Here’s why EFF policies are a bad idea

IN THE ongoing war of ideas in which Marxist-Leninism and its offshoots, continue to do battle with advocates of free and open societies such as Martin Luther King, Thomas Jefferson, and Nelson Mandela, what has Julius Malema have to offer?

In a brazen “State of the Nation” address, uncharacteristically published by local newspapers over the weekend*, Malema, who technically cannot stand for parliament whilst under curatorship for mismanaging his own finances, called for mass expropriation of land and property rights. (See Ivo Vegter’s take on this issue here)

“We will pass legislation which will make the state the official and only custodian of all land in South Africa, in a similar way the Minerals and Petroleum Resources Development Act has made the state the custodian of our mineral and petroleum resources.”

Common property ownership has long since been abandoned in China and Russia. In South Africa it would instantaneously turn property-owners into tenants or wards of the state as all citizens suddenly became government employees in a perverse system that myopically fixes the problem of jobs with a stroke of the pen without actually creating any new jobs.

With the state controlling banking in South Africa under Malema, citizens will be expected to hand-over their current accounts to the state for safe-keeping — do we really trust the government to secure our money? Malema however chooses to deflect such criticism in his address, by referring to the “South Korean” banking system and thus may already be in talks to establish his own private investment bank.*

The ANC breakaway faction which has become the EFF party platform has simply adopted a hodge-podge of leftist demands, along with many of the supposedly radical policies of the North Korean dictatorship on the other side of the 38th parallel.

For example, the entire state is divided according to party loyalty. All property is under custodianship of the state. There are no banks to speak of, except for those owned by the state.

The only bank available to citizens is thus the solitary Central Bank which has over 220 branches, all providing exactly the same choice in government banking.

All citizens are therefore effectively under state custodianship, forced into total obedience, and required to hand over their meagre earnings to the state which acts much like an unfit parent would in dispensing resources. North Korea controls its population by withholding food and its agricultural policies have resulted in mass starvation and famine. The systemic, widespread abuses and numerous crimes against humanity are all referred to in a 374-page UN report.

Most disturbing are the lengths to which the dictatorship is willing to go in indoctrinating its population who do not possess the right to freedom of thought. All social activities are controlled by the deformed Workers Party of North Korea.

The release of an unprecedented United Nations report detailing crimes against humanity by the North Korean regime of Kim Jong-Un has focused world attention once again on the problem of totalitarian states.

Startling details of the centralised, command economy of North Korea have emerged, such as the claim that each and every North Korean home has a speaker directly linked to a government propaganda machine.

Reports that children as young as 5 in North Korea are given special political education classes in which they are taught to hate “imperialists” as well as their own parents are rather troubling.

Despite the myriad problems, so poignantly related by images of malnourished children, Julius Malema, who resembles the portly Kim Jong-Un in stature, has already modeled himself on the classic “personality cult” figures once associated with Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and Mao Zedong, choosing to brandish a beret and the banner of ‘class warfare against the oppressor‘.

If may be early days, but the comparison with Kim Jong-Un , Pol Pot and other regimes such as the Castro dictatorship in Cuba, in which political education classes resulted in torture camps and political prisons overseen by psychiatric doctors, is not all that far off the mark.

The ANC once had its own system of political detention camps in Zambia. EFF are again taking up the cudgels on behalf of abandoned Marxist-Leninist policies.

NOTE: *Speculation is rife that Malema could be a Manchurian candidate for Asian business interests who wish to install him in government without bothering with an election result.

 SEE: EFF are not the solution