Those leaving the ANC to join the breakaway Congress of the People movement are a disappointment, not only to themselves but to their wives and families, ANC Youth League president Julius Malema said on Thursday.
These people, who did not want ANC leader Jacob Zuma as president of South Africa, would have cause to respect the youth in the country, Malema told a huge crowd of ANC volunteers in Kimberley.
The youth would march to the Union Buildings with Zuma when he became president in 2009, Malema told the gathering.
The youth would ensure that their legacy would be a proud legacy, he said.
The ANCYL president, to loud cheers, criticised those leaving the ANC for other parties.
The councillors who had resigned from the ANC should know that they had now ”invited poverty at home”.
”Today they are unemployed and they will know what it means to be unemployed.”
Malema also turned on ANC officials still within the party suspected of sympathy with the new movement.
”If the premier wants to go, you are welcome comrade premier to also leave the African National Congress.”
It was not clear whether he was referring to Northern Cape premier Dipuo Peters, who was sharing the podium with Malema.
Malema also referred to the Northern Cape ”MEC [provincial minister] of education or whatever” and said ”you must go”.
All recent resignations from the ANC would be ”headlines for the day” but the next day, United States president-elect Barack Obama and ANC president Zuma and other important matters would make headlines.
Malema said the youth league had no regrets being associated with Zuma and with making him the president of the ANC.
The youth also had no regrets in having Zuma as the face of the ANC’s 2009 election campaign.
”We have no regrets, none whatsoever, to march with you to the Union Buildings come 2009.”
Malema told Zuma, who also addressed the crowd, that the youth were becoming impatient.
”This lot of noise by these shenanigans, the mickey-mouse organisation, makes us to want to go now to elections so that the ANC could teach them a lesson.”
The leaders of the new political movement would soon found out that they were only popular among the media’s editors and journalists, said Malema. – Sapa