South African President Cyril Ramaphosa hit back Tuesday against President Donald Trump‘s demand that opposition politician Julius Malema should be arrested, for repeatedly chanting “kill the farmer.”
Also on Tuesday, a senior politician within South Africa’s government told Fox News Digital the chant “inflamed hatred” and called for “legal consequences.”
In the White House Oval Office last week, President Trump had a video showing Malema making the chant shown to the then-visiting Ramaphosa. Trump told the South African leader that Malema should be arrested.
On Sunday, Malema, leader of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) political party, which drew just under 10% of the vote in last May’s South African election and is not part of the government of national unity, told a crowd of thousands at a rally in South Africa’s Free State, “I will never be intimidated by Donald Trump.”
Just four days after the president’s call that he should be arrested, Malema launched into the chant again, shouting to cheers “Shoot to kill. Kill the Boer (Afrikaans farmer), the farmer.” {snip}
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Reacting to President Trump calling for Malema’s arrest, President Ramaphosa on Tuesday told reporters there are no plans to detain the EFF leader. “It’s not a matter where we need to be instructed by anyone (to) go and arrest this one. (Malema) We are a very proud sovereign country that has its own laws, that has its own processes.”
Ramaphosa continued that South Africa’s equivalent of the Supreme Court, the Constitutional Court, had decided in 2022 the slogan “kill the Boer, kill the farmer” was only a decades-old “liberation chant and slogan, and it’s not meant to be a message that elicits or calls upon anyone to go and be killed, and that is what our court decided.” Critics point out that Malema sits on South Africa’s Judicial Services Commission – the body that appoints judges here.
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