WATCH: ‘We don’t need their validation’ – Malema on the front foot ahead of municipal elections

As South Africa prepares for local government elections later this year in the midst of a pandemic, Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) leader Julius Malema was trending on Twitter on Wednesday with a video highlighting his party’s undeterred spirit to influence the country’s political landscape.

In archive footage shared on the party’s Twitter page, Malema said the EFF when it demanded that former president Jacob Zuma “pay back the money’’ spent on his Nkandla home, a lot of people said the party was embarrassing and behaved like hooligans.

But since the party’s formation in July 2013, Malema said the EFF had shown itself to be a force to be reckoned with. The party had grown to become the country’s third-largest party and garnered a seized amount of votes in the last local government elections, which propelled it to the status of “kingmaker” in hung municipalities in Johannesburg, Tshwane and Nelson Mandela Bay.

ALSO READ: Parties divided over motion to postpone elections

“A revolutionary is always ahead of its time. They will join us later like they did when we said ‘pay back the money’. They said, ‘this is so embarrassing, these are hooligans, we’ve never seen anything like that’,” the EFF leader said in the 33-second clip.

“Later on, that’s the language they were speaking in their houses when they speak to their husbands and wives, ‘pay back the money’. A language they rejected and said it’s a language of thugs and hooligans and all of that.

“We don’t need their validation,” Malema said.

We don’t need anyone’s validation.

A Revolutionary is always ahead of its time. We must accept that others will always join us later.

Politics require activists, thinkers, and individuals who speak truth to power without seeking any validation. That’s what EFF is. #EFFmustRise pic.twitter.com/l527ErA89K

— Economic Freedom Fighters (@EFFSouthAfrica) January 27, 2021

Earlier this month, the EFF called for the local government elections to be postponed due to the number of Covid-19 infections in the country.

Malema said the pandemic had made it impossible for political parties to campaign and engage their constituencies. But this has been rejected by other political parties.

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