PHAKAMISA MAYABA / Nearly two months since Floyd Shivambu’s departure from the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), leader Julius Malema has taken stock of the ‘betrayal’ and composed himself. In place of the morose expression, a straight face. A toning down of the broadsides at anyone else who might wish to follow Shivambu out the door.
But the blustering figure – big physically, bigger in infamy – who had ‘white monopoly capital’ sweating bullets as he conjured up the spectre of a tinpot African dictator — is, at least in the estimation of this armchair critic, waning.
The numbers are thinning. Juju was once a reliable audience-rouser, but nowadays one never knows what to expect. One partly suspects that Shivambu’s exit has contributed more to the degeneration than the CIC would care to admit. Like the playground bully known to command fear and respect, until one ‘victim’ has the nerve to stand up to him, suddenly opening the floodgates for others to try their luck. It’s hard for an emperor to come back when he’s been spotted butt-naked.
Since the May election, it has been Annus Horribilis for the Red Brigade. The self-styled ‘government in waiting’ had proclaimed its intention to at least dethrone the Democratic Alliance (DA) as the Official Opposition. Instead, it only scraped into fourth place, beaten by both the DA and the barely six months old MKP.
Following the election, Shivambu, regarded by most analysts as a smart chap with a knack for policy development, has tossed in his lot with the newbie. Juju was swift to play it down, declaring: ‘We are doing much better now, without him.’ Reality, however, paints a different picture.
In two months, the EFF will be heading to an elective conference, the first where some members may call the bluff on the revolutionary rhetoric. Remember Naledi Chirwa, the EFF MP who was fined for her absence during the parliamentary budget speech on 21 February? She later claimed that this was due to a sick baby. Not long after her public apology, she found her name stone last on the party’s list of candidates for the May general election. Malema attributed her positioning (many called it a ‘demotion’) to a democratic party process, but the court of public opinion wasn’t so sure.
This incident strengthened the suspicion that Malema’s leadership proclivities were nakedly dictatorial. So too his arbitrary decision that no matter what the EFF constitution said about defectors, the door would always be open to Shivambu. Such comments – even if they were later retracted – could not have sat well with an EFF that portrays itself as a home for the educated. What if individuals like Shivambu were merely playing to the CIC’s whims in as far as the GNU was concerned, when deep down they actually yearned to be part of it?
Outside of Malema’s party issues, the political landscape is littered with talk of growing the economy and throwing a few baddies in jail, and the revolutionary messaging doesn’t – outside of the MKP – carry much gravitas. It seems that economic livelihood has taken precedence over political platitudes.
When the ANC started to talk about a GNU, Malema demanded that the DA be excluded and that Shivambu should be made minister of finance. This was a massive miscalculation – the ANC and DA simply sailed on, leaving the EFF in the cold and very far from the spoils of cabinet positions.
For someone with Juju’s temperament, this must sting. Ramaphosa, the billionaire president who supposedly bends the knee to unseen white principals and could not possibly speak on behalf of the marginalised proles, is faring pretty well as captain of the GNU. He has gradually roped in the most unlikely participants, and even those who haven’t openly said so, seem grateful for the benefits.
Patriotic Alliance leader Gayton Mckenzie has not passed up the opportunity to thank the Buffalo, and to point out that those who take a dim view of the new arrangement do so because they’ve been left out in the cold. The DA’s John Steenhuisen is grinning widely, flashy suits and all. The Freedom Front Plus’s Pieter Groenewald is staging prison raids in a bid to show that there’s a new sheriff in the corridors of incarceration. And Leon Schreiber is promising to turn the home affairs department into a ‘Home Affairs from Home,’ where users may not need to visit a physical building for routine services in the future.
Everybody seemingly wants to be seen to be working, even though, according to Daily Maverick, ‘signed ministerial performance agreements still seem some way off’. Regardless, nobody wants to be upstaged by their ‘colleagues’ in government, who also remain their political rivals.
Even COSATU, infantilised into a ‘yes man’ in the Tripartite Alliance, only to be emasculated during the ‘nine wasted years’, has seemingly regained its libido, and called for national stayaway on Monday 7 October as a National Day of Action against the ‘crippling economic crisis’.
A noble move, as it was also ‘World Day for Decent Work’, but one may still ask whether staying away from work on the day where everyone was gauging the 100-day mark of this unlikely government that will obviously affect the common worker more than the bureaucratic cheeseboys was the wisest thing to do.
In the meantime, the GNU is wading knee-deep through both vilification and acceptance. Somehow, even the pessimists have come to terms with the fact that it is holding together, and learning to crawl. So far, the main ous seem to be getting on fine, and there are lots of promises and handshakes before the cameras. However, there are few signs yet of wiping out the deficit that’s been building up over at least the past 15 years.
EDITOR’S NOTE: In results published on 2 October, a survey conducted by the Social Research Foundation found that 60% of voters believed the NGU was working well, and was moving in the right direction. It also found that support for the ANC and DA – key players in the GNU — had increased by up to 10 percentage points. However, while support for Jacob Zuma’s MKP was steady at 12%, support for the EFF had ‘tanked’ to just under 6%.
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This is an edited version of an article that first appeared on Phakamisa Mayaba’s website, eParkeni. Used with permission.