In recent months, South Africans have once again seen how supremacist ideology based on racial identity threatens the unity of a nation that aspires to be a non-racial society.
Since its formation, the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) have attempted to sow racial division within South Africa.
After a controversial Clicks advertisement which supposedly discriminated against people on the grounds of their hair was aired on social media, Julius Malema ordered his ‘fellow fighters and ground forces to attack’ those who were responsible for this advertisement. This mob mentality led to protests at Clicks stores across the country, often attended by violence or threats of violence, which had the effect of endangering the very livelihoods the EFF claims to fight for.
When a young farm worker was brutally murdered in the Free State, the EFF once again pounced on the opportunity to racialise the issue of farm murders. Supporters of the party descended on the Free State town of Senekal, supposedly to protect state buildings and democracy, where its leader used the opportunity only to stir racial tensions.
More recently, EFF members clashed with parents who, as they saw it, were protecting learners at a Brackenfell high school.
The EFF claimed it the apparent exclusion of black pupils from a private function amounted to racism. Once again, the EFF was bent on racialising the situation.
Widespread poverty
These few instances are enough to hint at the kind of South Africa radical EFF leaders want to create. Those who incite violence and seek to fuel racial tensions, while blaming rampant corruption and widespread poverty on a minority of the population, are a threat to the country.
At an EFF rally, Julius Malema went as far as saying the throat of whiteness should be cut. Such statements border on promoting the idea of genocide.
It should therefore have come as no surprise that the Democratic Alliance likened the EFF to the Nazis in a recent twitter post:
“The Nazi’s had the brown shirts that went around terrorising minorities. South Africa has the red shirts.”
Indeed, just as the Nazis blamed Germany’s economic, social, and political ills on the Jewish minority, so the EFF has chosen to blame the white minority in South Africa for the state of the nation.
The EFF’s race-baiting theatrics prompted police action in Brackenfell which led to Commander-in-Chief Malema directly threatening members of the South African Police Service and their families.
Incitement of violence
This direct incitement of violence against a critical democratic institution should have been met with immediate legal consequences for Julius Malema. Instead, Minister of Police Bheki Cele merely scolded the child his party, the ANC, gave birth to.
What is clear is that the far-left ideological position on which Malema has established himself is founded on sowing division at a time when South Africa’s economic and political climate makes the country particularly susceptible to repeating its historical mistakes.
The views of the writers are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
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