By Anita Dangazele
- ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula said at a media briefing that the EFF was “knocking on people’s doors, telling foreigners to go outside the law.”
- The EFF issued a statement on 2 July denying the claim, saying it has never organised or taken part in any door-to-door campaign against foreign nationals.
The EFF has hit back at ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula after he accused the party of going door to door telling foreign nationals to leave the country.
Mbalula made the claim at a media briefing. “Lawlessness cannot be a norm and be tolerated and violence…I’ve spoken about this and another political party, EFF, was knocking on people’s doors, telling foreigners to go outside the law,” he said.
The EFF responded in a statement on Thursday, 2 July, titled “EFF Statement on the Defamatory Falsehoods Spread by ANC Secretary-General Fikile Mbalula.”
“The EFF has never organised, endorsed or participated in door-to-door campaigns to intimidate, threaten or forcibly remove foreign nationals from their homes,” the party said. It said such conduct is “fundamentally inconsistent” with its Pan-Africanist principles.
The party said it rejects xenophobia in all its forms, and blames the state, not migrants, for South Africa’s problems.
“We reject xenophobia in all its forms and have consistently maintained that the failures of the South African state cannot be blamed on poor African migrants seeking survival, but on corruption, unemployment, inequality, state incapacity and the deliberate collapse of public institutions under ANC rule,” the statement read.
The EFF accused Mbalula of contradicting himself.
“In the same public engagement where he correctly warns against vigilantism and acknowledges that no one should take the law into their own hands, he recklessly fabricates a story,” the party said.
Mbalula separately referenced the EFF’s January 2022 restaurant inspections at the Mall of Africa, where EFF leader Julius Malema and party members checked how many foreign nationals restaurants employed compared to South Africans. The Department of Employment and Labour condemned the inspections at the time as unlawful, saying only the department itself could carry out such checks.
The EFF has not yet responded to this specific claim about the restaurant inspections.
Pictured above: ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbulula addressing the media on Thursday.
Image source: ANC
