Trollip can ‘work with gangsters’ but we will eventually get rid of him – Malema

While EFF leader Julius Malema on Wednesday addressed a rally in Nelson Mandela Bay ahead of his party’s motion of no confidence against the DA’s mayor Athol Trollip, he hit back at criticism of the EFF and indications that the motion is likely to fail.

Intermittently switching from defence to attack, Malema explained that his motion against Trollip remained a punishment of the DA for voting against land expropriation without compensation in parliament. He said that Trollip’s whiteness was the obvious target to show the EFF’s policy consistency, as land expropriation without compensation had always been a cardinal pillar of the party, against the status quo of white people wishing to cling to the private ownership of land that he alleges was stolen from black people.

He hit out at the media, which he claimed has now been attacking him because of the party’s reinvigorated stance on radical leftist politics, particularly land expropriation and nationalisation.

The land “is the big issue. I will only stop talking about the land when I’ve been silenced forever. But you can’t silence the idea.”

He took strong issue with the label of “fascism” that has recently been associated with his party. He distanced the ANC from any comparison to European fascist organisations and instead outlined the successes of his party in upholding constitutional democracy and making former president Jacob Zuma repay state funds spent on his homestead at Nkandla.

Malema denied that he has secretly been in the pockets of white businessmen and declared he’d never taken any money from white monopoly capital, unlike most other major politicians in South Africa.

Following news that the Patriotic Alliance will support Trollip in tomorrow’s motion, Malema said that Trollip could work “with gangsters and all that”, but that if this first motion failed they would “come back until we collapse him and teach him a lesson. We are going for him. We have taken a decision, and there’s no doubt about it.” He vowed that Trollip would not finish his term, which ends in 2021.

“Today, the day after. Whatever he wants to do in that municipality, he is alone. Until they [the DA] come to us and tell us how are we getting our land back.”

He accused Trollip of failing the poor, particularly cutting the electricity of poor households, with a R300 connection fee.

Despite Trollip promising to eradicate the bucket system, Malema said the system remained and that any improvements in Nelson Mandela Bay had been in “white areas”.

Malema encouraged his followers to behave peacefully regardless of the outcome of tomorrow’s vote.

He accused the ANC of not having been able to find a clean leader of the calibre of Mcebisi Jonas to nominate as the new mayor.

“We have exposed the ‘new dawn’ as an ‘old dawn’ … not even in a new bottle of Dawn lotion, it’s actually in an old Dawn bottle. There is nothing new about Cyril Ramaphosa; there’s nothing new about the ANC.”

He charged that they struggled to find someone in their party who is free of corruption.

He revealed that the ANC had “begged him” to return Johannesburg to them, while they were less capable of taking over Port Elizabeth and Tshwane because “there is no coherent ANC in Port Elizabeth and Tshwane”.

Malema alleged that Ramaphosa is thinking of bringing elections earlier to capitalise on his apparent current popularity.

“But he can bring them. We are ready.”

He said the white-owned media had created the false impression that Ramaphosa was popular, but Zuma is actually far more popular among people on the ground.