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EFF Leader Julius Malema.
The Equality Court has found Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) leader, Julius Malema guilty of hate speech for the 2022 statements he made in his speech at the EFF’s 3rd provincial People’s Assembly in the Western Cape.
The remarks relate to events that occurred two years prior where EFF members physically clashed with individuals at the Brackenfell High School, following allegations of racism linked to a private matric farewell during the COVID pandemic.
The South African Human Rights Commission said, at the time, it had recieved numerous complaints regarding Malema’s speech. The commission’s Acting Spokesperson at the time, Wisani Baloyi, “Mr Malema questioned why that [white] person had not been located and taken to ‘an isolated space [where EFF supporters could] attend to the guy properly’, followed by an exhortation to the members that ‘You must never be scared to kill — a revolution demands that at some point there must be killing, because the killing is part of a revolutionary act.”
The EFF was at the time given 10 days to retract the remarks which they never did.
The Equality Court judgment finds among other things that Malema’s remarks constituted an exhortation to kill white men who had participated in the incident in November 2020.
The EFF says the ruling is “an attack on the democratic space and the right to articulate revolutionary politics”.
In a statement plublished on X, the party says, “The language of revolution cannot be sanitised to comfort the sensitivities of those who continue to enjoy the fruits of colonial dispossession and have never experienced racial violence whatsoever. The real violence is the daily reality of landlessness, unemployment, and racism that black people endure.”
The EFF’s Statement on the Equality Court Ruling on CIC Julius Malema
-We note the Court’s ruling as an attack on the democratic space and the right to articulate revolutionary politics. The language of revolution cannot be sanitised to comfort the sensitivities of those who… pic.twitter.com/WFLRpbr0ec
— Economic Freedom Fighters (@EFFSouthAfrica) August 27, 2025
