Western Cape EFF members were told by their leader, Julius Malema, to “follow up" and deal with racist white people.
Malema told a cheering crowd in Cape Town gathered for the party’s elective conference, that racism was violence and should be responded to with violence.
"Why, as revolutionaries, have you not taken that guy to an isolated space and attended to him? What kind of revolutionaries can be beaten by a white man and then fold their arms?“ Malema asked.
He said he would be embroiled in another court case if he were to be beaten by a white man.
“Because no white man is going to beat me up and I call myself a revolutionary. You must never be scared to kill. The revolution demands that at some point there must be killing because the killing is part of the revolution,” he said.
Malema is fresh from a lengthy assault case in which he and EFF MP Mbuyiseni Ndlozi were accused of assaulting a police officer at Winnie Mandela’s funeral in 2018. The pair were acquitted in September.
Last month the Equality Court also ruled that the EFF’s “kill the boer” song did not amount to hate speech.
Malema said, upon landing at the Cape Town International Airport, he had been greeted by shacks and poverty until he drove into town and the environment changed completely.
“If you want to know about racism, come to the Cape Metro. Our people live like animals in the Western Cape, yet we are told it’s the best-run province under the DA. That’s true, but it is well-run only for white people,” Malema said.
He said the inequality in the province was the reason some political parties called for the Western Cape to be classified as an “independent state”.
Malema said this would not happen. “The Western Cape is South Africa and South Africa is the Western Cape,” he said.
He asked delegates why landless people had not yet occupied prime land in Stellenbosch and Camps Bay.
“We must go to the prime land, not the rotten land. Has there ever been an identification of land in Camps Bay?“
Delegates were asked why they had not attracted landless, unemployed people, including white women who are housewives, to join the EFF.
During the conference a new leadership structure was elected.
Unathi Ntame was elected chairperson, Thembalethu Klaas as deputy chairperson, Mbulelo Magwala as secretary, Thozama Mangcayi as deputy secretary while Aisha Cassim was elected as treasurer.
The collective was elected unopposed after other candidates failed to meet the threshold.
Newly elected secretary Magwala said the immediate plan was to prepare the EFF in the Western Cape for the elections in 2024.
“As a secretary of the province, mine is to get everyone in gear. All the structures need to be ready for 2024 but in line with the resolution of this conference,” Magwala said.
He said the conference would give them a roadmap towards reviving and strengthening the EFF in the Western Cape.
"We have always had a vision of building the Western Cape from the ground up and tackling the majority constituency in the Western Cape, which is the coloured population,“ he said.