LETTER: EFF needs wake-up call from fairy tales it imposes on followers

The EFF have inherited Alice in Wonderland syndrome. Reality eludes them. The party’s position on land expropriation question, accentuated by its mistaken belief that the state should own all land assets, is wrong and should be debunked as unworkable in our modern day economy.

The land belongs to the people, not to the state, as justice and correctional services minister Roland Lamola correctly stated in an article that appeared in the Sunday Times recently, a view shared by many including academics, authors and other experts on property and land ownership.

The belief by the EFF that land should be held in trust by the state is an absurd policy choice because it is regressive, based on the nanny state concept. But it is not surprising, because that is how the EFF leadership treats its followers — as unthinking children with no capacity to make important decisions for themselves, perpetually destined to be hewers of wood and drawers of water owing their total loyalty to party apparatchiks.

South Africans thirst for land, and black people have always been on the receiving end of political decisions to deny them access to land ownership. The long political struggle we waged was in a large measure informed by the desire to end land dispossession, a grand plan by the colonialists and architects of apartheid policy to deny us the right to our land.

Author Lewis Carroll’s children’s stories of the 19th century were meant to entertain them, point them to the reality of tomorrow, and put them to sleep with fairy tales. Today, EFF leaders seek to weave a yarn of fairy tales as they seek to distort what the constitution’s property clause is really about.

Jo-Mangaliso Mdhlela,Via email

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