JULIUS MALEMA: APARTHEID ECONOMY NEVER ENDED

Julius Malema, the leader of South Africa's Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) party, was born on this day in 1981. He has been a prominent feature of the political landscape since 2008, when he was elected president of the Youth League of the country's ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC). In that role, he addressed issues that the ANC leadership had been skirting around since coming to power after the fall of apartheid in 1994 - namely, the lack of progress on land reform and the nationalisation of key sectors of the economy, such as mining, as promised in the ANC's guiding document, the Freedom Charter. He accused the ruling party of straying from its revolutionary course by maintaining apartheid-era social and economic structures that excluded Black people from meaningful participation in the country's economy.

This put him on a collision course with his party superiors, ultimately leading to his expulsion from the ANC in 2012. However, if they thought expelling him would extinguish his flame, they were wrong. Months after being expelled from the ruling party, Malema announced the formation of the EFF, a party that has, in the last decade, significantly altered the country's political discourse. The EFF has ensured that tough questions about the post-apartheid South African economy stay in the limelight. It was the party's relentless advocacy for land expropriation without compensation that eventually led the ANC government to push through the Expropriation Act to address anomalies in the country's land-ownership structure, which is rooted in apartheid-era legislation.

Malema's commitment to the fight to break the systems that continue to shackle the majority of Black South Africans to poverty more than three decades after the fall of apartheid has been unwavering. To mark his birthday, we share this 2016 clip of him explaining how the ANC has failed to dismantle apartheid structures completely.

Happy birthday, comrade Malema!

Video credit: BUSINESSLIVE/YouTube