Julius Malema. File photo M&G
Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) leader Julius Malema on Tuesday responded to a tongue-lashing by President Cyril Ramaphosa in parliament by saying politics is no place for the thin-skinned and redoubling his claim that the head of state had sold out mineworkers.
Malema, in his reply to the president’s budget vote speech, told Ramaphosa his defence on Monday of his record as leader of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) was myth-making, given the dire conditions the sector’s labour force still endured.
“Mineworkers continue to be the most underpaid workers in South Africa,” Maleme said.
“Compared to the amount of wealth they continue to extract from beneath our soil, mine workers continue to stay in horrible conditions … mineworkers continue to perish in occupational accidents.
“If the history and fiction that you tell about the NUM and mineworkers is anything to believe, why are mine workers still trapped in the condition they find themselves in?” Malema asked.
He returned to the Marikana massacre of 34 miners to repeat his claim that Ramaphosa was complicit in their death because, as a non-executive director of Lonmin at the time, he termed their conduct in a wage strike criminal and called for “concomitant action”.
“You did not take the side of the workers. You called for concomitant action and the workers were massacred by the ANC government in Marikana,” Malema charged.
“If you formed the union for these workers, why are the conditions remaining the way they are? The union was formed to suppress those workers.”
In the debate last week on Ramaphosa’s first opening of parliament address as head of a coalition government, Malema repeated a claim that he 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 Ramaphosa became a founding leader of NUM in 1982 “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,” he said.
In his reply to the debate on Monday, Ramaphosa said Malema needed a history lesson and asked rhetorically where the 43-year-old politician was at the height of the struggle against apartheid.
In unscripted remarks delivered in four languages, he warned Malema to “play the ball, not the man” in political debate.
But on Tuesday Malema retorted that his remarks were in fair play because in politics character counted for much.
“I want to state it very clearly that, President, we respect each other and will continue to engage each other robustly,” he said.
“Secondly, parliament and political work in general, is not for the soft-skinned who will use all languages to complain whenever we give fair but robust and direct characterisation of their political conduct.
“You can never play the ball without also understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the player.”
He said the EFF accepted political criticism, even when it came from the side of “amateurs” in the ANC’s ranks.
“We are not cry babies, we fight because we are fighters.”
Malema has in both debates in recent days led the personal attack on Ramaphosa, rather than John Hlophe, the parliamentary leader of the official opposition uMkhonto weSizwe party. The EFF and the MK party last week formalised their opposition alliance and have been branded a populist menace by Ramaphosa and members of the ruling coalition.