EFF CONDEMNS CALLS FOR AN INQUEST ON WINNIE MANDELA

Friday, January 19, 2018

The EFF condemns the pseudo tribal chief, Mandla Mandela’s call that there be an inquest on mama Winnie Mandela to probe the death of Stompie Moeketsi and Abu-Baker Asvat. These two cases were not only settled by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, but mama Winnie Mandela has already paid the price for her presumed involvement. 

Mandla Mandela, with his heart buried in the muddy waters of vindictiveness, opportunistically seeks to further discredit Mama Mandela all in the empty hope of inheriting Mandela’s legacy instead of building his own. In his dark heart, he wishes to erase mama Mandela the same way the apartheid system sought to do. He wishes to dig her up so that he alone can claim Nelson Mandela. 

We would have him know that Winnie Mandela is a struggle veteran in her own right. She paid in torture, imprisonment, build, led and inspired an underground movement which brought the apartheid regime to its knees in the 1980s. She became the face of a movement, not only as a matriarch who rejected false peace; she, like Laila Khalid  affirmed the right of black people to resist in violence. She did this, not from comfortable offices in London. She was in the trenches, fighting the boers with stone as did the masses of our people. 

Mandla Mandela represents that misogynist patriarchal rejection of the caliber of leadership Winnie Mandela became. In essence, Winnie Mandela did not become a wife; known because of her association to Nelson Mandela. She became Winnie Mandela, the woman who when Nelson Mandela and the ANC had been almost a mere memory in generations of the 1970s, she picked up the spear and breathed life to them until their return. 

Many would have wanted Winnie Mandela not to blow up into a leader in her own right. Many, like Mandla Mandela, wanted her to stay in the victimhood wife position, so that her political existence depends on the man, Mandela. 

Mandla Mandela hates her for this reason. He hold the same interests as those who even after the release of Mandela, sought to ensure that they divorce so that Mandela can loose the radical advices and accountability that he would get from a partner like Winnie Mandela. 

That is why Mandla Mandela would prepared to accept and forget what apartheid leaders did. In his small plastic soul, he does not see the need for any inquest for what apartheid leaders did. He want Mama Mandela to sit in yet another inquest in her old age and in his view, she must pay forever ever. 

Yet, Mandla Mandela would be willing to fraternise with De Klerk and still insist that society must see Winnie Mandela as an evil that must be eradicated in the memory of heroes of our people.

We reject Mandla Mandela as an aberration; a perfect fork in the hands of evil, turning and cooking the fires of hatred and vindictiveness. But he will never succeed because Winnie Mandela will always be the hero of our people. She has gone through the worst, and in her powerful towering international stature, Mandla Mandela is a mere spit of an insect.

Mandla Mandela is currently a Member of Parliament in South Africa not because of his own credentials, activism and political contributions to the organisation that deployed him, but because he was done a favour due to his surname. He will not be allowed to tarnish the image of true Freedom Fighters like Mama Winnie Mandela because of his personal quest for riches he wishes to inherit from Nelson Mandela’s Estate. 

Finally, let’s remember that his life’s ambition growing up was to be a DJ. But due to biology, he got more that what he bargained for. All the things he has, he never worked for, because he got them from being born a Mandela. Now they have gone to his minute head and rendered his soul to the smokes of empty arrogance; soon he will choke, because pride comes before fall.

Statement issued by the Economic Freedom Fighters, 19 January 2018