Forty-eight parties will appear on South Africa’s national ballot on Wednesday, 19 more than those registered in 2014.
At a packed Orlando Stadium, the far-left Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) wrapped up a weekend of mass rallies by the three main political parties ahead of crucial general elections on Wednesday.
The EFF’s firebrand leader, Julius Malema, reeled off a list of the ruling African National Congress’s (ANC) perceived failures on Sunday – on everything from education to land redistribution – to a rapt audience, encouraging his party’s followers to “vote for the hope of the hopeless masses”
at the polls.
Malema also repeated his previous controversial campaign promises to nationalise South Africa’s mines and banks.
Other EFF leaders who joined Malema on stage repeated the party’s familiar refrain of “Our land, our jobs”, a slogan that highlights two of the most prominent challenges faced by the country voted the most unequal in the world by the World Bank in 2018.
South Africa’s unemployment rate currently sits at about 27 percent, while private land ownership is skewed to 72 percent in the hands of whites, who comprise less than 10 percent of the population.
Malema also condemned xenophobia after a spate of attacks, predominantly on African and Asian foreign nationals, in recent months against a backdrop of rising anti-immigrant rhetoric by leaders within both the Democratic Alliance (DA) and the ANC.
Following weeks of protests and shutdowns in under-served townships and informal settlements across South Africa, Mandisa Mashego, the EFF’s provincial chairperson in Gauteng, which incorporates Johannesburg, alleged there is “massive disillusionment with the ANC”.
