South Africa's Julius Malema calls Australia a ‘racist country’, tells farmers to ‘leave their keys’ when they go

South Africa’s radical opposition leader, Julius Malema has told white farmers to leave for “racist” Australia, but wants them to leave their keys behind and insists “we are not killing them”.

If white farmers want to flee for a “racist country” like Australia they should leave the keys to their houses and tractors behind, the head of South Africa’s radical Marxist opposition party said on Wednesday.

But the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) leader who recently declared his party was “cutting the throat of whiteness”, denied white farmers were being killed and according to him, “We don’t know violence, we know negotiations.” 

And we are very robust in our engagement sometimes. A racist country like Australia says: ‘The white farmers are being killed in South Africa.’ We are not killing them. Now Australia says: ‘Malema, EFF want to kill white farmers, they must come to Australia.

If they want to go, they must go. They must leave the keys to their tractors because we want to work the land, they must leave the keys to their houses because we want to stay in those houses. They must leave everything they did not come here with in South Africa and go to Australia.

His comments came as Australian Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton stared down criticism from “crazy lefties” as he pushed on with plans to bring white South African farmers to Australia.

They don’t realise how completely dead they are to me,” Mr Dutton told Sydney radio station 2GB on Thursday.

Malema, who was convicted of hate speech in 2011 for singing the apartheid-era revolutionary song Shoot the Boer, Kill the Farmer and in 2016 told supporters he was “not calling for the slaughter of white people‚ at least for now”, said farmers should “leave quietly”.

We’re too busy,” he said. “Don’t make noise, because you will irritate us. Go to Australia. It is only racists who went to Australia when Mandela got out of prison. It is only racists who went to Australia when 1994 came. It is the racists again who are going back to Australia.

But he said they would be “poor in Australia”. 

They are rich here because they are exploiting black people. There is no black person to be exploited in Australia, they are going to be poor.

They will come back here with their tail between their legs. We will hire them because we will be the owners of their farms when they come back to South Africa. As to what we are going to do with the land, it’s our business, it’s none of your business.

We want Africa back. Africa belongs to our people.

We are saying that which our people were killed for ... has not been achieved, and therefore we will continue with that struggle. When we say so, they say we are racist, they say we want to kill white people. Why would we kill white people?

Our mothers and fathers are not murderers. The white settlers found them here, they killed them, they forcefully removed them, yet our people kept on saying: ‘Let’s talk.’

Today we say: ‘Let’s talk like our parents kept on saying to you. Let’s talk about how we are going to expropriate land without compensation.’ Then when we say so, they say we want to kill them.

Last month, South Africa’s parliament voted in favour of a motion, brought by the EFF and supported by the ruling African National Congress, to begin the process of expropriating white-owned land without compensation.

A 2017 government audit found white people owned 72 per cent of farmland in South Africa. According to the 2011 census, there are about 4.6 million white people in South Africa, accounting for 8.9 per cent of the population.

The racially charged issue of land rights and farm murders has been the subject of fierce debate in the country and internationally.