‘I can’t locate him these days’: Julius Malema slams President Ruto over broken campaign promises

Julius Malema, the leader of South Africa’s opposition Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) party, has criticized President William Ruto for failing to fulfill the promises he made to Kenyans in the run-up to the 2022 General Election.

Malema, who is presently in Kenya to launch the Pan African Institute at the Lukenya University, intimated that President Ruto’s election promises vis-à-vis his actions as the current Head of State are as distinct as day and night.

“I don’t know if President William Ruto means it because he said so many things, and I can’t locate him these days, because the things he said during election and the things he’s doing now are two different things,” he said in his address.

“Because I heard him saying we need to do away with the dollar and build our own currency, but his actions are not speaking to anything of doing away with the dollar.”

The South African opposition leader went ahead to slam Ruto over the recent visit to Kenya by Britain’s King Charles III, during which he was hosted to a State banquet and accorded various high privileges befitting his status as royalty.

However, according to Malema, the visit by King Charles III served no significance if he could not bring himself to offer a direct apology to the people of Kenya over the atrocities meted on the Republic by British soldiers during the colonial era.

“The latest (of Ruto’s ills) being putting a red carpet for a murderer; a person who killed the Kenyan people, coming into this country, receiving a red carpet and being saluted by our own army. The Kenyan army is a product of the Mau Mau rebellion, and those who killed our people in the Mau Mau rebellion cannot be saluted by the same army of the children of those who were killed during Mau Mau rebellion,” stated Malema.

“We have a duty to stay true to the course; we have a duty to remind the King and Britain of what they did to us; indeed, he shows no remorse – he says ‘this was bad, it shouldn’t have happened’, but he runs short of ‘I apologies, I am sorry.’ He will never say he is sorry, because he thinks that his race makes him superior and he is not qualified to apologise to those who are junior to him.”

He added: “We call upon the Kenyan government to be firm and to decide what they want to be, do they want to be Pan Africanist or do they want to be proponents of neocolonialism? You can’t have it both, only one call must be made and that call is open Africanism.”