Sifuna’a Open Letter to Julius Malema
My attention has been drawn to comments by the leader of South Africa’s Economic Freedom Fighters Party, Comrade Julius Sello Malemama, asking Kenya’s Azimio Coalition and ODM Party Leader, H.E. Rt Hon Raila Odinga, to “stop the protests and stop disrupting Kenya,” adding that he would not “allow” Hon. Raila to “disrupt peace in Kenya.”
It is clear that Comrade Malema, watching Kenya from a distance, is not familiar with the delicate sociopolitical fault lines in our nation, and makes the faulty assumption that his approach in in fighting injustices in South Africa can be replicated here. If he was seized of the facts, he would know that Kenya is largely a dictatorship falsely basking in the sun of democracy, in which nearly all elections since 2007 have been fraudulent, and where the wrong president has been sworn in each time. It is a far cry from South Africa’s strong multiparty democracy, where we have witnessed the ruling party even recall presidents and end their terms when they no longer represented the aspirations of South Africans.
More importantly, Comrade Malema’s own EFF prides itself as a far-left movement for the economic emancipation of South Africans from decades of oppression. Logically, the EFF has more in common with our Azimio Coalition and/or the Orange Democratic Movement than with the current far-right and oppressive capitalistic regime in Kenya. Indeed, if Comrade Malema had bothered to look beyond the Kenya Kwanza regime propaganda, he would know that the recent protests in Kenya were against obscenely high taxes, rising cost of living and government refusal to listen to the people. I have no doubt that if Malema was Kenyan, his red army would have joined us in their numbers on the streets, similar to what they recently did in South Africa.
I draw Comrade Malema’s attention to the history of liberation in Africa, in which when the African National Congress fought the demonic apartheid regime, most of Africa, without equivocation, stood with the liberation heroes of the ANC. Today, neocoloniasm perpetuated by dictators, who were never in the liberation struggle, is ravaging Africa. It behoves modern-day liberation forces to speak with one voice against new apartheid and colonialism practiced by our own black rulers.
Comrade Malema enjoys the enviable luxury of living in a country where all post apartheid presidents have come from the ranks of liberators. Nelson Mandela, Thabo Mbeki, Jacob Zuma and Cyril Ramphosa are all inspirational figures in the freedom movement on our continent.
I am certain that if Comrade Malema lived in a nation perennially led by collaborators and former homeguards, thieves and liars, who not only steal elections at will, but routinely send police to shoot unarmed civilians in a re-enaction of South Africa’s own Sharpeville Massacre of 1960 or the Marikana Massacre of 2012, he would hold different views.
As the ODM Party SG, I extend an invitation to Comrade Malema to visit Kenya, so that I can personally take him on a tour of our country, so that he understands that we fight for the same things he does. In fact, Kenya’s own quest for a people-driven constitutional framework has always looked up to South Africa’s strong party foundations and structures to dilute our oppressive winner-take-all presidential system. We still have a lot to learn from them as they do from us. While at it, we acknowledge, as our founding fathers and liberation heroes did, that we will only achieve the true justice and freedom by fighting for it and not sitting on our laurels.
That is what Comrade Malema is doing in South Africa and that is what we are doing in Kenya.
Hon. Edwin W. Sifuna, MP Secretary General,
Orange Democratic Movement
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