At a press conference at the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) headquarters in Braamfontein on Wednesday afternoon, the party’s leader, Julius Malema, said he didn’t believe the polls and thought the EFF would take over Gauteng, Limpopo, and the Eastern Cape in the upcoming elections, which will take place on May 8.
“That’s what our observations tell us, that we are going to take Limpopo, Gauteng, and Eastern Cape,” Malema said.
The EFF taking those provinces would be highly unlikely if the EFF’s previous results and current polls are taken into account, but the EFF commander-in-chief said he believed the party would get much more votes than anticipated.
He added that he didn’t believe the polling and research as, according to him, the evidence on the ground told a different story.
“In the Western Cape, the attendance at our rally shocked me, I had not expected that much support, but according to research, we have 2% support in the Western Cape. So we do not put much attachment on the research,” he said.
“We don’t work on the basis of research, we are intellectual in our own right and we believe in scientific research, but we do not put much concentration on the reports. We put our attention on what is happening on the ground.”
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Malema said the EFF was going for “total victory”, and that the party would change the constitution to allow for expropriation of land without compensation as soon as this was achieved.
“We call on all our fighters and ground forces in general to focus on the battle at hand, which is to win the 8th of May elections. Do not allow to be defocused. Let us all be on the ground, every hour of every single day, because victory is certain,” he said.
Malema added that he would be having a rally at Orlando stadium on May 5, the last Sunday before elections, inviting his followers to fill it up “to give the final warning shots of what would happen on election day”.
He also put pressure on his fellow fighters to campaign door to door leading up to elections and urged his supporters to come out and vote for the party.
“As a people, we have to be honest about a simple fact that we have not tried an alternative revolutionary party. For over 25 years, we have only tried one option, and that option has failed and is now tired,” he said.
(Compiled by Daniel Friedman)
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