South Africa: Potential Election Kingmaker Leads White Genocide Chant

Julius Malema, the left-wing radical leader of the third-largest South African political party, led a massive stadium crowd on Saturday in a vicious “liberation” chant of “Kill the Boer! Kill the farmer!” — in other words, an explicitly racist call for massive violence against the white population of South Africa.

The spectacle was all the more disturbing because the EFF is growing in political strength and could well play the kingmaker during next year’s elections.

Malema’s party, the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), was celebrating the tenth anniversary of its founding — and flexing its populist muscles as it prepares to displace the African National Congress (ANC) as the official opposition party in the Western Cape where the Democratic Alliance (DA) currently holds power.

According to the latest polls, the EFF will surge to 15 percent from its 2019 showing of four percent in the 2024 election, while the ANC will slide to 13 percent from 29 percent. Beating the ANC in the Western Cape would be a sobering demonstration of the EFF’s growing strength. The militant left-wing radical party might be some distance away from taking power nationwide, but after next year, it could become difficult for any South African coalition to win office without EFF support.

Malema, 42, is a former member of the ANC expelled for radicalism in 2012. Under Malema’s leadership, the ANC’s youth wing was instrumental in bringing former President Jacob Zuma to power in 2009 — but by 2012, he had soured on Zuma, denouncing him as a “dictator.”

Malema also wanted the ANC to help stage a coup in neighboring Botswana to overthrow the “puppet regime” of President Ian Khama. Botswana responded by announcing that Malema was the one and only citizen of South Africa who would have to apply for a visa before crossing the border.

The ANC asked Malema to tone down his revolutionary rhetoric, and when he refused, his party membership was suspended. He founded his own party in 2013, gleefully writing everything that made ANC leaders uncomfortable into the EFF manifesto.

The EFF is a hard-left party of “radicals” with an “anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist” agenda by its own description. Among other horrors, its agenda calls for nationalizing all of South Africa’s mines and banks and seizing the remaining white-owned farmland by force — hence the chant about killing “Boers” and “farmers.”

The EFF was never really a tiny fringe movement — it drew considerable support from disaffected ANC members as the economy deteriorated under President Cyril Ramaphosa, capturing six percent of the nationwide vote and 25 parliamentary seats in its very first election in 2014. The EFF was up to 44 seats in the National Assembly by 2019.

Malema seems worried he might lose control of the EFF, which styles itself as a paramilitary army clad in red berets. The party’s founder publicly claims to be proud that the EFF has become more popular and respected than him, but he has been putting on populist displays to boost his own popularity and solidify the party’s view of him as its heart and soul, culminating in the alarming murder dance he led on Saturday.

The rally also gave Malema an opportunity to blast Ramaphosa for bowing to international pressure and failing to guarantee Russian strongman Vladimir Putin safe passage to the BRICS summit in Johannesburg next month. 

South Africa is a signatory to the founding treaty of the International Criminal Court, which has issued a warrant for Putin’s arrest for war crimes in Ukraine. After several weeks of awkwardly seeking a loophole to avoid this responsibility, Ramaphosa punted by saying it would be a “declaration of war” against Russia if he arrested Putin and the Kremlin decided to take the pressure off him by announcing that Putin would not attend the BRICS summit in person.

Malema, an outspoken fan of Putin and his authoritarian regime, called on the other BRICS members (China, India, and Brazil) to boycott the Johannesburg summit to show “solidarity” with Putin.

“It is Ramaphosa, the coward Ramaphosa, who could not guarantee that we would not arrest Putin. We are Putin and Putin is us, and we will never support imperialism against President Putin,” Malema howled at the EFF rally on Saturday.

Malema’s critics have long painted him as a mediocrity who rose to power by peddling undiluted hatred to disaffected South Africans, especially young people. Politicians in the ANC and various opposition parties distanced themselves from his “Kill the farmers” rally on Saturday, describing it as a step too far. ANC leaders also fumed at Malema for attempting to force South Africa into an ironclad alliance with Russia, when most South African leaders would prefer to maintain good relations with both Russia and the Western world.

