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JOHANNESBURG. — Employees of the Independent Electoral Commission of South Africa have threatened to strike unless chairperson Pansy Tlakula is removed before the election on 7 May, City Press reported yesterday.The potential strike risks disrupting the election, and intensifies pressure on Tlakula, who has been implicated in a PwC forensic audit as well as Public Protector Thuli Madonsela’s report into the leasing of the IEC’s R320m head office in Centurion, Pretoria.
This week Economic Freedom Fighters leader Julius Malema and AgangSA leader Mamphela Ramphele told Tlakula to her face she must resign.
Malema called on Tlakula to resign “to avoid the possibility civil war”.
The ANC has come out in Tlakula’s defence, saying her issues don’t impact the credibility of the elections.
Organisers of the unprecedented strike said it was supported by more than 90 percent of IEC employees who have mandated the national negotiating forum – a worker’s structure led by the National Education, Health and Allied Workers’ Union – to enter into talks with IEC commissioners, the paper said.
In another development, EFF leader Malema said yesterday Kliptown township in Soweto is the symbolic definition of what poverty looks like.
“When we look around here we see poverty. If people did not know the definition of poverty, Kliptown is proof that there is no good news to tell 20 years after our democracy,” he told a crowd gathered at an open field in the township.
Malema was introducing advocate Dali Mpofu as the EFFs’ Gauteng premier candidate.
“People of Kliptown don’t know what freedom and democracy is. Freedom is a house. How do you have freedom if you share a room with your kids? When you go to bed hungry?
“When you don’t have a local clinic in an area where the Freedom Charter was adopted?”
He said the ruling party should be ashamed.
He told residents and EFF supporters present that they should ask the African National Congress where they had worked hard.
“This is where it should have started. In 1994 we said ‘a better life for all’ not a better life for the few. If there are roads in Orlando and not in Kliptown, then there is no good story to tell,” Malema said.
He urged the crowd to have faith in the EFF and to vote for them in the upcoming 7 May general elections.
“We as the EFF are saying ‘Vote for us for five years, if we don’t deliver then kick us out. Don’t wait 20 years’.”
He said Mpofu was a humble man who grew up in politics, who lived with ordinary people but was still able to speak English and serve the people. — Sapa.
Online Reporter