By R.W. JOHNSON
Due to the media blackout over the Christmas season, readers may have missed the highlight of the EFF’s National People’s Assembly, held at Nasrec in Johannesburg in December.
Julius Malema – re-elected unopposed as leader yet again – treated delegates to a three-and-a-half-hour speech. It is worthy of some analysis for what it tells one about this radical strand of African nationalism and, indeed, about the South African variant of African nationalism altogether.
There were odd bits of information: the EFF has just had a membership drive and signed up one million members. This is probably meaningless: Zuma did the same thing for the ANC in KwaZulu-Natal when he was president but very few of those new members remained active, let alone paid annual dues. Interestingly, 66% of the delegates to the NPA this year were women – clearly Malema’s attempt to re-balance his party. Again, it would be surprising if he succeeded: poll data have always shown a heavy preponderance of young males in the EFF’s following.
The EFF has now celebrated its 10th anniversary, and although Malema doesn’t say so, he is not where he had hoped to be. As a youngster he grew up in the environment of ANC organisations and closely observed his elders, seeing how they used ideological issues to advance their personal interests, how they got their hands in the till, and the mistakes they made. Malema is extremely shrewd and was sure he’d learned enough to take him to the very top of the ANC, despite his complete lack of a struggle history.
But things haven’t worked out quite as he hoped. When, in last year’s general elections, the ANC vote dropped below 50%, he had visions of himself as deputy president and Floyd Shivambu as finance minister. He now talks of how the EFF turned down the ANC’s invitations to join the government – but he is simply imagining this. In fact, they turned down his approaches, and issued no invitations to him at all.
So here he is, already 43, still out in the cold, with his support down from its 2019 level and several years of hard slog ahead, having been overtaken by the MKP and abandoned by many of his closest associates.
This is not at all what he expected. He talks of how the EFF depends on “the elimination of voter apathy”, but he must know that abstention from voting has steadily increased down the years, and took a further downward jump in 2024.
That said, Malema is not the only one whose fortunes have taken a downward turn. The presence at the EFF conference of Mmusi Maimane – wishing the Fighters all the best – was difficult to interpret as anything but a sign that Build One South Africa has also turned into a dead end, vastly disappointing Maimane’s (admittedly overblown) predictions of electoral success. The fact that he is looking around for friends among the Fighters suggests a degree of desperation.
Malema proclaims himself a Marxist, Leninist and Fanonist,and takes his listeners through an extensive explanation of each figure. It is in fact a hodge-podge. Both Marx and Lenin emphasised class above all and were very much internationalist, while Fanon is all about nationalism and race, which are quite incompatible things.
Malema wants to believe that the EFF is a working-class party – but it isn’t. A high proportion of his supporters are unemployed and they are more defined by age than by class. It is a rag-tag party of petty bourgeois and lumpen elements. And there is a strong element of playing soldiers about it – the party is organised into Commands, and he addresses his supporters as “Fighters”.
This is, of course, a game the ANC plays too. Everyone wants to show they are militant by dressing up in red uniforms or T-shirts. One remembers Winnie Mandela dressed up in military fatigues or, even more ridiculous, Lindiwe Sisulu in the bizarre combination of military fatigues and high heels. Or Jacob Zuma’s signature song, “Give me my machine gun”. In fact neither of these ladies ever saw action, nor did Jacob Zuma ever wield a machine gun.
The ANC set up MK and then didn’t know what to do with it, kept it in camps in Angola, Zambia and elsewhere, and never risked it in confrontations with the SADF or even the SAP. There is a great emphasis on playing soldiers precisely because African nationalism in South Africa never managed to create an army, let alone attempted to fight a war. The only real point about MK was to create an image of militancy.
Much of Malema’s rhetoric strains for the same militant effect. He invents an imagined history of resistance which never actually happened. Thus he talks about “our ancestors who bled so that we can stand here today and continue the historic struggle for the land and the economy”, and “the millions who have come before us, who died fighting against colonial domination”. Yet there were no such battles in which millions fought colonialism.
