On Saturday, ANC Youth League leader Julius Malema told league supporters that Premier of the Western Cape Helen Zille was a “cockroach” and must be voted out of power.
“You have put a cockroach in Cabinet and we need to remove that cockroach by voting the ANC into power.”
Malema said he had absolutely no respect for Zille.
Political commentators have stated that it’s “unfortunate” that Malema would use a term which will forever be associated with the mass murder of about 1 million members of the Tutsi minority in Rwanda in 1994.
Writing in The Mercury, for example, veteran political commentator and author Max du Preez commented: “There is no chance that Malema did not know about the Rwanda genocide link to the word cockroach. He must have deliberately chosen to call a respected senior politician with a good anti-apartheid record by that name.”
The cockroach reference emanates from the fact that members of the Hutu majority in Rwanda referred to the Tutsis they were decimating at a rate of thousands a day as “cockroaches”.
Malema is also currently fighting charges of hate speech relating to his singing of the lyrics: “Shoot the Boer”.
What do you think of his utterances? Send us your comments.