Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) leader Julius Malema told the South Gauteng High Court this week that it was not inconceivable that he might in future call for the killing of white South Africans.
Malema took the stand for two days this week in the hate speech case brought against him, one of his associates and his party by AfriForum.
Malema was reminded of his notorious 2016 Newcastle speech in which he said ‘we are not calling for the slaughter of white people, at least for now’. He said that he could not guarantee what other people would do, but when the question was focused on his own future conduct, he was keeping the option of calling for the slaughter of white people open.
When asked, ‘could it be’ that ‘you may very well call for the slaughter of white people?’ he said that ‘it could be me, yes’.
Asked if he could pledge never in future to call for the slaughter of white people, Malema said that this he could ‘do easily’, though declined to make any such pledge.
While responding to questions from AfriForum’s defence counsel, Advocate Mark Oppenheimer, Malema said: ‘I’m going to be president of this country, whether you would like it or not. And I will preside over the affairs of this country, including presiding over you. I think you must start adjusting to that reality. The sooner you do that, the less chest pains you’ll have when that reality comes.’
Though he was found guilty of hate speech on earlier occasion for chanting ‘shoot to kill, kill the boer’, and had since shifted to chanting ‘shoot to kill, kiss the boer’, the EFF leader told the court this week: ‘If I want to kill, if I want to sing, my lord, kill the boer kill the farmer, I will sing it.’
He also refused to condemn any supporter or member of the EFF who chanted ‘shoot to kill, kill the boer’.
Malema spoke of his ‘superior logic’ with regards to the EFF’s seven cardinal pillars, adding that ‘they are not changeable, they stay forever’.
When Oppenheimer put it to Malema that one of the EFF’s cardinal pillars, the execution of expropriation without compensation (EWC), was incompatible with another, the realisation of a growing economy, Malema replied that ‘you might be a lawyer and obsessed with the word evidence, but politics don’t work like that’.
He promised that the EFF would never change its EWC policy and that ‘the EFF will never do anything that is outside the Constitution’. Moreover, he twice said that ‘there is no danger’ of corruption under the EFF after 100% of land is nationalized.