"Zuma should condemn Mugabe-style ANCYL rhetoric"
ANC President Jacob Zuma should condemn the Mugabe-style rhetoric used by ANC Youth League President Julius Malema in the strongest terms.
Malema's statement that the youth is "prepared to die for Zuma" and prepared to "take up arms and kill" to ensure that Zuma becomes the next President of South Africa amounts to gross abuse of an important commemoration such as June 16.
Zuma has shown the courage to stand up and criticise the lack of discipline within the ANCYL, saying that the ANC would not be made "a haven for hooligans and criminals".
As ANC President, Zuma should now show the courage to follow through and act against Malema for his June 16 statements, as they were very clearly intended to incite violence and criminal activity in the event that Zuma does not become the President of South Africa after the next election.
This type of rhetoric does nothing to advance the cause of the youth, who need jobs to be created, proper access to HIV/AIDS treatment to be promoted, poverty alleviation to be addressed and the scourge of drug abuse to be excised from their communities.
These are the causes that Malema should have addressed on June 16th, both in the interest of our youth and in the interests of our democracy.
Instead he abused the public platform that he was afforded for little else than to advance the selfish personal and party-political interests of the ruling elite within the undisciplined and patently undemocratic ANCYL.
If Zuma is willing to stand up and criticise the lack of discipline within the ANCYL in the interests of the ANC, but fails to criticise the undemocratic and inflammatory positions of ANCYL in the interests of the country, it will only show that he condones this type of undemocratic behaviour when his own political ambitions are being favoured.
Malema's language goes against the very essence of what our democracy is supposed to be: an open and free society in which the will of the people shall be respected, in which the law is left to take its course and in which the institutions of state are left to do their work without fear or favour.
Jacob Zuma needs to acknowledge this and denounce Malema's comments in public immediately.
Statement issued by Democratic Alliance parliamentary leader, Sandra Botha MP, June 17 2008