Christo van der Rheede, the outgoing CEO of South Africa’s AGRI SA farmers cooperative, condemned Malema’s rally in the “strongest terms.”

“What do you seek to achieve by continuing to chant these highly insensitive, divisive, spiteful and despicable words? All that you achieve is to whip up emotions and polarize our citizenry,” van der Rheede told Malema in an op-ed on Sunday.

“You are wrong if you think you will advance the cause of economic freedom through sloganeering and chanting. Instead, you will achieve the opposite which is more poverty, misery and hunger,” van der Rheede argued.

“It is the agricultural sector at large and all the other role-players that make the economy work for you, me and the rest of South Africa! Chanting slogans such as ‘Kill the Boer, farmer’ is childish at best and tantamount to political thuggery!” he declared.

Writing at South Africa’s News24 on Monday, columnist Adriaan Basson said it was time to start worrying about the swelling ranks of the EFF’s membership and not just its left-wing radical leader.

“Julius Malema is a dictatorial and criminally-accused leader of a party that worships fascism and Russian president Vladimir Putin, but why do thousands of South Africans still believe in him?” Basson asked.

“Let’s be honest: Very few political parties in South Africa, bar the ANC, would succeed in filling up the 94,000-seater FNB Stadium in Soweto,” he pointed out.

News24 noted that Major-General Feroz Khan, second-in-command for criminal intelligence at the South African Police Service (SAPS) and the man who would likely be in charge of thwarting an EFF murder spree, was a guest of honor at an EFF banquet last week.

Public Interest South Africa (PISA) conceded that Khan was not legally barred from attending the banquet, but his fraternization with “confessed criminals and political leaders currently under scrutiny by the criminal justice system” was a “slap in the face” to law-abiding South Africans who are “grappling with widespread crime.”

The Democratic Alliance (DA), South Africa’s second-largest party, on Monday denounced Malema for “inciting racial and ethnic division.” DA chief John Steenhuisen said his party will file charges against Malema at the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC).

Steenhuisen accused Malema of awakening the “demon of hatred” that has slumbered in South Africa since the end of apartheid. He blasted ANC leaders for not acting to rein Malema in sooner.

“With his incitement to commit mass murder on Saturday, Malema has confirmed the urgency of this warning. He is intent on igniting the civil war that so many South Africans worked and sacrificed to avert in 1994,” he said.

“For more than a decade, the South African state has utterly failed to use appropriate internal remedies to stop Malema. Time after time, institution after institution, has turned a blind eye to his incitement,” Steenhuisen complained.

“We saw this again just last week. Instead of dealing with Malema, senior law enforcement officials drank expensive champagne with him at a fundraiser. This is exactly why the time has come to turn to the global community,” he said, referring to the EFF banquet attended by Khan.

The South African government did make a few attempts to hold Malema accountable for hate speech. A complaint was filed with the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) after Malema said in 2016, “We are not calling for the slaughter of white people, at least for now.” The SAHRC ruled in 2019 that Malema’s ominous remark was not hate speech, but that ruling was set aside by the Johannesburg high court two weeks ago, on the grounds that SAHRC is “not empowered or authorized” to render such judgments. 

In the fall of 2022, SAHRC threatened to take Malema to court because he suggested taking a white person accused of assaulting a black high school student to “an isolated space” where EFF supporters could “attend to the guy properly.”

The commission also asked the EFF to tone down slogans on its posters, such as “The honeymoon is over for white people in South Africa” and “A revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate” (a Che Guevara quote). No firm action was taken after these warnings were issued.

In August 2022, the Equality Court in Johannesburg heard a complaint specifically about the “Kill the Boer, Kill the Farmer” chant that Malema sang on Saturday — and the court ruled the chant does not constitute “hate speech.”

“It articulates the failure of the current government to address issues of economic empowerment and land division,” Judge Edwin Molahlehi ruled, rejecting a motion from a civil rights group called Afriforum to order EFF to stop using the chant.

Judge Molahlehi said Afriforum did not make a convincing case for a hate speech ruling, even though the plaintiffs pointed out that white farmers have, in fact, been assaulted and killed for their land.