The president told the EFF leader that "respect" would take the country forward. (Photo: by PresidencyZA)
President Cyril Ramaphosa on Monday rebuked Economic Freedom Fighters’ (EFF) Julius Malema for suggesting he sold out during the liberation struggle, and said the party’s leader needs a history lesson.
Ramaphosa, as he concluded his reply to the debate on his opening address to parliament, also told Malema to learn to play the ball, not the man in political discourse.
“Now you spent a considerable amount of time playing me, the man. What is important in building this country, is to play the ball of development,” he said.
Malema on Friday repeated an allegation that Ramaphosa was “insulated from any form of arrest or harassment by the apartheid system” while his comrades in the ANC were in exile or in prison.
Malema went on to ask how he became the founding leader of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) “without being a mineworker” and how he came to play a central role in the negotiations in which apartheid was dismantled to make way for democracy.
“It now explains as to why so many compromises and capitulations were made, leading to a situation where economic power remained in the hands of the white minority,” Malema said.
Jacob Zuma, the leader of the new official opposition uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) party, has said apartheid “could not have lasted even one day without black collaborators like Ramaphosa”.
The EFF and the MK party last week said they formalised their alliance. The two parties were left out of Ramaphosa’s broad coalition government, and have characterised it as a regressive pact with the Democratic Alliance.
Ramaphosa was twice detained in the 1970s.
On Monday, he urged Malema to read about the mineworkers’ movement and speak to those who lived through the strikes in the 1980s that brought the sector to a standstill.
“I would like to speak to many members of the NUM, who on the second of December 1982 got together to form the National Union of Mineworkers, and as they formed that union, they said we are building a shield and a spear that is going to improve the lives of mineworkers, and they did exactly that,” Ramaphosa said.
“Five years after formation they embarked on a 21-day strike, and stopped the entire mining industry in this country — and you call that a sell-out position.”
He then, in Afrikaans, asked Malema, who was born in 1981, where he was in the struggle.
“Waar was jy?”
The EFF benches responded by shouting “Marikana”, a reference to an email Ramaphosa sent as a non-executive director of mining Lonmin urging “concomitant action” to address a wildcat strike, days before 34 miners were shot by the police.
Ramaphosa switched to Sepedi to say he would like to instruct Malema about the political past.
“You and I need to find time to sit together and discuss politics, especially the politics of days gone by, which I have not realised you do not understand very well. I can see that you are blind to the politics of the past,” he said.
“You know you stood here some two years ago and swore at me, and you swore at my father as well, using the fact that my father was a policeman as an insult. And yes, I am proud to have been the son of a policeman, a very good policeman.”
Switching to Tshivenda, he added: “When we show each other respect, this will be one of the things that take our nation forward. What you said here will not take the country forward.”
His response to Malema was not part of his prepared speech, in which he said parties in the ruling coalition had an appreciation that they must transcend politics to work together to grow the economy, create jobs and combat poverty.
“The unity that we are forging will be our courage and it will be our greatest strength. It is time to get South Africa working again,” the president said.
“We must demonstrate in word and deed that this is an era of a government of national unity and not a fleeting convenience.”
Ramaphosa returned to his analogy of a collective of weaver birds rebuilding South Africa he used in his speech last Thursday.
“We need weavers, not vultures,” he said.