I understand why so many people inside the EFF continue to argue that Floyd Shivambu’s defection to Jacob Zuma’s MK party was a brilliant piece of strategy by the Progressive Caucus — it’s human nature, when you fall on your face, to jump up and explain that your hobby is tasting pavements, and boy, is this one delicious!
Of course, not everyone has been trying to sell that version. Julius Malema, for one, hasn’t looked this sad since Acme Events told him its walking-on-water rig was in for repairs and he’d have to settle for being cranked into the sky on a hydraulic lift at the EFF birthday rally last year.
Still, the desperate damage control seems to have found a receptive audience, with many followers and even a couple of journalists insisting we’d seen a brilliant piece of political chess, played by the ultimate mastermind, Zuma.
I’ve always found the left’s love of chess metaphors odd given that it’s a game in which you pretend to be an aristocrat defending your privilege by sending your serfs to murder other serfs.
But in Zuma’s case it’s especially strange. After all, his version of chess is a game in which you sell the board, try to sue any journalists who keep asking you about it, and then once Dali Mpofu has lost your case for you yet again you announce that the game is rigged and you’ve invented a far better version of chess called Bless, in which you pay the other pieces to fall over or come to work for you.
No, Zuma is many things, but an evil genius he is not — a fact unwittingly endorsed by caucus supporters as they explained that now, thanks to Shivambu’s defection, MK is finally about to get some serious intellectual heft.
I must say I feel slightly insulted on Zuma’s behalf. Then again, it’s possible that Shivambu is what his fans say he is: a deep thinker whose light has for too long been hidden under Malema’s bushel.
Certainly, I remain fascinated by one of Shivambu’s tweets from 2021, when he explained why he wasn’t suing journalists accusing him of dodgy dealings. “We don’t and will never fight lizards,” he wrote at the time. “We are fighting crocodiles in their home ground and still will be victorious.”
Until he wrote that I hadn’t realised how much I’d wanted to see Shivambu fight a lizard, and I know many of you will share my disappointment that he’s ruled it out for good. Still, I suppose the fight against crocodiles is important too: the shoes and handbags of the caucus elite aren’t going to skin themselves.
There’s a certain perverse fun in watching these shenanigans play out, but there’s also a cost, and I don’t mean the fact that they’ve largely overshadowed real news, such as Leon Schreiber and his team at home affairs halving the visa backlog in three months, or basic education minister Siviwe Gwarube stopping a potentially dodgy R10bn tender.
No, the cost of being sucked into this particular soap opera is that we run the risk of starting to believe that any of it is real. A few nights ago I was surprised to hear a highly respected business pundit on the radio refer to SA’s “radical left”.
I was surprised for two reasons. First, it was strange to hear an intelligent pundit use a phrase that has been so overburdened and abused that is has become almost meaningless, invoked for everything from Stalin’s gulags to polite suggestions that workers be paid a living wage and not be fired instantly for asking for one.
Second, and more important, I’m not sure that SA has a radical left. Indeed, if we ignore for a moment the anxious accusations of the right or the boasts of capitalist authoritarians in Moscow or Caracas or Sandton pretending to be liberators of the poor, and remember that the left, at least in its theoretical form, is there to guard societies against capitalism’s more voracious urges and prevent workers from becoming alienated, expendable and dehumanised drones, I’m not sure SA has a left at all, let alone a radical one.
Certainly, we know the old left is dead. The ANC was hollowed out by crony capitalism years before Zuma and Cyril Ramaphosa surrendered their last leftist credentials at Marikana. But the new lot aren’t even trying. MK might be selling itself as Sankara-lite, but its cosy relationship with traditional leaders and apparent openness to theocracy and feudalism means Zuma’s party is, by definition, what the left abhors.
As for the EFF, well, it must be one of the few revolutionary organisations in the world to have participated in the regime’s parliament for a full decade without overthrowing anything except the odd display stand at Clicks.
Some readers, encouraged for years to associate the political left with the crimes of Pol Pot or Stalin, or at least with the corruption of the ANC, will be relieved by this state of affairs. But it is a mistake to believe those crimes are the inevitable outcome when movements start to call for fair wages or give a voice to the poor.
We need a robust, intelligent left in SA, just as we need a legitimate opposition, committed to improving our constitutional democracy. And right now we have neither.
• Eaton is an Arena Holdings columnist.
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