Malema is boss! He is just telling the truth … . He is standing up for what he believes (Kagiso, interview, 2013)1
[With] Julius I took a conscious decision not to follow him, or what is said about him. Julius is on point … . But there’s no way that Julius will give us economic freedom in our lifetime. (Namhla, interview, 2013)2
Du Bois had a sustained interest in political developments in South Africa. And indeed, archival material (University of Massachusetts Amherst Special Collections MS 312 1908) shows that he had a direct hand in the liberation struggle, frequently communicating with some prominent members of the African National Congress (ANC), and even teaching some – Charlotte Maxeke was his student, for example. Fredrickson (1995, 117) notes that Pixley ka Seme’s 1906 speech, ‘The regeneration of Africa’, was influenced by Du Bois’ 1897 article entitled ‘The conservation of races’. In contemporary South Africa, the EFF, which self-defines as a Marxist-Leninist-Fanonian party, does not cite Du Bois in any of the documents it has produced. If the EFF read and internalised Du Bois’ Black reconstruction, it would gain a nuanced understanding of the opportunities and constraints it is entangled within in a context of post-apartheid reconstruction.
Additionally, the article seeks to understand the contradictions within the EFF beyond the conventional alarmist label of ‘fascism’. It therefore goes against the grain of some prominent Leftist scholars who see in the party a portent of ‘dangerous’, ‘fascist’ or ‘pugnacious populist politics’ (see Habib 2018; Satgar 2017; Hart 2015). It does this by situating the EFF within the longer ideological trajectory of the ANC. The failures of the ANC, plagued with factionalism, corruption scandals, under-delivery of basic services and a confusing market-friendly ideological position, has given an opening for the rise of the EFF. Nevertheless, the emergence of the EFF should be understood as undergirded by the Congress tradition. It will argue that the EFF Manifesto and its ‘non-negotiable pillars’ essentially constitute a contemporary revision of the Freedom Charter. The EFF remains caught within the limits of the era of reconstruction, and will therefore not emancipate Black people from oppression.
Revisiting Black reconstruction
In Black reconstruction, Du Bois argues that, after the abolishment of slavery in the US, starkly contradictory outcomes emerged: some of the freed slaves were able to access ‘education, economic opportunity and the protection of the ballot … while the mass[es] would make average labour’ (Du Bois 1935, 580). The process of reconstruction Du Bois describes represents an ‘unprecedented scramble for this new power, new wealth and new income’ (Du Bois 1935, 580). Du Bois’ central argument is that racism prevails within capitalism even when some liberties are given to Black people. Racism conceals itself and adapts to some demands of Black people. The process is untidy. It creates splinters, overlapping and reconstructing how self-determination and social change is envisioned among Black people, especially the working class. Reconstruction is partially the breaking down of ‘old standards of wealth distribution, old standards of thrift and honesty’ (Du Bois 1935, 581).
Du Bois, thus, described two elite routes in the context of reconstruction:
A section of the elite will advocate for ‘universal suffrage’. These universal values cannot ‘function without personal freedom, land and education’. In order to achieve these liberties, these elites promote the idea that with ‘an electorate of growing intelligence, democracy would truly function’ (Du Bois 1935, 384). However, Du Bois warns, the core of this rationale is to preserve elite power while those who sell their labour for a wage remain in their powerless position.
While this is unfolding, sections of the elite also become embroiled in soaring corruption scandals – events that engulf the nation and affect ‘all lines of party and geography … all sections, class and races’ (Du Bois 1935, 582). The ‘old aristocracy [will be] part and parcel of the new thieving and grafting’; during this process, a section of the elites and white people will blame and charge Black people who have been newly included within this system as the cause, ‘until it [becomes] history’ (Du Bois 1935, 583).
Within the process of reconstruction these two phenomena overlap, contradict, play against and with each other to set the stage for the political dramas that follow.
