EFF STATEMENT ON CHILD GRANT SUPPORT AND REPRODUCTION
15 April 2016
The EFF reiterates, in no equivocal terms, the statement made by the CIC Julius Malema that child grant support does not lead to irresponsible procreation amongst the poor, black people in particular. Whilst addressing a community meeting in Meadowlands, the CIC took time to explain that the perception that child grant support leads to black people making many babies was not true because black people have been making babies even when they did not have any child support grants.
The CIC explained that poor black people have been making babies even under a government that did not even care about them since colonial times. To say they are making babies in order to get access to the child support grant portrays our people as irresponsible and willing to use children to get access to money from the state.
This idea is also based on a long history of anti-black racism. It is consistent with colonial attitudes that portrayed black people as incapable of controlling their sexual desire, all they know is making babies. This attitude also portrays blacks as people who are defeated by sexual desire, which burns in uncontrollable levels, thus leading to make children en mass.
Making children is a good thing that must not be turned into taboo amongst the poor. The idea that the poor must not make children until they are able to get the money to support them is crude and makes making babies the reserve of the rich. If we were to sustain this logic, in a society where the rich are white and the blacks are poor, it means there will ultimately be more white people in this country than blacks.
The colonial society is premised on a deep desire to see native people reduced in numbers. In the Americas, as well as in in places like Australia and New Zealand, colonisers subjected the native populations into genocide so that they as colonisers are more in numbers. This is crucial because having built society on democratic values, those who rule the state will always be on the basis of the majority.
To ask our people not to have babies satisfies this colonial desire and serves as reverse black genocide. There is no relationship at all between child grant support and the increase of the black population except anti-black racism musqurading. We as EFF believe absolutely that children should not be the responsibility of individual families only, but the whole of society. The responsibility to create jobs, provide quality education, healthcare rests on society as a whole, not the single individual that makes babies.
The CIC explained that this is in no way a promotion of irresponsible fathers who desert their children and do not take care and form part of their lives. We must take care of each other as black people and make sure to procreate in order to reproduce ourselves and our ideas, against the colonial desire to see us being rendered into inexistence.
Statement issued by the Economic Freedom Fighters, 15 April 2016
