EFF STATEMENT ON SHARPEVILLE/LANGA DAY

21 March 2017

The Economic Freedom Fighters commemorates Sharpeville/Langa Massacre. EFF notes the impact this day in the year 1960 had on the liberation of Black people in South Africa and international community for the demise of the murderous apartheid regime. 

The Sharpeville Massacre which ended in the loss of 69 lives in Sharpeville was a demonstration of the importance of human dignity. It highlighted the dehumanization of Black people and their land dispossession. The lives of 69 people in Sharpeville, 3 in Langa  and 26 in Uitenhage in 1985 on the same day ended in the hands of police brutality; a reality that still echoes in South Africa 22 years into democracy. Resisting and rejecting the Pass Laws was central to the very question of land and that apartheid ensured that they treated natives of this country like foreigners in the land of their birth and ancestors. 

This day is an assertion that until there is justice and equality in relation to land, until the dignity of Black people is restored through access to land, any Human Rights attained are incomplete. 

This is because there can be no human right with no land. All Human Rights are unsustainable without the right to land. They all exist in a time boom because the majority of our people have to claim to this land. 

In memory of the marches that took place in Sharpeville and Langa, we reiterate that land must be expropriated without compensation for equal redistribution. Increasingly, our people will ask what good is the right to vote without land? What good is freedom of movement, assembly and expression without the land? Above all, they will ask what good is the right to life without the land because without the land we are condemned to live on our knees, without the dignity of identity and economic freedom. 

We commemorate this day with the realization that until land dispossession of Black people is addressed, all Human Rights are incomplete. 

Increasingly, the post-1994 democratic government is also becoming like apartheid in its disrespect of human life. The commemoration of Sharpeville Day must remind us of Marikana in 2012 where the ANC government killed 34 workers in cold blood. It must remind of the the death of more than 100 mentally ill patients who died in the hands of the ANC government in Gauteng due to negligence, corruption and disregard of human life. The ANC has no claim to observe Sharpeville Day and claim a moral high ground in relation to apartheid. This is because it too, has become to black people, what apartheid was to black people; a murderous regime. 

Statement issued by the Economic Freedom Fighters, 21 March 2017