Johannesburg - EFF leader Julius Malema has called for a thorough inquiry into the Marikana massacre in 2012 that led to the death of 34 miners.
Speaking to The Star on the eve of his party’s 8th birthday, Malema said he wanted to ensure that the Marikana widows received the justice they deserved. He criticised the commission of inquiry into the Marikana massacre chaired by Judge Ian Farlam, saying that the outcome was a huge disappointment.
“(Judge) Farlam, wherever he is, must be ashamed of himself. I’m telling you if that inquiry is opened, (President Cyril) Ramaphosa will go straight to prison. There has been no accountability about Marikana, not from the police, not from anywhere,” Malema said.
“The Marikana matter was a serious miscarriage of justice. No minister was ever fired for that, no one has ever been arrested for that, yet life was lost. Imagine if 34 white people were shot and killed, that president would have been in the international crimes court,” the EFF leader said.
Malema said he believed that President Cyril Ramaphosa should take responsibility for the deaths that occurred at Marikana.
He also suggested that, with his imprisonment, former president Jacob Zuma was being harshly treated.
“Cyril is planting a wrong seed; Zuma is not a hardcore criminal. You can’t be treating him the way that he is being treated. We fought with Zuma, we finished, and we said ‘I’m done, I’m leaving.’ We don’t play the man, we play principle,” Malema said.
He said while the EFF did not back Zuma, the party would also not sit back when an injustice was done.
“These ones that are saying EFF are flip-floppers, they always change policies, there is no EFF issue called Zuma. We never changed our policies. We have seven non-negotiable pillars and supplementary pillars: the constitution and the founding manifesto of the EFF.
“From time to time, we have to kiss frogs to arrive at our destination. Zuma was not an agenda, he was just an irritation, and we said once that’s done, we are going to come back to the land (issue),” he said.
Malema said he was proud of the party’s achievements in the past few years. He said that since the party had arrived on the South African political landscape, black people had grown the courage to speak about economic freedom and issues of land that were still oppressing black people.
He said the party would now chart the realisation of economic freedom for the majority of South Africans, and the next step in that mission was democratically removing the ANC president from the Union Buildings.
“We are now led by an illegitimate president. The racists because they know that he is their product from the 70s … we see the arrogance of racists because they know they have their own in power,” Malema said.
He said he was shocked that the army had been ordered by the state to search for stolen food and some essential goods that looters had taken during the recent unrest. He said this showed that the president was out of touch with the inequality in his own country.
“How do you undermine the army like that to go look for tinned stuff and mealie meal, the military that takes sanitary pads from our young girls? You belittle the military and send them to people who are weak,” he said.