The Sunday Mail
Cape Town. — The Economic Freedom Fighters will nationalise the ocean to ensure South Africans benefit from the country’s natural resources, the fledgling party’s Western Cape premier candidate said on Friday.
“We need to end the limited access people have to natural resources,” Nazier Paulsen told the Cape Town Press Club.
“We will nationalise the ocean, the abalone, the perlemoen.”
Paulsen said the EFF’s aims included total gender parity, free education up to post-graduate level, minimum farm workers’ wages of R5 000, and creating a provincial construction company that would provide 100 000 jobs.
The company would be set up to end the corruption-prone practice of contracting private builders to construct social housing, and would “end the spacial divide” that persisted 20 years after the advent of democracy.
“We are still living in the apartheid spacial divide. It hasn’t ended, it is only being managed by the Democratic Alliance.”
The company would also take charge of the delivery of electricity, water, and sanitation.
“We will end this potty system within a year.”
‘‘The madam’’
Paulsen was equally scathing of the DA and the ANC, from which he said he was an early defector. Referring to DA leader Helen Zille as the “the madam”, he said her provincial executive had not only failed to create “a single job” but was unable to understand the plight of women because it consisted of 10 men. By contrast, he said, EFF leader Julius Malema had included women on his “war committee”. Paulsen dismissed suggestions that the EFF was tarnished at the outset by the charges of fraud, corruption, racketeering and money-laundering against Malema. The National Prosecuting Authority’s decision to permanently drop related charges against his business associates proved that the case against Malema was one built on political interference, he said.
Whatever percentage of the provincial vote the EFF won in Wednesday’s polls, the party would not enter into a coalition with either the ANC or the DA. — SAPA.
