Johannesburg - The African National Congress is on a downward spiral ideologically, politically and morally, expelled ANC Youth League leader Julius Malema said on Monday.
It was no longer committed to the freedom charter, he wrote in an open letter to Thami ka Plaatjie.
Malema was responding to Ka Plaatjie's open letter to him, which was published in the Sunday Independent newspaper.
He accused the ANC under President Jacob Zuma of demoting South Africa to a government of thieves which used selective prosecutions and secrecy to hide its looting of the resources which should better the people's lives.
He claimed it was an association of careerists and neo-liberal bureaucrats whose sole mission and role was protecting the interests of white monopoly capital.
Malema announced last week his intention to establish a new political platform called the Economic Freedom Fighters.
In his letter, Ka Plaatjie wrote that Malema would be sealing his doom if he established a party out of anger and frustration.
The former Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) secretary general left the party in 2009 to found the Pan Africanist Movement, and resigned from it to join the ANC in May 2011. He is now an adviser to Public Service and Administration Minister Lindiwe Sisulu.
“You are aggrieved because you have lost property and have suffered public humiliation for what you regard as your beliefs. Are these the ranks that you wish to abandon and curse?” Ka Plaatjie asked Malema in his letter.
“My counsel to you, son of Africa, is to stay within the ranks of the glorious movement, lick your wounds, regain your resolve, up your chin and submit to organisational discipline and fate will be the best arbiter.”
He said Malema had little chance of taking on the ANC and winning.
In his response, Malema wrote that this advice did not make sense, as he was not a member of the ANC.
He also believed that in the ANC, under Zuma, tribalism, regionalism, and factionalism would be entrenched to marginalise all radical economic perspectives.
He also said his Economic Freedom Fighters platform was not an ANC breakaway.
Instead, it consisted of revolutionaries who, “having realised suppression of radical economic thoughts and policy direction in the ANC, have chosen to establish an independent platform to gain mass power, political power, the state and then transform the economy for the benefit of all South Africans”.
Malema said that, to him and his followers, politics was not a profession for obsession with upward mobility at the expense of principle.
He said he had urged that the struggle for economic freedom in his lifetime be intensified long before charges were brought against him, and had known he and his followers could face banishment, criminalisation and threats to their lives because this would directly challenge white monopoly capital.
However, he had refused to back down, even in the face of the disciplinary action which resulted in his expulsion, because he believed the struggle was genuine.
He believed the struggle should be extended to Botswana, Namibia, Malawi, Angola, Mozambique, Angola, Lesotho, Swaziland, the rest of the African continent, and intensified in Zimbabwe.
Malema said the ANC was not the alpha and omega of revolutionary politics in South Africa and that many major political events had transpired without its involvement.
To think it was only the ANC under Zuma which would carry the struggle forward was “foolishness”, he said. - Sapa