The scramble for former ANC president Jacob Zuma’s vote is on ahead of the 2024 national and provincial elections.
EFF leader Julius Malema told Sunday World Engage this week that although he might have failed to convince Zuma to join the EFF, his next strategy was to have the old man backing the red berets towards the hotly contested polls.
Malema’s remarks come at a time when Zuma’s own party, the ANC, is hard at work trying to bring him on board in its campaign for the all-important elections.
Zuma led the ANC for two terms as its president and was the boss at the Union Buildings for nine years before being recalled.
He is considered to have a sizeable influence, especially in his home province of KwaZulu-Natal, where the governing party battles an IFP’s resurgence.
Malema said he was working day and night to clinch Zuma’s endorsement of the EFF. He said their previous fallout when he was the president was never personal.
“We continue to engage with president Zuma. My intentions are that even if I do not get him to join the EFF, I want him to endorse the EFF because any other thing will not be consistent with what he stood for and what he represented,” he said.
“We disagreed with president Zuma like we would do with anyone, but it was on principle issues, and it must never be personal.”
According to Malema, it was in fact the ANC national chair, Gwede Mantashe – then the party’s secretary general –who caused a rift between him and Zuma.
The fallout was apparently premised on the ANC Youth League, which Malema led at the time, lobbying for Fikile Mbalula to be elected as secretary-general at the ANC national congress in 2012.
The lobby pitted Mantashe against Mbalula, who was eventually elected the party’s secretary general at last year’s national conference.
“The fallout was that we pronounced that Mbalula must be the secretary general, and then Gwede said, ‘If you fight me, I am going to chase you to the river’.
“And then he went to mobilise president Zuma against us, telling him, ‘They actually want to remove you; they do not want to remove me’,” Malema said.
He said that he then took a trip with Mbalula to see Zuma at his house in eThekwini during the funeral of a provincial leader.
“We said, ‘we see that there is hostility and animosity among us, and we do not know where this thing comes from’.
“And he said ‘it is very clear that you comrades are fighting me’, and we told him ‘we are not fighting you, but we are just not convinced that Gwede is the right person to lead the ANC’.”
Malema charged that Mantashe managed to get Zuma paranoid and that they were out for his blood. This did not surprise Malema, who believes that the ANC leaders with Cosatu and SACP ties operate like that when they want to take out an opponent.
Malema believes Mantashe deliberately misled Zuma to create animosity towards him, Mbalula and their lobby.
“President Zuma did not hear us, and remember that Gwede had the support of Cosatu and the Communist Party.
“So, they all ganged up against us and won president Zuma over, misled him, and that is what led to the deterioration of my relationship with Zuma. It was Gwede who is a factionalist of note.” Mantashe saidMalema’s claims could not be further from the truth. “He is telling lies,” said Mantashe.
Malema said it was a longstanding culture within the ranks of SACP leaders to thrive on conspiracies to get ahead.
A case in point was the rise of the SACP national chairperson and Minister of Higher Education Blame Nzimande, whom he insists has nothing to offer but managed to survive through scheming.
“If you were to ask, politically, socially and otherwise, what is Blade’s contribution to South African society? It’s nothing except political manoeuvering, conspiring and outmaneuvering others, and that has been the role of the communist party.”
He continued: “You do not know of kids that get taken to school by Blade Nzimande. You do not know of the poor who got houses from Blade Nzimande. You do not know of any charitable social programme that Blade Nzimande leads in society.”
He said Nzimande’s political nature was paraded only when he took a platform to denounce a certain leader in favour of another because he used that leader as a stepladder to survive politically.
“Gwede comes from that school. That is what [they did] to president Zuma. He listened to the wrong people,” Malema said.
Follow @SundayWorldZA on Twitter and @sundayworldza on Instagram, or like our Facebook Page, Sunday World, by clicking here for the latest breaking news in South Africa.
