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ID President Patricia de Lille says the ANC ‘is becoming a vehicle for a dangerous gangster mentality amongst leaders in our society, where they claim to speak for the poor, but are more interested in lining their own pockets with cash.' 

The ID Leader's comments come after reports that ANCYL President Julius Malema, who Ms De Lille recently said could be ‘stealing from the poor through tax evasion', called for nationalisation of the country's mines allegedly as a response to a personal setback in business and to pressurise a foreign mining group to sell off its shares.

‘If these allegations are true this will come as no surprise to me. This gangster mentality has hijacked the ANC at the highest levels over at least the past decade and it is not new for leaders in the ANC to use their positions to protect or further their business interests,' Ms De Lille says.

She cited the Arms Deal, the Siphiwe Nyanda Transnet tender saga, where the Minister of Communications' own company received a R55 million tender and the recent electricity price increases, a significant proportion of which will flow directly into the ANC's coffers through its front company Chancellor House. 

‘For his part, as I have said previously, Malema has got a constitutional right to be involved in economic activity, but the way he goes about his business is more characteristic of a gangster than a national youth leader,' says De Lille. 

‘On top of my suspicions that he and his companies are not tax compliant, it now looks like his calls for nationalisation were not an effort to launch a sound public debate, but rather an attempt to fill his own pockets. 

‘If these allegations are true then Malema is certainly not as stupid as I thought he was, although he is a lot more dangerous than I ever expected,' De Lille says. 

De Lille says she was ‘also not surprised' that President Zuma came to Malema's defence in an interview with a Friday weekly paper. 

‘The ID has repeatedly said that over the past 16 years the moral gap between the vision, values and ideals of the struggle against Apartheid and the behaviour of more and more ANC leaders has widened just as quickly as the massive inequalities in our society,' says De Lille.