For Du Bois, the state is a key collaborator and facilitator in emboldening these overlapping routes of the elite: ‘The governments, federal, state and local, had paid three-fifths of the cost of the railroads and handed them over to individuals and corporations to use for their profit’ (Du Bois 1935, 581). Officials in the public sector are ‘on the payrolls of corporations’, and ‘the whole civil service became filled with men who were incompetent and used to paying political debts’ (Du Bois 1935, 582). Through the manipulation and strategic awarding of contracts, the state and private businesses collaborate, and new forms of allocation, distribution, and accumulation take an innovative shape:
All of the national treasure of coal, oil, copper, gold and iron had been given away for a song to be made the monopolised basis of private fortunes with perpetual power to tax labour for the right to live and work. (Du Bois 1935, 581)
Du Bois affirms that corruption is part of the logic of capitalism embedded in processes of reconstruction. The pattern he writes about below has been replicated by some now-familiar events in South Africa:
[The] late speaker of the House of Representatives marketing his rulings as a presiding officer; three Senators profiting secretly by their votes as lawmakers; five chairmen of the leading committees of the late House of Representatives exposed in robbery; a late Secretary of the Treasury forcing balances in the public accounts; a late Attorney-General misappropriating public funds; a Secretary of the Navy enriched or enriching friends by percentages levied off the profits of contracts with his departments; an Ambassador to England censured in a dishonourable speculation; the President’s private secretary barely escaping conviction upon trial for guilty complicity in frauds upon the revenue; a Secretary of War impeached for high crimes and misdemeanours – the demonstration is complete. (Du Bois 1935, 582)
As these scenes play out, both Black and white elites try to justify the pervasive poverty and inequality in society by negating their own greed, consequently putting the blame on ‘Negro suffrage’ (Du Bois 1935, 582). Another faction of the elites immunises itself by pleading for a ‘new morality’ – a need to break down the ‘monopoly of raw materials and the privileges of special laws and exclusive techniques’ (Du Bois 1935, 582). Du Bois warns that this response is located within the racist capitalism which continues in reconstruction. It would not be long, he adds, before these ‘new moral’ elites taste the ‘rewards of monopoly and privilege … and the powers bestowed’ (Du Bois 1935, 583). Their concerns and rhetoric are centred on a new plan to concretise state power and a new form of capital. These elites are not willing to surrender power into ‘the hands of labour or of the trustees of labour’ (Du Bois 1935, 583). Du Bois adds that these elites not only want to create a state which controls old and new capital and corporations, they also seek to make social contracts with the established and emerging middle class by ‘guarant[eeing] them reasonable and certain income from their investments’ (Du Bois 1935, 583), while the majority of poor Black people are left behind.
The era of reconstruction is constituted by two contradictory worlds. In one, Black people desire to pursue their freedom, opportunities, and rights. But the dominant narrative tells them that in order to obtain these ideals, they need to expand industrial competition by attracting investments, reforming the state to create new aspirant elites while the old guard remains (Du Bois 1935, 583). In the other world, the majority of Black people remain ‘without personal freedom, land and education’ (Du Bois 1935, 583). Therefore, there is an over-reliance on the exploitation of cheap labour and accumulation of profits for the few. It is a period which crystallises a narrow-minded perspective on how best to eradicate poverty and gives limited power to the working class. As this article will show through the EFF’s pillars and practice, the party is locked within this two-world conundrum: attempting to solidify its elite faction and wealth by disguising it as ‘national prosperity’ and ‘equal economic opportunity for all’, but, privately accumulating resources which ought to develop the ‘mass of the nation – that is, of the labouring poor’ (Du Bois 1935, 585). As a result, the alternatives proposed by the EFF are a form of a ‘new capitalism and a new enslavement of labour’ (Du Bois 1935, 634).
The Youth League breakaway
Reconstruction describes the paradoxes and contradictions which manifest following the legal eradication of racial oppression. The ceding of civil rights to Black people, Reed argues, brings benefit to a few Black people, while ‘Black life’ beyond that experiences no dramatic improvement (Reed 1999, 58). Since 1994, many theses have emerged within South African scholarship seeking to explain why the envisioned ideals of freedom were not attained. Gibson (2008, 684–702), for instance, notes that Mandela’s notion of the ‘Rainbow Nation’ never materialised. The South African liberation project is ‘incomplete’ (Gibson 2008): it is haunted by the legacies of apartheid and colonialism such that the white minority still control the economy and the Black majority remain in their poverty-stricken condition. Von Holdt (2012, 116–126) describes South Africa as a ‘violent democracy’. Sithole (2016) argues that the contemporary context has not broken from its historical, ontological condition – the world is still constructed to dehumanise Blackness. Forde (2011, 16) describes the present juncture through Gramsci’s words: ‘The old is dying, and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms.’
