STAFF REPORTER
ANC YOUTH League president Julius Malema has praised former president Thabo Mbeki’s intellect and for making it possible for the ANC to get a two-thirds majority in elections.
Malema, who was instrumental in Mbeki’s removal from power, said the former president had made two mistakes. He had been intolerant of others’ views and had pursued a third term as ANC president.
“Other than that, president Mbeki was one of the best cadres we produced as the movement of the ANC,” Malema said to a cheering crowd in Polokwane yesterday.
He said whites hated Mbeki passionately because they saw him as an Africanist. “Even when they did not vote for president Mbeki, we got a two-thirds majority under him without their vote, so what are you talking about?”
The jibe was an indirect attack on ANC secretary- general Gwede Mantashe, who blamed Malema for chasing away white voters in last month’s municipal elections.
Malema was addressing a youth league provincial general council meeting.
He said most whites had supported apartheid and still yearned for it.
“Those who suffer from myopic politics, they come and say, ‘Julius drove away the white voters’,” he said.
Malema claimed senior ANC leaders were out to destroy him. These leaders had held “high-level meetings”, planning to disrupt the league’s conference later this month in Midrand.
“Painful as it is that those that we have supported, those that we have committed our lives to defend, those that we sang songs about, today they can sit proudly and plot our downfall and the disruption of our congress,” said Malema.
The Sunday Independent reported yesterday that President Jacob Zuma supported Lebogang Maile’s bid to unseat Malema as league president.
Yesterday, the league’s Limpopo branch endorsed Malema’s second-term bid.
Malema said ANC members should never be allowed to impose their preferred youth leaders on the league.
He told delegates that a Limpopo MEC was holding meetings with the Hawks and was helping the police unit in its bid to arrest his ally, Premier Cassel Mathale.
Mathale’s name has been linked to businessmen who do business with the state.
“There is an MEC who goes around having meetings with Hawks, saying: ‘Me (she) and Cassel must be arrested before the conference of the youth league’, and she has done that twice,” said Malema.