EFF president Julius Malema responds to questions from members of the media during a joint press briefing with the leaders of Contralesa in Johannesburg, 05 July 2018. Picture: Refilwe Modise
A man describing himself as an architect on social media claimed on Saturday to have been done in to the tune of R62,000 by the EFF over a house that he designed and built for them.
The details are unclear, but the man going only by the name “Bani” on Twitter claims that he is still owed the money for a project in Inanda, KwaZulu-Natal, despite having issued the party lawyers’ letters.
He added that the EFF had rushed him to finish and get the house built in a month. He tagged the EFF’s official Twitter account and EFF leader Julius Malema.
“And we did,” he wrote. “I no longer understand what EFF stands for.”
He was reacting to a tweet from long-time EFF basher Black First Land First (BLF) president Andile Mngxitama, who had been commenting on reports of how self-confessed cigarette smuggler Adriano Mazzotti’s company Carnilinx allegedly gave Malema a R1 million loan to settle his tax debt.
Mngxitama claimed he had himself offered up his “last R10 000” to the EFF to help the party register for elections in 2014, and was never repaid his money.
The now BLF leader served the EFF in parliament as an MP until his expulsion from the party in 2015.
The architect is clearly disillusioned with the EFF, since he also responded to EFF one-time acting spokesperson and Hollywood actor Fana Mokoena’s boast that “an EFF membership is a sign of independence of mind … intelligence and creativity” and “the very stuff of courage” … “It is not membership, it is leadership.”
Bani told Mokoena that the EFF was, in his view, just about “selective thinking, selective intelligence and selective leadership”. He said the party was “great in theory” but just winging it disappointingly in practice.
Mngxitama responded to him by wondering what might happen to the country’s finances if the EFF “crooks” ever came to power in government.
The architect then tweeted that he, like other leaders in the EFF – including Malema – was going to the Vodacom Durban July and he would “print out my unpaid invoices just in case I bump into any of them”.
The EFF had tweeted this photo of Malema with UDM leader Bantu Holomisa and Deputy Minister Pinky Kekana ahead of Africa’s biggest horse-racing event, which Malema attends every year.
Many on Twitter accused the architect of making up his story merely to cast aspersions on the EFF. They demanded that he show them proof. One, Dumisani Dlamini, also referred to Mngxitama as a “samoosa boy” due to his strong connections to the controversial Gupta family.
There was also the suggestion that the architect had failed to do the work with the protection of a contract.