Freedom Front Plus leader Pieter Mulder requests meeting with President Zuma to ask him to condemn hate speech against Afrikaners.

Below is an article published by IOL :

DA leader Helen Zille, after telling journalists that ANC Youth League president Julius Malema made President Jacob Zuma look like "a follower and not a leader", on Tuesday [April 6] asked for an urgent meeting with Zuma to discuss Malema's "hate speech".

Freedom Front Plus leader Pieter Mulder has also requested a meeting with Zuma.

He wants the president to publicly condemn Malema's singing of the song with the words "Shoot the Boer" and has told The Star he is prepared to resign his post as the deputy minister of agriculture, forestry and fisheries if that does not happen.

Zille told journalists at Parliament yesterday [April 6]: "Julius Malema holds no position in government. He is a highly contested leader of the ANC Youth League.
"Yet somehow he manages to drag everyone in government around by the nose. He makes Zuma look like a follower and not a leader."

Zille said the murder of Eugene Terre'Blanche had unleashed a tidal wave of pent-up rage and frustration.

"For over a decade now, farmers and farming communities have been on the receiving end of escalating criminal violence, and 3 368 have been murdered."

Malema's singing of "Shoot the Boer" was not experienced as "an attack on the apartheid system" but as an "expression of a hateful attitude towards farmers and Afrikaners in particular, and white people in general".

"It is time for Jacob Zuma to act like a president and tell his youth league and its leader that we cannot allow our history of division to destroy our chances of building a shared future," Zille added.

"If Zuma cannot take a stand against Malema, the rest of South Africa must."

Whatever the literal meaning of the words, "the fact remains, it's a call to shoot a human being".

Zille said the ANC's national executive in 1997 had resolved that a former youth league leader, the late Peter Mokaba, should stop chanting "Shoot the farmer, kill the Boer" because former president Nelson Mandela believed that it was irreconcilable with nation-building.

"Peter Mokaba was the Julius Malema of his day. President Mandela was not scared of him. He stood up to him," Zille said.

By contrast, Zuma had "missed opportunity after opportunity" to repudiate Malema, and this had led to the perception that Malema had some kind of hold over him.

Presidency spokes Vincent Magwenya last night said Malema was "not a creation of President Zuma" and had been elected by members of the youth league, which was constitutionally an entity independent of the ANC.

He added that Zuma himself did engage with Malema.

Mulder told The Star he be-lieved the ANC leadership did not fully understand the sensitivities involved.

"It's not only white people but other minorities," he said.

"I would like the ANC to be sensitive to the perceptions on the other side."

Zille said Terre'Blanche's murder threatened to be "the match on the dry grass".

Malema had "no concept of the rule of law" or the constitution and was "sacrificing everyone's future for the sake of his personal ambitions".

"This is a very dangerous watershed for South Africa."

She nevertheless believed that the majority of South Africans were sensible and moderate.

"If we can defend our constitution, things will be fine. That was a historic compact. It wasn't imposed on anybody.

"People get reckless and dangerous, and cross the edge. But the centre can hold, and I believe it will."