NEWS & ANALYSIS

Captains of industry starting to take EFF seriously – Malema

EFF leader says companies now realise ANC has been misleading them

Captains of industry starting to take EFF seriously – Malema

7 December 2015

Cape Town – The EFF has the “busiest office” because companies are starting to take its goal of economic freedom seriously, its leader Julius Malema said on Monday in a Radio 702 interview.

"For the first time, arrogant captains of industry are prepared to talk to a party that is not in power."

He said the party's recent well-attended march to the Chamber of Mines and the Johannesburg Stock Exchange in Sandton had brought about "very good results".

Corporates regularly arrived at the Economic Freedom Fighters' office to make presentations on how they were transferring shares to workers and adopting schools, he said.

"The ANC called us clowns. The ANC said they [the EFF] shouldn’t be taken seriously, there is nothing they can do. The captains of industry realise the ANC has been misleading them… results are coming and people will be very thankful of such an intervention."

Malema told Radio 702 that the EFF remained intent on occupying Absa Bank branches.

"We are not the youth of the ANC anymore and the ANC can’t tell us what to do.

"I see them occupying platforms and say Malema must apologise, Malema must do this. These clowns think they can tell me what to do when they couldn’t tell me what to do when I was [one of] them? I defied them. I never listen to cowards."

The EFF leader recently came under fire for saying that a collective of the ANC, including late former president Nelson Mandela, had compromised on the promises of the Freedom Charter.

He told the radio station that this didn’t make Mandela "an evil person".

"He ushered in a political freedom, which we appreciate and enjoy today, but we are saying he could have done more."

In a statement on Sunday, the ANC parliamentary caucus said Madiba’s legacy "does not need to be defended. It speaks for itself".

It referred to the EFF as "genetically modified revolutionaries" which had attained an "unprecedented level of political infantilism and ignorance".

This article first appeared on News24 – see here