Reed (1999, 55), undoubtedly influenced by Du Bois, defines this era of reconstruction under the mantle of ‘late capitalism’, characterised by the pervasive influence of commodities on every aspect of human life. Citing Walter Benjamin, Reed (1999, 55) describes how ‘mass reproduction is aided especially by the reproduction of masses.’ There is an absence of a coherent Left politics, both within Marxist-Leninists and nationalists, to oppose the dynamics which are emboldening the commodification of the everyday. Rather, reconstruction has created a neatly confined politics of ‘leaders’ and the ‘led’ (Reed 1999, 58). Aligned with our present realities, the EFF self-defines as the vanguard of the ‘community and workers’ struggle’ (Shivambu and Smith 2014) – thus, in some respects, positioning itself as the ‘leader’ who seeks to emancipate the working class from the chains of oppression. As such the working class is expected to follow all party prescriptions to realise freedom.
The EFF situates the party’s roots within the colonial past and historical struggles for emancipation: ‘the history of the EFF began in April 1652 with the arrival of Jan van Riebeeck ostensibly to set up a vegetable garden and a refreshment station en route to trade in the East’ (Shivambu and Smith 2014, ix). This history has continued unbroken:
The present-day similar exploitation of the mineral resources of South Africa by multinational companies, as well as the concomitant exploitation of predominantly African labour power in the process, can also be traced directly to the same or similar intentions of the Dutch East India Company. (Shivambu and Smith 2014, ix)
Even though the party maintains that the present trajectory is still disenfranchising Black people, it however acknowledges there have been partial victories. Their struggle for ‘economic freedom’ is inspired by ‘the gallant fight those who came before us have mounted, generation after generation, against the superior firepower of the colonists’ (EFF Manifesto 2013). The EFF finds itself entangled in an environment where the older generation fought, confronted and struggled for political freedom, alongside the new generation which has not received the freedom envisioned by its predecessors. They carry memories of what that freedom could possibly look like (Kelley 2009, 6). Complete liberation, the party argues, requires economic emancipation.
The struggle for economic freedom is a political struggle, the primary mission of which is to ensure that all people of South Africa equitably share in the natural and economic resources of our country. (Shivambu and Smith 2014, 1)
The EFF sees itself as ‘radical, leftist, anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movement with an internationalist outlook anchored by popular grassroots formations and struggles’ (EFF Manifesto 2013). In line with its Marxist-Leninist-Fanonian approach, the EFF seeks to have ‘total ownership, control and maximisation of natural and economic resources by the previously oppressed, colonised, conquered and exploited majority’ (Shivambu and Smith 2014, 3).
Marxist-Leninist-Fanonian ideas of emancipation were developed by the Black Panther Party of the United States in the 1960s as the vehicle for organising Black people. The Black Panther Party used Fanon’s concept of the ‘Lumpenproletariat’, interpreted as those ‘who have no secure relationship or vested interest in the means of production and the institutions of capitalist society’ (Cleaver 1969, 325). Fanon’s ideas were brought in as a way to stretch Marxist tradition which was embedded in ‘racism’ and ‘class-egoism’ (Cleaver 1969). The EFF, on the other hand, asserts that its use of the concept is to analyse ‘the state, imperialism, culture and class contradictions in every society’ (EFF Manifesto 2013) – and implicitly, to mark its distinction from the ANC from which the EFF originally broke away in 2012. Indeed, the EFF’s rise and ideological position needs to be understood as part of longer developments within the ANC.
The core leadership of the EFF had once led the ANC Youth League (ANCYL) and played pivotal roles in the trajectory of the ANC, until its expulsion. In the run-up to the ANC’s 2007 Polokwane Conference and in the years that followed it, the ANCYL under Julius Malema’s leadership was seen to be a kingmaker within the Congress movement: ‘Malema was untouchable’, and instrumental in propelling Jacob Zuma to the presidency of the country (Forde 2011, 3). However, this rosy alliance did not last long. Well before Zuma’s first term had ended, their relationship was falling apart. At a point when divides within the ANC between pro- and anti-Zuma factions were reaching a point of uncontrollable tension, Malema staked his opposition to the president. Those supportive of the president within the ANCYL and the party’s National Executive Committee members came to see Malema as a liability.
One dimension of the fallout between Zuma and Malema was ideological: Malema called for the ANC to enter a new phase of ‘economic freedom’. Yet, once president, Zuma quickly showed himself unwilling to veer off the well-trodden course of neoliberal policies. The Youth League’s proposals were rejected by the majority of the ANC as unworkable, and the League’s leaders were either expelled or suspended from the organisation for their ideological challenge to the ANC (see Forde 2011; Phadi, Pearson, and Lesaffre 2018). Malema himself was hauled before a disciplinary hearing on the grounds that he had brought the party into disrepute, and was expelled (Bauer 2012). Thereafter, the ANCYL structures were dissolved and an interim committee was put in place, rendering the once fiery League servile to party leadership. For two years after the Malema grouping’s expulsion, the interim committee was unable to revive the radical edge of the ANCYL (Letsoalo 2015). A Zuma ally was elected as the League’s new president. These events demonstrate the hostility with which the former Youth League president and his allies viewed discussions of alternative economic policies within the party.
