GARETH VAN ONSELEN: The EFF’s five-year hate-fest

As South Africa reflects on the EFF’s five-year anniversary, the record would suggest its primary contribution has been to fuel loathing, engender racial division and espouse violence. Indeed, if the EFF has done anything, it is to provide the country’s latent animosity with a colour and a figurehead — and in doing so, to give a formal, elected voice to hatred.

Enmity infuses the EFF’s rhetoric. There will be those who point to its contribution to accountability or the pressure it has applied to the government on certain policies, but central to it all is the unadulterated anger that permeates everything the EFF does and says. For a party that cares nothing for truth or consistency, rage is the common denominator.

The EFF is a party of hate, and it has made that particular emotion its own.

"A revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate," a banner read at the EFF’s launch in October 2013. It was reportedly accompanied by other like-minded messages, such as "We need to kill them like they killed us." Advertising professionals call this a "brand problem". The EFF said they were a "great disappointment". Time has revealed both to be untrue. Both messages were perfectly on brand. A "problem", they were not.

It was machine constructed for war. For revolution. Only there was no war. So, it had to invent one. And the zero-star generals running this motley crew of mutineers have been hard at work ever since, identifying various enemies and the reasons why they must be targeted

Violence was built into the party’s structure from the start. The result — a pseudo-military organisation, replete with a commander-in-chief, a war room, ground forces and, of course the basic army unit: the economic freedom fighter — "fighters". It was machine constructed for war. For revolution. Only there was no war. So, it had to invent one. And the zero-star generals running this motley crew of mutineers have been hard at work ever since, identifying various enemies and the reasons why they must be targeted.

There have been so many. Most of them have, however, only had to endure a verbal assault. The "ground forces" very rarely, if ever, actually get it together to implement the instructions issued by their superiors.

In 2012, Julius Malema said, "We are going to lead a mining revolution in this country. We are going to each mine. We will [make] these mines ungovernable until the boers come to the table." In 2014, Malema threatened to make the whole of the Gauteng province ungovernable: "We will fight. We have the capability to mobilise our people and fight physically." In 2015, Malema declared that the party would occupy, "Each and every branch of Absa, until we are given a practical programme of action on how the bank is going to intervene to resolve the inequalities in society."

And so on, and so forth. Nothing ever happened.

War of the words

You see, really, this was to be a war of words. The real battlefield would be Twitter and newspaper columns. And the strategy was simple enough: take everything the ANC Youth League (ANCYL) stood for (indeed, it is almost impossible to find any position Malema advocates as EFF leader, which he did not first advocate as head of the ANCYL) and use it to bend the ANC to its own will.

Inside the ANC, these sorts of radical sentiments, which always enjoyed some latent favourability, would be kept more or less in check by the hard realities of actual governance. Malema’s attempts to nationalise the mines is a case in point. That issue is the template for every issue the EFF has driven since: the scare-mongering, the hyperbole, the feigned passion for economic equality that mask a cataclysmically stupid economic idea.

—  Pouring fuel on the fire of hatred is what the EFF does best; pouring petrol onto all that anger and animosity

But, cut loose from the mother party, the EFF could apply external pressure, an altogether more powerful force. So, aided by the ANC’s own surrender to the socialist populism and demagoguery that defined the age of Jacob Zuma, along with a generally supine media, it could use the ANC against itself, and SA’s best interests in turn.

It has proven a remarkably effective formula.

When Malema was finished destroying the National Prosecuting Authority’s (NPA) case against Jacob Zuma, he would declare, in February 2009, "If Jacob Zuma is corrupt, then we want him with all his corruption. We want him with all his weaknesses. If he is uneducated, then we want him as our uneducated president."

He got his wish, in spades. And it worked out very well for him. On one hand he could denigrate Zuma, as the EFF leader, until the cows came home, something for which he would receive no end of praise. On the other, he could use the populism that came with Zuma to realise his agenda in a way he could never have done had Mbeki or someone of his ilk been in charge. Zuma was the gift that kept on giving. The devil, but a devil who engendered the perfect environment for the EFF.

That said, really it is all the accompanying vitriol and venom that leaves the greatest impression.

Built on a foundation of hate

Malema brought a great deal of hate with him. In the ANCYL he had been convicted of hate speech, no less. At the zenith of his Zuma-zealotry phase, he had said, "We are prepared to die and take up arms only if the need arises … killing counter-revolutionary forces hell-bent on reversing the gains of our revolution." He had threatened the head of the NPA ("Anybody who seeks to re-open [the case against Zuma] will be viewed as public enemy number one"); suggested judges were corrupted ("They, the ‘dark forces’, travel at night. They have got the potential to do anything"); called the leader of the opposition a "cockroach"; and personally attacked many and various members of the ANC itself.

