Political parties marking the 65th anniversary of the Sharpeville Massacre on Human Rights Day on Friday called for unity among South Africans as the country’s diplomatic and trade dispute with the US intensifies.

Addressing EFF members at the Dlomo Dam in Sharpeville in the Vaal, party leader Julius Malema accused the government of adopting an approach seeking to plead with imperialism, which he described as cowardice, succumbing to white domination and that can never be accepted as diplomacy.

”Why does this government not tell the US that when racists refused equality, Nelson Mandela said they must be confronted with arms, and that today we are better, because we are confronting racists with legislation and the Constitution to expropriate land without compensation?” he asked.

According to Malema, the US is not interested in diplomacy but in dominance over South Africa by any means necessary.

”We must stand up and fight for ourselves because we represent a historical mission, and that mission is the return of the land,” he said.

Malema added that South Africans should not forget that the US classified freedom fighters as terrorists and that its Central Intelligence Agency assisted in Mandela’s capture in 1962 and handed him over to the apartheid regime.

”They may have been forced to abandon apartheid South Africa, but they have simply shifted their methods. They use economic policies, military interventions, and propaganda to maintain the oppression of Black people globally,” said Malema.

He maintained that it is for the first time in the country’s history as a democratic nation that South Africa faces the threats of sanctions and economic isolation, and that this is because the white minority, which controls the land and the wealth, fears equality.

ActionSA Gauteng chairperson Funzela Ngobeni said the current state of South Africa internationally needs South Africans to be united.

”It means that we must be remembered as a nation that when we were attacked, we united and fought back together,” he said.

Former ANC secretary-general and Free State premier Ace Magashule suggested that US President Donald Trump’s actions against South Africa may assist in unravelling some of the country’s dark secrets.

”The good thing about Trump, maybe, what he might actually do he might actually tell us who the spies working with the US were because he might actually expose them,” he said.

Magashule, who now leads his own political party African Congress for Transformation, added that spies working with foreign governments delayed the country’s march to freedom.

loyiso.sidimba@inl.co.za

magashule

Political parties unite on Human Rights Day amid US diplomatic tensions