It was thus through the creation of the EFF that these former members of the ANC advanced demands for economic alternatives. Many of the core demands issued by the new party had been given early expression when they were still members of the ANC – the call that a minimum of 60% of South Africa’s mines should be nationalised and controlled by the state, for example, was first conceptualised and articulated inside the structures of the ANCYL (Shivambu and Smith 2014, 34). The EFF Manifesto, moreover, heavily draws on discussion papers published by the former ANC Youth structures when some of its leadership were members of the organisation. More fundamentally, as will be argued below, while the EFF ruptured from the structural support of the ANC and claimed a radical departure from the mother body, the new party’s manifesto was still undergirded by the Congress tradition, and the EFF has still not fundamentally broken from these ideological roots (Nieftagodien 2015). Calls for economic transformation have demonstrated strong continuities with the past, and the emergence of the EFF should thus be situated within the much longer history of continual reinvention that has characterised the ANC. In particular, they have drawn prominently on a foundational document of the ANC: the Freedom Charter.
The EFF’s debt to the Freedom Charter
In their attempt to foster the fight for ‘economic freedom in our lifetime’, the EFF proposes seven ‘non-negotiable pillars’:
1. Expropriation of South Africa’s land without compensation for equal redistribution in use.
2. Nationalisation of mines, banks, and other strategic sectors of the economy, without compensation.
3. Building state and government capacity, which will lead to the abolishment of tenders.
4. Free quality education, healthcare, houses, and sanitation.
5. Massive protected industrial development to create millions of sustainable jobs, including the introduction of minimum wages in order to close the wage gap between the rich and the poor, closing the apartheid wage gap, and promote rapid career paths for Africans in the workplace.
6. Massive development of the African economy and advocating for a move from reconciliation to justice in the entire continent.
7. Open, accountable, corrupt[ion]-free government and society without fear of victimisation by state agencies. (EFF Manifesto 2013)
At a superficial glance the EFF’s seven non-negotiable pillars look extremely progressive, especially when compared to the ANC’s neoliberal policies (Bond 2000). However, when closely evaluated, the seven pillars closely resemble a contemporary revision of the Freedom Charter of 1955. According to Jordan (1986, 146) the Freedom Charter emerged from a context where the ANC, initially established to protect the interests of the ‘Black elite’ in 1912, transformed itself mid-century. With the onset of apartheid, the ANC was forced to confront the limits of their goal of protecting Black elites: the ANC elite could not buffer the structural racism embedded in capitalism. Class ‘objectives and ambitions were [found to be] contingent upon the status of the Black community as a whole’ (Ibid., 147). Jordan (Ibid.) argues that the events which culminated in the production of the Freedom Charter in Kliptown, Soweto, thus came out of compromise between the elites and working class. This compromise infused the document with ideological tensions – tensions which, it will be argued, have been inherited by the EFF.
During the transition from apartheid to a democratic state, the Freedom Charter became ‘the starting point for consideration of the substance of a new constitution’ (Burnham 2005, 25). It served as the guideline for the Bill of Rights: ‘We reiterate our adherence to the principles of a united, non-racial, non-sexist and democratic South Africa as enshrined in the Freedom Charter’ (Burnham 2005, 25; also see Beinart 2001; Seekings 2000; Sachs 1985). Mazibuko (2017, 446) warns that the Charter confined the liberation of Black people within the legal framework of the state and extraordinarily ignored the ‘history of pillage and plunder; fire and murder; dispossession and humiliation’ which accompanied the ontology of being Black.
