chief, because he is the most outspoken proponent of economic justice. It is no surprise, considering Malema's ideologies threaten the economic stability of some of the most powerful white capitalists in the world.
To this day, a large portion of South Africa's budget pays apartheid-era debt to Western nations. This means the people pay for their oppression twice over. Clearly, the fabric of apartheid, which the Western media claims is long dead, still generates large sums of money, lining the pockets of the very same Western capitalists.
Neo-apartheid companies in South Africa made record profits for Western shareholders since democracy in 1994, all the while shedding hundreds of thousands of jobs. In fact, among the 295 companies on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, only 4 percent of the CEOs are black. Far from being a “model democracy”, South Africa is an example of how not to practice democracy.
The equitable redistribution of land is the first pillar of the EFF's manifesto. Under the 1913 Land Act, blacks were not allowed to own, or even rent, land outside designated native reserves. By 1994, some 87 percent of agricultural land was in white hands. Precious little has changed during the intervening twenty years. One exception is that black people in rural areas have lost 600,000 jobs since “independence”.
At face value, the Economic Freedom Fighters' call for agrarian revolution may appear to be simply about land. But, it is about so much more. For Africans, land is not merely land. Land is a place to be born, a place to grow up, a place to call home, and a place to be buried. Land is a source of food, a livelihood, and an asset to bequeath to our next generations. Above all else, land is a source of African pride. Land is never merely land.
The second pillar of the EFF's manifesto is the nationalization of mines. Pick up the financial report of any major South African mining company, and one will understand why Malema is advocating nationalization. If you examine a sample income of 100 dollars from a typical South African mine, $22 flows directly into the mine owners' pockets and $17 goes to the corporate executives. Crucially, over 90 percent of these beneficiaries are white. The rest is shared between suppliers ($18), capital goods providers ($16), labour ($14), government in the form of taxes ($9), and debt providers ($4).
So the notion that “the nation’s resource wealth is in the hands of a few white industrialists and foreigners” is not one of Malema's populist fictions, but a cold, hard and uncomfortable fact. The EFF plans to use Venezuela as a model of how to nationalize mineral wealth for the benefit of the people. Venezuela, under Hugo Chavez, used its natural resources to go from being one of the most unequal countries in Latin America to the most equal one, in terms of income.
Democracy is not merely about elections. True democracy is also about equal opportunity through education and the right to life through access to health care. In Venezuela, the government has used nationalization of mineral resources to pay for free health care and free education for the masses. The EFF plans to do the same.
Every year, wealthy Western shareholders repatriate hundreds of millions of dollars from South African mines to Western countries in the form of rent, dividends and profits. Nationalization would channel money towards building bridges and clinics at home, as opposed filling Swiss bank accounts abroad. Unlike the ANC, the EFF will put the interests of local labour above foreign capital.
Any true African revolution has three stages: political, agrarian and economic. The ANC has failed on the second and third stages. The ANC liberated South Africa politically, but economically the ruling party shackles the majority by presiding over its white monopoly of bourgeois capitalism. Under the ANC, corruption is booming and the economy is stagnating, at a time when the rest of Africa is starting to boom. The EFF has vowed to tackle corruption by pledging to do away with Ministerial cars and houses. All EFF parliamentarians will be forced use public hospitals, private cars, and send their children to public school.
South Africa is the continent's most powerful nation, however it is also the continent's most economically colonized nation. Therefore, an EFF election victory would not only democratize and decolonize South Africa, it will encourage other African nations to do the same. A full half century after the first African nation gained independence, the World Bank estimates that a staggering 65 percent of Sub-Saharan Africa's best arable land is still controlled by white settlers or multinational corporations.
The World Bank also estimates that as much as 70 percent of the net wealth in Sub-Saharan Africa is owned by non-indigenous Africans or foreigners. The EFF stands to become a future model for all white-dominated, African economies. If the continent's most powerful nation can achieve political, agrarian, and economic independence, then the rest of Africa will follow suit.
"If the ANC does not deliver the goods, then the people must do to it what they have done to the apartheid regime", once remarked Nelson Mandela. Truth is, the ANC has failed the people of South Africa. The current ruling party has been thoroughly co-opted by neo-liberal, big business. It clearly no longer represents the interests of the poor and middle class. The Economic Freedom Fighters are now the party for progressive Africans to support.
Garikai Chengu is a scholar at Harvard University.
Labels: ANC, APARTHEID, BEE, ECONOMIC FREEDOM FIGHTERS (SA), LAND REFORM, NEOCOLONIALISM
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(TALKZIMBABWE) Malema bounces back, launches party
This article was written by Our reporter on 12 July, at 03 : 48 AM
Julius Malema officially launched his new political organisation, the Economic Freedom Fighters yesterday. Malema said it was agreed by members that the EFF would be a radical leftist movement that will look to contest the 2014 elections.
“We are not like Agang (SA) and all of them … We have a completely different plan.”
The former ANC Youth League president said the EFF will focus on land expropriation and promised that white South Africans “are more than welcome to join us in the redistribution of land and wealth in South Africa”.
