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Johannesburg - The DA on Saturday called on EFF leader Julius Malema to apologise during his manifesto launch in Soweto for various controversial statements made in the past.
"I today challenge… Malema, to use the opportunity of live coverage to apologise to South Africa as a whole for his radical and hateful statements which have over many years sought to divide South Africa," Democratic Alliance spokesperson Phumzile Van Damme said in a statement.
She listed 10 thigs that the Economic Freedom Fighter’s leader should apologise for.
"Malema should apologise for vowing, in 2008, that the ANCYL would take up arms if the prosecution of Jacob Zuma for alleged fraud and corruption continued."
On Friday, the High Court in Pretoria ruled that the dropping of these charges against Zuma should be reviewed and set aside.
Van Damme also said that Malema’s comments at the time of Zuma's rape trial - that the woman who had accused him of rape had a "nice time" and had "requested breakfast and taxi money" - needed to be addressed.
Media freedom
Furthermore, she criticised Malema for an incident in 2012, when he again gave his two cent’s worth on the corruption case against Zuma by declaring that "the voters, and not the judges, must decide" on the president’s guilt.
Van Damme said that the head of the red berets should also say sorry for an incident in 2010 when he kicked a BBC journalist out of a media briefing, calling him "a bastard" and a "bloody agent".
This had embarrassed the country and undermined media freedom, she said.
According to the DA, Malema also owed an apology for his own brush with the law in 2013, when he was caught speeding at 215 km/h.
Van Damme suggested that Malema’s commentary on reconciliation was problematic.
Malema was allegedly responsible for "rebuking reconciliation" when, in 2015, he said that "we will not be speaking this reconciliation nonsense".
She also said that an apology was in order for his comments in the same year that Nelson Mandela had sold out in negotiating the end of apartheid.
Van Damme, further took umbrage with his comments this year in which he encouraged black women to have more babies. This statement failed "to understand the structural gender inequality and poverty that women in particular face across our country", she said.
She slammed Malema’s recent comments during a media interview that "he was prepared to remove the government via the barrel of the gun".
"The reality is that the EFF is too extreme and radical to govern."
Malema was expected to launch his party's election manifesto at Orlando Stadium in Soweto later on Saturday.
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