Just as the ANC in 1955 saw an opportunity to reconfigure itself in order to remain relevant and align with grassroots struggles, so the ANCYL-turned-EFF explicitly embraced the Charter. It understood the rising tide of discontent, demonstrated by thousands of so-called ‘service-delivery protests’, which some leftist academics identified as a ‘rebellion of the poor’ (Alexander 2010). The EFF has ‘robustly’ managed to project ‘the disillusionment and anger of young black people whose lives have been rendered precarious by neoliberal capitalism’ (Nieftagodien 2015, 447). It was an appeal to the ANC’s institutional memory, reminding the movement that the ideas agitated for by the ANCYL were consistent with the Congress tradition – an appeal which the ANC dismissed. The EFF thus left the fold of the ANC not only with a substantial number of ANCYL members, but also with one of its foundational documents. Yet a critical analysis of how the Freedom Charter is invoked and how it inspired the EFF Manifesto is mostly absent within the party and scholarship on the EFF. The EFF does acknowledge that the call for nationalisation, for example, aims ‘to realise the Freedom Charter’s clarion call’ (Shivambu and Smith 2014, 38–40). But how, precisely, has the Charter – drafted as a class compromise – been invoked by this self-proclaimed ‘anti-capitalist’ and ‘leftist formation’ in the reconstruction context? How does the EFF propose to avoid the pitfalls confronted by the ANC in its attempts to realise the Charter?
The first pillar of the EFF’s ‘non-negotiables’ centres around ‘land expropriation’. This pillar echoes the call of the Freedom Charter: ‘The land shall be shared among those who work it.’ The original Charter, reflecting apartheid realities, also noted ‘Restriction of land ownership on a racial basis shall be ended’, and that ‘Freedom of movement shall be guaranteed to all who work on the land’ (Freedom Charter 1955). The EFF adapted this call to the present context, demanding ‘expropriation without compensation’. The notion that ‘The state shall help the peasants with implements, seed, tractors and dams to save the soil and assist the tillers’ (Freedom Charter 1955) was given quite direct expression at one of the party’s annual events, where a tractor was given to a rural community (Cilliers 2018) – a small but significant gesture demonstrating how the Charter can be implemented as well as modernised. The EFF brought the motion for ‘land expropriation without compensation to the National Assembly which was supported by the ANC’ (Ntsebeza 2018). According to Ntsebeza (Ibid.), the ANC changed ‘gear, at least at the level of rhetoric, to advance a radical thesis of expropriating land without compensation’ because Zuma wanted to sustain power within a factional party that was also under pressure from the EFF’s gradual rise. Public consultations on amending the South African constitution are in progress.
Yet neither the EFF nor ANC has provided clear details on how implementation will work once the amendments are adopted (Ibid.), calling forth a critique of the Freedom Charter originally advanced by Mafeje in 1986. Mafeje was critical of the ‘petit-bourgeoisie in new states to mount their own political enterprise and frustrate any attempts towards a socialist transformation’ (Mafeje 1986, 117). As long as the slogan ‘land to the tillers’ remains hostage to elite perspectives (‘a bourgeois right’), Mafeje (Ibid., 118–119) argued that ‘the landless African peasantry which was forced into labour migration from the late nineteenth century onwards will never be able to lay claim to the 87 per cent of the land’ that was taken away from them during colonial conquest. Mafeje wrote at a time when the two routes of elite adaptation articulated by Du Bois were not as manifest as in the current context of reconstruction.
The EFF frames its call for the nationalisation of key strategic sectors in terms of the Freedom Charter’s declaration that ‘The people shall share in the country’s wealth!’ According to the Charter, ‘the mineral wealth beneath the soil, the banks and the monopoly industry shall be transferred to the ownership of the people as a whole.’ As part of realising this goal, the EFF seeks not only to acquire a minimum of 60% of South African mines, but also to create a state bank, ‘which will exist in the current regulatory framework, yet with clear developmental, financial inclusion and redress mandate’ (Shivambu 2018b). The party has pushed a persuasive advocacy campaign for the creation of a Sovereign Wealth Fund, recently endorsed by the ANC government, funnelling proceeds from mineral extraction towards the goal of ‘self-governance’. This fund aims to be ‘an instrument to save wealth for future generations, mostly in nation-states that are economically dependent on finite resources’ (Shivambu 2018a). The high developmental expectations that the EFF attributes to a Sovereign Wealth Fund appear to be informed by the examples of China – an authoritarian state – and Norway. But the party says little about less successful examples of Sovereign Wealth Funds elsewhere in the world, and the lessons that might be drawn from those cases (the Malaysian Sovereign Wealth Fund, for instance, is currently in crisis [Nakano 2019], and the Libyan example offers further warnings). As Mafeje (1986, 119) reminds us, the key limitation of the Charter is that it does not provide details on the how. Thus, ‘nationalisation policies and state capitalism can no longer be treated as progressive measures, without relating them to the question of balance of power between contending classes in the transitional period’ (Ibid.). The ambiguity in the how of state capitalism and nationalisation is a function of the EFF’s attempts to navigate the balance of power between two routes of elites. However, these routes are shifting and neither has sustained power – making it difficult for the EFF to decisively align its tactics and manifesto.
