FNB Stadium overflows as fighters converge for EFF's birthday bash

 The EFF has filled FNB Stadium to capacity for its 10th anniversary celebrations. 

So full is the stadium that the party has asked those who were thinking of still coming to stay home and watch on television.

The stadium's capacity is just shy of 95,000. 

Party’s secretary-general Marshall Dlamini asked the police to open the pitch for the fighters who couldn't get seats in the stadium. 

He later asked security guards to close the pitch as it was full and told the latecomers to head to the overflow area across the road. 

EFF members from all over the country had come to celebrate their party's 10 years of existence. since its birth. Clad in their signature red T-shirts and berets, they belted out pro-EFF songs. 

Dubbed the July movement after Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro's 26th of July movement, the EFF was born out of the expulsion of its leader Julius Malema from the ANC in  2012 for bringing the party into disrepute and sowing division, among other charges. 

Malema this week spoke about how the early members had found it difficult to raise the money needed to register the party with the Electoral Commission (IEC). 

He said it was alleged that cigarette smuggler Adriano Mazzotti paid the R650,000 registration fee. 

Ten years later the party boasts a membership of a million and is represented in parliament, in all nine provincial legislatures and in all municipal councils across the country. The party has used the militancy that was synonymous with Malema’s leadership of the ANC Youth League to shake up all the  legislative entities to which it belongs.

At its core, the EFF believes in the economic emancipation of poor black people, that land should belong to  the people and that it should be expropriated without compensation. The EFF says it would nationalise banks and mines if it came to power.