It’s been a tough month for the EFF. The party, which tends disproportionately to dominate media headlines and public debate alike, has faded away into near obscurity. Crises quickly reveal it’s formal power that really matters. The ANC has a lot of it, the DA has some, the EFF has none. There are only two shows in town at the moment, and the EFF isn’t one of them.
Informally, one could argue the EFF has long since punched above its weight and, thus, it wields a fair amount of informal power. But even that has, overnight, become irrelevant. No-one cares about the ideological conspiracies the EFF uses to augment its influence. It’s the coronavirus or bust. And, more importantly, its rationality and science that now hold sway. Not the antiquated, socialist ideals of Stalin or Mao.
That’s been another contributing factor to the EFF’s disappearance: it doesn’t really do rationality, least of all economically. One plus one has never equaled two for the EFF, rather, whatever answer is most politically expedient on the day. That sort of gamesmanship is not acceptable in this particular crisis. Now people want certainty, science, evidence and reason. The EFF is simply not the place one looks to for that kind of thing.
Putting the final nail in the EFF’s coffin (if only to keep the lid closed for a while), the brutal, uncaring menace that is capitalism has proven to be relatively benevolent for the last month or so. The world over too. The EFF wants every person to farm their own piece of land, in a kind of 1920’s agrarian utopia. Right now, though, people want innovation and complex medical equipment and vaccines. It’s the private sector that provides that. And so, all those billionaire innovators have a newfound authority and legitimacy.
All of this is communicated in a constant flow of information, none of which the EFF controls. Of statistics, knowledge, updates, medical developments, rules and regulations. The state, naturally, has a monopoly on much of it. The DA too, via the Western Cape and Cape Town, is able to provide unique information that matters to people. But the EFF’s got nothing to say. Well, nothing that matters at any rate. It is the most irrelevant it has ever been, and it is fascinating to watch.
Part of the response, from its front-line zealots, is to spend its time being bitter about all of this online. Making snarky tweets about Bill Gates having dropped out of university and suggesting now is a good time to bone up on Lenin’s ideological teachings. It’s a kind of desperate denial from the party. And evidence of how out of touch the EFF is with one concept above all others: modernity. Modernity is busy eating this pre-modern party for breakfast.
People actually cite numbers now, mortality rates and the number of beds available. They understand that numbers dictate policy, and where necessary they apply pressure. Our public debate right now is the most rational it has ever been
You see, what Covid-19 has done is impose modernity on everyone from the ANC down. Don’t think the ANC is not prone to the kind of pre-modern, backwards-style thinking that animates the EFF. It most certainly is. Only, it has power and, with that, comes responsibility. Ignore science, rationality, logic and reason in the way it has done for the past 25 years and people will immediately die. Not in the kind of gradual, implicit way the ANC has historically killed our citizens, but in a direct way that would negate any of the typical excuses it offers up.
It goes to show how much of the ANC’s much vaunted policy is, in fact, a luxury. It can afford to avoid rationality because the consequences have been so disparate and meaningless. No more. Very quickly the president and health minister have learnt to talk in facts, numbers, graphs and statistics; not ideology. At least they have come to understand that much. The virus cares nothing for the Freedom Charter.
Even South Africans generally have been forced to redirect their general inanity to more meaningful ends. People actually cite numbers now, mortality rates and the number of beds available. They understand that numbers dictate policy, and where necessary they apply pressure. Our public debate right now is the most rational it has ever been. God, if people had applied this sort of passion to, say, crime or education statistics on a more permanent basis, the ANC would have been voted out decades ago.
Few things focus the mind better than the prospect of death.
If you wanted to be really lateral about it, you could even argue that Covid-19 is the best thing to happen to SA in a while. Not only is there suddenly this widespread appreciation for rationality and policy grounded in actual evidence but we are all behaving a lot better too. The crime rate is down, less liquor means less assault; and we have even reduced our murder rate. In fact, there is now a net gain on this front — lives saved through less crime (hundreds each week), compared to lives lost to the virus (12 as of Tuesday).
Take a utilitarian approach and we should be put under permanent lockdown.
But politically, the hardest knock has been suffered by the EFF. All the EFF’s enemies — capitalism, monopolies, ubiquitous racism — are all invisible. It has managed to fight them so successfully by deploying a series of invisible countermeasures — ideology, conspiracy, black nationalism and hate. Only it never banked on this particular invisible enemy. And it has no countermeasures, for they are all things — rationality, science, capital, intellectual progress — the EFF does not possess or value.
Don’t think the coronavirus only manifests physical symptoms in humans; it manifests political symptoms in political parties too. And right now, the EFF is a few days away from needing a ventilator.
Missed viral opportunities
There are a few other people in political hospital. Mmusi Maimane and Herman Mashaba have, like the EFF, become totally irrelevant. Mashaba of all people must be kicking himself. He gave up what would have been a profoundly influential platform — as mayor or Johannesburg — with a real chance to set him apart and rise to the fore as a leader in the midst of a crisis. Maimane, too, could have hung on for a bit. The crisis would have delivered them both a massive opportunity to lead with actual power, in the best possible sense.
Now they both just have a Twitter account. And no one cares about anything they have to say. They both ploughed all their political capital into an informal-power investment just at the moment the informal-power economy collapsed ( not that they had much informal power to start with).
It will be interesting to see how Cyril Ramaphosa emerges from all this. And that means in three or four months from now. Because, as things stand, our response to the crisis — indeed, the world’s response to it — is still a novelty. There is a long time to run, and much that still needs to be understood before a full and proper assessment is possible.
As things stand, there is every chance the national government has got things horribly wrong. But then again, they could have got them perfectly right. It is an almost impossible environment — uncertainty — to make the right policy calls. Generally, one can only make the best possible call at the time. And then, in a cruel twist of fate, time itself will deliver its own judgment.
But whatever way it swings, so long as SA remains gripped in this crisis, the EFF will continue to be utterly and totally irrelevant. And the one thing time will not record is its contribution, because it simply does not have one.
At some point SA reality will return, and the EFF can resume its duties as chief architect of how best to take SA into the past. As long as the future drives behaviour, the EFF will remain entirely inconsequential.
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