The EFF’s call for ‘free quality education’ also speaks to an ideal of the Freedom Charter: ‘The door of learning and culture shall be opened.’ The expansion of education, it assumes, will result in job creation. The EFF’s objectives of providing and creating ‘millions of jobs’ through industrialisation and ‘local beneficiation’ aims to optimise ‘minerals extracted from beneath South Africa’s soil’ (EFF Manifesto 2013). This ambition furthermore echoes the Freedom Charter’s promise that ‘There shall be work and security!’ The Charter had called for a ‘forty-hour working-week, [and] a national minimum wage’, and sought to give ‘Miners, domestic workers, farm workers and civil servants’ equal workplace rights. Similarly, the EFF wants to:
emancipate [workers] from economic subjugation and oppression. The African working class suffered and continue to suffer excessive levels of oppression and exploitation as Mineworkers, Farm workers, underpaid Domestic workers, Petrol Attendants, Private Security Guards, and constitute the large pool of reserve labourers as they are [unemployed]. (EFF Manifesto 2013)
In its calls to develop an ‘African economy’, the EFF demonstrates a pan-African orientation. The call by the Freedom Charter that ‘There shall be peace and friendship’ signals that this pan-Africanism is an old tradition within the ANC. The Freedom Charter adds:
The people of the protectorates – Basutoland, Bechuanaland and Swaziland – shall be free to decide for themselves their own future; The rights of the peoples of Africa to independence and self-government shall be recognised and shall be the basis of close co-operation.
Across its manifesto, the EFF’s adherence to the tenets of the Freedom Charter in its quest for economic emancipation is evident in the shared belief in the centrality of the state as the vehicle to bring about radical change. In essence, the party seeks to facilitate its agenda through the state: by reforming the state to better leverage capitalism towards pro-poor goals. This echoes the ANC’s imagination of the 1950s, which sought to dismantle white hegemony and reshape capitalism to include Black elites. The EFF is thus essentially repeating the same ideological options that the ANC presented when it was attempting to relate to the radicalism which was brewing in various working-class communities. Yet, as with the ANC of the 1950s, the EFF seeks to incorporate working-class demands by aligning them to the Black middle class and emerging elites. Oddly, in formulating their revolutionary manifesto, they seem to have neglected any historical analysis of the nature of the class alliance that the ANC galvanised in producing the Charter, and indeed theorisation about ways to circumvent the pitfalls that this presented (see Mafeje 1986).
As will be argued below, the EFF is caught in an ideological lacuna: while entangled in a political strategy which seeks to emancipate Black people from economic oppression, it is simultaneously battling to free itself from perpetuating the inferior status of Blackness which still informs the fabric of reconstruction. The next section interrogates some of the tactics it is employing as it tries to navigate the conundrum which dominates the reconstruction epoch.
The EFF in practice
The EFF’s contradictions display themselves acutely in their practical implementation. This section shows how the party moulds itself within the elites routes as it attempts to navigate reconstruction. For instance, in 2016, a prolonged campaign by civil society advocating for President Zuma to resign started to gain major traction. During this period, the National Prosecution Authority (NPA) laid charges of fraud against then Minister of the National Treasury Pravin Gordhan and others (Makhafola 2016). The EFF interpreted the act as a plan by Zuma’s allies in the ANC ‘to remove Gordhan and place their crony to loot the Treasury. They are using the NPA to charge and remove Gordhan’ (Ibid.). In response, the party staged a protest to defend Gordhan, the ‘South African democracy and against state capture’ (Ibid.). The EFF’s interventions were crucial in pushing Jacob Zuma to eventually resign in 2018.
