Three years ago, the EFF was absolutely focused. There was Jacob Zuma, there was Nkandla and state capture, and he had to go. The message and the purpose was absolute and powerful. In the background there was the question of “the land”. The EFF was both morally compatible with the zeitgeist and the determining of it.
Today, the EFF can be found flailing around on a hundred different issues. The party is almost always on the defensive as their romance with the mainstream media, much like Julius Malema’s relationship with Zuma, has turned from coddling to condemnation. There is no singular direction or purpose. The EFF is like the beam of light that enters a glass prism and refracts into a thousand colours.
There is the war with the media; Malema’s dubiously funded lifestyle; the public protector (whom the party has decided to die in the ditch over); the genuflection before the hateful spectre of Robert Mugabe; and, finally, a vague and relative cessation of hostilities towards the ANC and President Cyril Ramaphosa in parliament, once the playground for the EFF’s thuggish brand of physically intimidating politics.
Malema spends his time denigrating minorities and spewing vitriol and contempt for anyone and everyone who disagrees with him. Make no mistake, he has always done that. Only now it is to be all he does. A one-man hate machine that roams the country covering everything with hyper-aggressive revulsion, like a crop-spraying machine that has found its way onto the public road network.
There is an audience for that kind of thing. It isn’t very big. Even if you are in the hate business, as all the great fascists knew only too well, you have to attach your hate to something concrete. You can’t hate for its own sake, otherwise you just look like a lunatic.
The big conspiratorial themes are still there. The idea that the country is owned and run by white people, and their economic emissaries who constitute white monopoly capital. Only Malema has invested so much energy in saying these people really control the ANC, and Pravin Gordhan in particular, that it has become almost impossible to distinguish the racial enemy from the racial nationalists.
It deals exclusively in intense racial animosity, but then has to spend its time telling people not to attack foreigners, as if to say ‘you can hate foreigners, just make sure they are white or Indian’
It’s brave, some would say stupid, to try and paint the ANC as an indentured slave of white economic interests. It is to take on one of the biggest brands in SA today: that the ANC is the party of the people, and as the ANC will be the first to tell you, “the people”, are poor and marginalised black South Africans.
The ANC itself has done everything in its power to destroy that reputation. The victims of its dire policies are “the people” themselves, denied a proper education, safety and economic opportunity. Yet, the myth endures. But the EFF believes, rather than focusing on the ANC’s actual policy failures, it is going to bring the ANC down by trying to convince all and sundry it is really working for whites.
That’s a hard sell when the failures are so palpable. It’s hard to experience load-shedding and arrive at the conclusion this is the result of white monopoly capital. It’s just manifestly untrue. Nevertheless, Malema has his chisel, and he whiles away his time chipping an inch of stone off the mountain one day at a time. And he is no Methuselah, even pseudo-revolutionary advocates such as Dali Mpofu are beginning to hint Malema won’t be round forever.
The EFF’s problem is that it actually agrees with all the ANC’s more destructive policies. Things such as prescribed assets and national health insurance; money-munching monsters such as state-owned enterprises, and expropriation without compensation. It often disagrees on the degree or manner in which such things might be realised and maintained, but ultimately, it is the ANC. It always has been.
Much has been written about Malema and Zuma, and how these once allies now antagonists, have become mortal enemies. There was a Shakespearean quality to the love and hate that bound them together. The EFF, little more than an extension of Malema’s personality, thus finds itself in the same predicament he does.
The father he hated is dead. What to do with all that hate now? The answer, it seems, is to throw a terrible and all-consuming tantrum, directed at anything in the party’s line of sight, unconstrained and disparate — therefore, without any singular resonance. The thing is, it wasn’t really ever about Zuma. The hate was always there, and that’s what everyone has come to realise. The Zuma years were just a grand exercise in sublimation.
It’s tough being the EFF. It advocates for socialism, but everywhere you look, in SA and abroad, socialism has failed. It berates the ANC, but it is the ANC. It scapegoats economic ruin onto minorities but then the party of the people runs out of electricity. It deals exclusively in intense racial animosity, but then has to spend its time telling people not to attack foreigners, as if to say “you can hate foreigners, just make sure they are white or Indian”.
Not a single, solitary ideological exemplar
If only the EFF could just find one thing, one solitary example, of how it’s feigned ideological purpose has delivered something, anything, of value, anywhere. It would make its life so much easier. Not that it cares, mind you. The benefit of occupying a world of fantasy, is that the fantasy can never be wrong. All you need to do is describe the last dream you had a little differently.
The public protector was an incompetent mistake. Now Busisiwe Mkhwebane is a brave and conviction-driven warrior. Ramaphosa was a “murderer” with “blood on his hands”, now he is afforded all the relative space and respect Zuma was denied. Xenophobia is disgraceful, but not a word about Herman Mashaba, the “EFF’s mayor”. The ANC is an oppressive, authoritarian and corrupt regime, but Malema’s lifestyle is funded by the stolen pensions of the weak and vulnerable.
Take a moment to appreciate what a thoroughly useless and incompetent revolutionary movement the EFF is
There was a time when all this contradiction and double-speak could be vanished through the charismatic rhetoric of the EFF leader. But the magic has worn off. And, when pushed, he has no answers, just bannings and threats. Barry Bateman was caught saying what he really thinks. The two minutes of Malema vitriol that led to it have gone largely unnoticed. But watch the clip, and you will see the life drain out of Malema’s eyes as he vents ice-cold hate at Bateman’s face. He wasn’t really talking to Bateman though, Bateman was just a convenient archetype, for him to talk to white people generally.
Great revolutionary movements, through history — and the EFF would have everyone believe it is a revolutionary movement — don’t play politics. They aren’t there to manipulate mayors, and influence national policy. They don’t hate for hate’s sake either. There is a very specific purpose to them: to overturn and replace the fundamental edifice from without, not to play games within the democratic space.
Take a moment to appreciate what a thoroughly useless and incompetent revolutionary movement the EFF is. Rarely is an environment so conducive for real revolution, as SA is today, delivered to a revolutionary movement, through no doing of its own. The army is deployed; moral panics are ubiquitous; people riot and protest; the state is experienced as weak, incompetent, corrupt and illegitimate; the governing party is fractured; and economic deprivation is widespread and acute. But can the EFF capitalise on any of this? Nope.
Instead, the EFF boasts about how it influenced the insourcing of some people in Johannesburg and helped the ANC be true to its own radical liberation values. Thanks for the help guys. Mao, Lenin, Castro and Mussolini must be looking down from revolutionary heaven and shaking their heads. “What’s the plan guys? Do you want to trend on Twitter or burn down the Reichstag?”
Malema will tell you he has it all in hand. EFF superior logic dictates he could never claim anything otherwise. But that is nonsense. The plan, such as it was, has come and gone with Zuma. All that remains now is a perpetual firefight to defend the EFF on a hundred different fronts. They say a good defence is the best offence. Not in politics it isn’t. In politics explaining is losing. And that’s all the EFF is doing these days.
One day, a proper book will be written about Zuma, and the profound influence he had on the nature of the SA political landscape. There will be a chapter on the EFF. A précis of it might read as follows:
“In response to Zuma, Julius Malema formed the EFF, a pseudo-revolutionary movement after the idea that ‘a revolutionary must be a cold, killing machine’. It delivered no revolution. And, once Zuma had gone, it lost purpose and direction, enmeshed in the constitutional state and enamored with the capitalistic delights that tend to accompany power. In the end, little more than venom remained. When the revolution did eventually come, the EFF found its members among the first against the wall.”
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