Malema said: “This land is too big. There is nobody who will be driven to the sea. We will share, black and white. But failure to share means you will be forced to share.
“We all belong here, but we all have to show proof that we belong here. Black people have nothing to show. Therefore we must give them something to show so they can say proudly: this is our land, this is our country.”
While he lashed out at the ANC, he said that the EFF’s “number one enemy” is Helen Zille’s Democratic Alliance as “they support monopoly capital”.
“We will never go to bed with (the DA),” Malema said.
He also took aim at the SABC, saying it was run at Luthuli House, the ANC’s headquarters.
“Comrades in the SABC operate like its the 80’s . . . (they are) scared they are going to be fired,” Malema said.
He said that high profile members of government will help the EFF “from within” while the organisation also consults with unions within Cosatu.
Malema was speaking at a news conference in Braamfontein. — News24.
Labels: ANC YOUTH LEAGUE, ECONOMIC FREEDOM FIGHTERS (SA), JULIUS MALEMA
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(STICKY) (YOUTUBE) Malema: We'll take over South Africa
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4lz78uoOeo
Julius Malema: "You can say whatever you want to say about Zimbabweans. In the next 10 years, they will be the only Africans in the whole of Africa who own their country. Because why? They were ready to take the pain. Revolution is about pain. Revolution is change, and change is painful. We are ready for that pain. We need that pain."
Labels: ECONOMIC FREEDOM FIGHTERS (SA), JULIUS MALEMA, LAND REFORM
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(MnG SA) Malema's red berets storm 2014
12 Jul 2013 00:00
Charles Molele, Matuma Letsoalo, Andisiwe Makinana
The Economic Freedom Fighters says its stance on land appropriation and nationalisation will help it to topple the ANC. Former ANC Youth League president Julius Malema insists that his Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF)stand a good chance of toppling the ANC, and that they are the only credible alternative to the ruling party.
Addressing the media at Constitution Hill in Johannesburg on Thursday, Malema said the expropriation of land without compensation and the nationalisation of the mines and other key sectors of the economy are central to his organisation's yet-to-be-formed policy.
Malema also introduced some new members, including celebrity Kenny Kunene, actor Fana Mokoena, former ANC Youth League North West chairperson Papiki Baboile, former youth league spokesperson Floyd Shivambu and former Umkhonto weSizwe cadre Mpho Ramakatsa.
Malema and his followers wore military-style red berets reminiscent of the thousands who marched from Johannesburg to Pretoria in 2011 to demand economic transformation.
Malema said he was confident that if an EFF national assembly scheduled to take place in Soweto at the end of July resolved to form a fully fledged political party, they would secure millions of votes from ordinary people impatient for change.
"It is no secret that an absolute majority of all those who have responded are saying that EFF should be a radical, left, and anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movement with an internationalist outlook that should contest elections in South Africa," said Malema.
"The ANC played a role in ushering in democracy but the situation now demands a new political party that will pursue and deliver economic freedom … if we resolve to form a party you can be guaranteed we will meet the ANC on the ground. We never lost. We even put [Jacob] Zuma as ANC president in Polokwane when everybody was afraid," he said.
Redistribution of land
"There isn't a single debate we lost when we were still in the ANC. If we resolve to contest the elections, rest assured that we will be a government in waiting … There are 30-million registered voters. Only 17-million voted. Where are the others? We will talk to them. There is going to be action everywhere. We will be among our people."
Malema said white South Africans were welcome to join the EFF for as long as they were prepared to support redistribution of land.
"Whites must be prepared to share the land. Who are we to say whites must be driven to the sea? The Freedom Charter says the land belongs to all who live in it but all of us must have something to share," Malema said to applause.
He has already met with a number of civil society organisations, including black consciousness activist Andile Mngxitama's radical September National Imbizo. Mngxitama said this week "their [the EFF's] positions on land and nationalisation are the same as ours. So, the affinity is clear."
The Imbizo has formally adopted a position document that moots a coalition with the EFF, but said that any engagement with Malema's group would be based on the acceptance of its people's manifesto.
Democratic reform
The manifesto is an Imbizo document that sets out the organisation's intentions, including changes to the South African political and parliamentary system, democratic reform, and demands that politicians and public servants use the same public services they legislate for the rest of the people and that members of Parliament aren't politicians but "revolutionaries".
"A rejection of the manifesto would expose the EFF as nothing but another ANC outside the ANC…" said the document.
The manifesto likens the EFF to the radical nationalism of Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe and his Zanu-PF and states that this is the main reason the organisation is engaging with the EFF.
The Imbizo is an urban movement operating mainly in the townships. Mngxitama said they were busy with an audit but that their members number in the thousands.
Malema has also met with the Congress of the People and revealed he was in talks with a number of Cosatu unions. However, he said that his party would not enter into a coalition with the Democratic Alliance.
"Our enemy number one is white monopoly capital, which is supported by the DA. We will never get into bed with the DA," said Malema.
Labels: ANC YOUTH LEAGUE, COPE, DEMOCRATIC ALLIANCE (SOUTH AFRICA), ECONOMIC FREEDOM FIGHTERS (SA), JULIUS MALEMA
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