Two years later, the EFF called Gordhan ‘corrupt’, ‘a dog of white monopoly capital’ and insisted that ‘he hated black people’ (Mitchley 2018). The act highlights opportunism from the party. Also, it demonstrates how the EFF is incapable of striking a balance between the ‘new moral’ and ‘corrupt’ elites. Thus, a calculated approach is far more difficult for the party because it is implicated and complicit in these routes of elites. Accusations of corruption against the EFF leadership are long-standing, persisting since their time in the ANC, and these have been weaponised against the party. Their attack on Gordhan coincided with allegations that some of the party’s leadership were involved in the looting of a Black-owned corporate finance and retail bank – the Venda Building Society (VBS). The bank was put under curatorship in 2018 (Corruption Watch 2018). When news broke about the status of the bank, the then spokesperson of the EFF argued: ‘Opting for curatorship as the first measure undermines the bank and undermines black people’s participation in the ownership and control of financial services institutions’ (Ibid.). Thus, manipulating concrete historical and present realities of racism and its consequences on the plight of Black people. A few weeks after his statement, news reportage claimed that:
the EFF received over R1.8-million in illicit VBS funds flowing through two fronts. An additional R430,000 was also paid in three tranches towards a luxury Sandown property where Malema used to stay since as early as 2012 – a property which has recently ostensibly been bought by and registered under the EFF’s name. (Van Wyk 2018)
Since the abuse of state resources has become a natural way to acquire wealth for all elites, the EFF further emboldens this crude method through its consumerism. Malema on numerous occasions has been called out for wearing expensive clothing while his party seeks to liberate the working class. His response: ‘Anyone who voted for the EFF knows that I came to the EFF wearing Gucci. No one can tell me what to wear. What I wear does not influence my political consciousness and commitment to the revolution’ (Moloko 2019). Of course, some of the criticism is embroiled in a historical idea that argues: ‘all Negroes were lazy, dishonest and extravagant’ (Du Bois 1935, 711). As a result, some of those who oppose the party have advanced parochial analyses about where the party’s leadership lives and what it wears. In defending itself from these critiques, ironically, the EFF still plays within the confines of these racist narratives – discourse Du Bois crystallised:
These men knew not only nothing about the government, but also cared for nothing except what they could gain for themselves … . Some Negroes spent their money foolishly, and were worse off than they had been before. (Du Bois 1935, 711–712)
Du Bois mentions other racist narratives which suggest ‘Negroes were responsible for bad government’ (1935, 712). ‘Although the Negroes were now free, they were also ignorant and unfit to govern themselves. The world was not built to view Black people as equals’ (1935, 711). Blackness, when it commits even the slightest mistake, maintains a ‘non-human status’, leading to the recycling of statements which never seem to go away, such as:
The Negroes got control of these states. They had been slaves all their lives, and were so ignorant they did not even know the letters of the alphabet. Yet they now sat in the state legislatures and made the laws. (Du Bois 1935, 711)
Although its tactics are contradictory, the EFF’s fundamental strength is its ability to mobilise its members to occupy the streets when its inconsistencies are revealed. The EFF mobilised its members over social media after the keynote speaker at the 2018 Journalist of the Year event held by the biggest telecommunication firm, Vodacom, labelled the EFF ‘abusers of democracy’ (Seleka 2018). The party accused the company of political bias, and the then spokesperson took to social media:
Fighters don’t be surprised when @Vodacom gathers journalists to strategies on how to deal with EFF. It just means our fight is right where it belongs, in the belly of the beast: #WhiteMonopolyCapitalism. We would not be doing well if they were not all uniting against us #Asijiki. (Seleka 2018)
The following day, its members went to various stores and vandalised them. However, immediately after meeting the firm’s executives, the EFF leadership condemned its members for the violence which they initially supported (Ibid.).
The EFF’s contradictions were also vividly on display after the 2016 local government election when it formed a coalition with the Democratic Alliance (DA), whose roots stem from the National Party. The party noted the alliance was not a formal coalition but the party nevertheless supported the DA to govern in two metropolitan areas and a few other municipalities (Marrian et al. 2016). In subsequent years, the alliance fell apart and Malema announced: ‘They refused with their votes. They don’t want to vote with us but they want us to vote with them’ (Nicolson 2019).
The party seeks to position itself as the party which represents the working-class struggle. As a result, any dissent within and outside the party is smashed, and the staging of protests against its detractors is a central tool in maintaining relevance and power as the opposition. Although the EFF seeks to be the representative of the working class, it is suspicious of the idea that the working class has agency of its own. This is pronounced, first, in the EFF’s account on the role of trade unions, which, it argues:
will soon be swallowed into the same politics of reform. All those who push for a radical agenda will be isolated, banished and portrayed as anti-government. The dominant faction in the trade union movement will rid itself of progressive leaders. Despite massive and clear ideological differences, the trade union movement will once again encourage workers to vote for the current government, despite its directionlessness [sic]. Workers will again be misled and tied to their oppressors through sentiments of historical significance and blind loyalty. (EFF Manifesto 2013)
The party also regards the ability of the working class to organise themselves in a new form with distrust: ‘These independent trade unions are not a political alternative, because they will only deal with workers’ interests and will make workers believe that their problems are workplace issues only’ (EFF Manifesto 2013). To avoid revolt in the working class, the EFF promises ‘higher wage and other privileges’ (Du Bois 1935, 583). Indeed, the slogan of its rallies and its 2019 Election Manifesto was ‘land and jobs now’.