Not the kind of goggle-eyed lunacy you’d want to underpin a stand-alone political party, but then there has always been a market for anger and conspiracy in SA, one that renders such things as reason and principle largely redundant. Malema tapped straight into the heart of it.

And, of course, he kept up the hate. Always with the hate. The EFF hates so many things: banks, business, the media, the ANC, the DA, parliament, government, and just about every individual who represents those institutions. But of them all, its minorities the EFF hates most.

The EFF was going to "cut the throat of whiteness". In November 2016, he would say, "I’m saying to you, we’re not called for the killing of white people, at least for now. I can’t guarantee the future." White people, Malema argued, were the root cause of almost every problem: "We’re unemployed because of them. We’re dying of diseases because of them. We’re illiterate because of them. We’ve surrendered to drugs because of you. You owe us a lot."

"Black people, you are subjects of white people, even under ANC and democracy. You are servants of white people."

The conclusion: ‘There is no place in SA for white supremacists and Indian supremacists.’ Whites are ‘just visitors’ here, they must ‘behave’

It’s the kind of scape-goating, typical of fascist parties the world over, and, recently, the EFF has extended its repertoire of hate to incorporate other minorities. Indians, Malema says, are generally racist. In KwaZulu-Natal, Malema says, "Everything strategic is given to Indian families. Everything, big tender, is given to Indian families. They are the ones who are owning strategic things here, in KwaZulu-Natal … They don’t pay our people, especially those Indians who are owning shops. They don’t pay our people."

The conclusion: "There is no place in SA for white supremacists and Indian supremacists." Whites are "just visitors" here, they must "behave".

Opening Pandora’s Box

Recently it was reported that on July 19 , a group of EFF supporters stormed a local business, chanting phrases such as "Indians must voetsek". The GM was assaulted, cars vandalised and bricks thrown.

You see, even if the EFF lacks the wherewithal to ever act on its revolutionary rhetoric, its supporters have other ideas. They were one step ahead of the EFF leadership from day one: "A revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate." The EFF might permanently threaten revolution yet never act on it — but when it comes to hate, the party has delivered no end. And hate tends to take on a life of its own.

Verbally, for five years now, the EFF has been fuelling the fire. Pouring petrol onto all that anger and animosity by the bucket-full. Its dangerous language has, until recently, been celebrated as entertainment more than anything else — the naughtiness of a delinquent. But that is not what the party faithful make of it. They take away from it all the core, underlying message: we all are victims; the enemies are minorities and we must take from them what is rightfully ours. To do this, you mustn’t just learnt to hate but understand why you hate — and the EFF will teach you how.

The EFF is the most vile organisation. An institution that worships at the altar of fear and resentment. The poison it spreads is profoundly dangerous. Both toxic and combustible

The EFF is the most vile organisation. An institution that worships at the altar of fear and resentment. The poison it spreads is profoundly dangerous. Both toxic and combustible. The Panadora’s box Malema is trying to force open is not the kind of thing you close afterwards.

Many are coming to this realisation. The infatuation with the EFF, which defined its first few years, has worn off. The ever-increasing circle of hate has now widened to include many who thought they would never be on the inside looking out. This has seen a great many scales fall from the eyes. And yet you get the sense that the greatest trick Malema ever pulled was to convince SA that, if anything, he was our greatest rhetorician; that the words were all games, carefully constructed to subtly influence debate.

Five years of hate

Truth is, Malema has fooled even himself on this front. He thinks he is control of all this hate. He is wrong, of course. It is in control of him. And the stronger it gets the more control it wields. If it is ever fully realised, it will answer to no one. Any revolution inevitably eats its own.

It will be interesting to see, come the 2019 election, just how much support the EFF has after five years. You get the sense it isn’t all going to plan, hence the recent flood of hyper-racial sentiment from the party — a vicious circle in which it is constantly forced to up the ante to keep up with all the rage out there. Oh for the days when slogans such as, "Make love, not war" populated the public mind. Those days are long gone. "War is peace", is the more Orwellian idea that animates the EFF. "Freedom is slavery". "Ignorance is strength". All the 1984 epithets apply.

In fact, 1984 provides the best possible description of the EFF, where he sets out Big Brother’s daily "Two Minutes of Hate" — the propaganda broadcast designed to define the parameters of the public mind:

"The horrible thing about the Two Minutes of Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within 30 seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion, which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp."

This is the desired effect behind any Malema speech. Only, not so much two minutes, as five year’s worth. The EFF, a heady mix of competing and confused political philosophies is, above all else, defined by only one: the ideology of hate. When all is said and done, that is the taste it leaves in the mouth.

• Van Onselen is the head of politics and government at the South African Institute of Race Relations.