AFP JOHANNESBURG FIERY youth leader Julius Malema vowed on Thursday to keep fighting after South Africa’s ruling ANC expelled him in a dramatic move seen as clearing an obstacle to President Jacob Zuma’s reelection.

The decision by the African National Congress late on Wednesday sparked overnight clashes between Malema’s supporters and rivals in his hometown of Sheshego, in northern Limpopo province, Sapa news agency reported.

Shots were fired when a caravan of anti-Malema demonstrators brandishing a cardboard tombstone with the words “RIP Julius” and “corrupt dictator” descended on the street where he had gathered supporters ahead of the ruling. The pro-Malema camp blockaded the road, but fighting broke out between the two factions and stones were hurled at a police car when it arrived to separate the rival groups, reports said.

“We must accept that this is the decision, but that is not the end of the road,” Malema, who has two weeks to appeal his expulsion, said on public broadcaster SABC.

“It is still early to celebrate because the road ahead of us is going to be very long and needs men and women... who are very strong. “If you are weak, you are going to fall in the process,” said Malema, who turns 31 on Saturday.

“I’m not a soldier who is prepared to fall in the battle, I will die with my boots on, I will die for what I believe in.” The Youth League said its top leadership would meet Sunday to discuss the decision, with a press conference expected on Monday. But within the ANC, Malema appears increasingly isolated. A party disciplinary hearing in November suspended him for five years, after finding him guilty of provoking divisions in the ANC and tarnishing its image. An appeals panel in February upheld his conviction, but allowed him a new hearing to argue for a lesser sentence. In the meantime, he kept up his campaign against Zuma at rallies across the country and made thinly veiled threats to turn the nation’s youth against the ANC, the party of elder statesman Nelson Mandela.

The disciplinary panel’s scathing decision Wednesday said Malema’s threats were “tantamount to holding the ANC to ransom”. It justified his expulsion by underscoring “the cumulative effect of comrade Malema’s past and present offences, coupled with his own evidence of lack of remorse and disrespect for the ANC constitution and its structures”.

Malema has stirred a national debate on class and poverty with his call to nationalise mines and seize whiteowned farms to help the 40 percent of the population living on less than two dollars a day.