The EFF also shows disregard for social movements, which it claims ‘will remain on the margins of mainstream politics and only mobilise on sector-based issues, which will not relate to mainstream electoral and power politics’ (EFF Manifesto 2013), even though grassroots movements have been active for at least the past 15 years and, in some cases, have coerced the state to concede to some reforms. For example, the Anti-Privatisation Forum was crucial in the fight against the government’s pre-paid water meters. As a result, six free kilolitres of water were given to people.
The party is skilled in incorporating some grassroots demands; however, its insincere attempts show in its selective implementation approach. For instance, many feminist activists have been critical of the party’s misogynist tendencies. In the 2019 local election, the party failed to attract significant numbers of women voters (Tandwa 2019). To remedy this problem, at the National Assembly in 2019, three women were elected to positions in the top six leadership committee. However, this change in the leadership coincided with the sidelining of some prominent women members within its ranks. A Gauteng leader, Mandisa Mashego, accepted the nomination for the position of secretary general, although she did not win (Du Plessis 2019). According to a news report, her nomination acceptance was in defiance of Malema (Mahlati 2020). Several months later, Mashego resigned as ‘the chairperson of the EFF in Gauteng and as the head of the EFF caucus at the Gauteng provincial legislature’ (Ibid.). She blamed illness, and claimed that she wanted to expand her activism: ‘My activism needs to broaden which I could not do within the EFF’ (Ibid.). Her statement highlights how non-party-aligned ideas are not welcome, and therefore resignation seems to be the only way to exercise alternative potentials.
Moreover, as I write this article, the world is dealing with the coronavirus pandemic which has seen the imposition of a global lockdown, including in South Africa. The country’s lockdown, however, has highlighted the brutality of police and soldiers against the working class across our townships and informal settlements. In the midst of these incidents, the EFF released a statement:
The EFF notes with great concern, that people continue to visit malls with children as if we are not under a Health threat from Coronavirus. This conduct undermines our collective efforts in the fight against Coronavirus, and renders us all weak in this fight against the national and world crisis … . Furthermore, we urge the government to continue on the same hardline restrictions it has taken on the hospitality and entertainment industry (shebeens, taverns, restaurants, night clubs etc) to extend it with the same vigor and sternness to the faith-based organisations … . The government must not hesitate to arrest any reckless leader who encourages his or her congregants to continue to gather in numbers, despite the call by the President. (Pambo 2020)
Once again, the above statement cannot break from the harshness that the conditions of reconstruction have produced. The EFF has been complicit in framing the root cause of inequality in a discourse which at times is blind to – and indeed fosters – racist knowledge, especially for working-class people. In reconstruction where two worlds exist, its tactics manifest themselves viscerally – a challenge the EFF is yet to overcome.
Conclusion
The EFF has proved supportive of some crucial working-class struggles, supporting victims of the Marikana massacre, for instance, and ousting former President Jacob Zuma. For three years it managed to sustain a campaign which exposed the corruption that existed within the Zuma administration. When it won seats in parliament during the 2014 general election, it managed to awaken a layer of society which ordinarily would not have been interested in parliamentary politics or advancing substantive criticism of this institution. In many respects, the party has ignited an unprecedented political consciousness where communities, and society more broadly, are more carefully interrogating the role of the state and its institutions. The EFF’s manifesto also carries greater radical potential than the ANC. Nevertheless, it offers little hope of rupturing the framework of capitalism and its racial underpinnings. Access to liberties, although important, does not negate how Blackness has been constructed through the mutation of racist capitalism.
While far more radical than the ANC, the EFF nonetheless has not moved outside the normative framework of the two routes of elite adaptation described by Du Bois that have developed in the context of reconstruction. It will, however, make different mistakes from the ANC. The EFF is caught between the conundrum of two worlds: one is using universal suffrage to consolidate its elite power; the other is abusing state resources to refine its elite formation. These worlds overlap; at times they rupture and contradict each other. The EFF finds itself moving between these worlds. Just as Walsh (2008) wrote about how the left are ‘mimicking’ the World Bank discourse of the ‘poor’ within a social movements context, this article has argued that the EFF is caught in that contradictory space described by Du Bois within which it seeks to emancipate Black people, while at the same time its manifesto and practice are embroiled in a discourse perpetuating their inferior conditions. Neither of these two worlds will emancipate the Black working class nor overcome the racist logic of capitalism.