The frontier wars in the Eastern Cape were essentially punitive raids for cattle theft. Only the Zulus in 1879 raised a substantial challenge to the colonial authorities – and that ended with overwhelming defeat as Chelmsford’s cannons bombarded defenceless African villages. Malema talks of Shaka waging “a courageous war of resistance”, but that is, of course, quite wrong. Shaka’s wars were against other Africans.
The same imaginary history is used to justify the use of violence. Thus, Malema insists that “decolonisation is always a violent phenomenon”, yet the fact is, of course, that only in a few cases did decolonisation in Africa depend on armed struggles. Overwhelmingly, in both Francophone and Anglophone Africa, decolonisation happened peacefully and by mutual agreement. In Nigeria, the most populous African country, African leaders actually asked the British to delay the granting of independence.
Similarly, Malema wants to insist that “Our people living in shacks is violence”. But is it? From time immemorial, Africans across the continent have built their own housing. South Africa is an exceptional case where the state, at least for some years after 1994, was expected to provide housing. One of the biggest shack settlements in Africa is in Nairobi, but the Kenyan government has never seen house-building as its obligation.
And all this straining for effect boils down to attaining “economic freedom”, a most unMarxist term which is never explained. As far as one may understand it, “economic freedom” seems to stand for the feeding frenzy unleashed by 1994 – an elemental demand for higher consumption of virtually everything. This notion of “economic freedom” is completely unconnected to any conception of hard work, higher qualification, or any of the usual routes to material success. It seems to be just a demand for more – of everything – as of right. It is just the elemental cry of the child gazing into a shop window, hungering for everything within.
Malema finally unveils the EFF’s economic policies. They are monumentally wishful. He wants to expropriate all land without compensation and nationalise all mines, banks and other major enterprises, also without compensation. He also promises free and high-quality education, health care, housing and sanitation, and promises a massive “protected” industrial development to provide millions of jobs. He doesn’t offer to say how all this will be paid for, which is just as well, for no one would invest in such an economy. This is either a sign of his complete economic illiteracy or his belief that one may as well promise the earth since promises are free.
What is one to make of all this? In common with the SACP and the MKP, the EFF clearly believes that the road to power is built by being more militant than anyone else. That is, all these parties are still captive to the revolutionary tradition of the 1960s and 1970s – indeed, Malema, like these other parties and the ANC, still makes much of “the revolution” which, of course, we didn’t actually have. None of them want to accept the fact that a negotiated transition to democracy was the only way – and certainly the way which was in fact taken – just as they all find it almost impossibly difficult to accept that the decline of African nationalism has made coalition government inevitable.
The strange specificity of African nationalism in South Africa is that it is a hugely destructive force. The ANC has not merely quadrupled the numbers of the unemployed, and wrecked most of the country’s major cities, but it is hard to see that it has achieved much that is positive at all.
It has, for example, presided over the ruination of black education, something it really might have been expected to prioritize. It continues to insist on completely impossible policies like NHI or the Mining Charter. Yet the alternatives to the ANC – the EFF, SACP and MKP — all advocate policies that would massively increase the damage, reducing South Africa to a wasteland.
Nationalism is not normally like this. It is obvious, for example, that Chinese or Vietnamese nationalism have accentuated the rapid development and industrialisation of their countries, with rising standards of living and production. It is also clear that the regimes in Rwanda, Mauritius and Botswana – to take local cases – have also achieved striking advances in education, living standards and production, using very different methods.
But the several variants of African nationalism in South Africa are caught up in a competitive struggle to destroy their own economy and inflict misery upon their own people. One stands aghast, and realises that what one is watching is more a pathology than any sort of development.
FEATURED IMAGE: EFF ‘commander-in-chief’ Julius Malema on the podium at the party’s National People’s Assembly in December. (Wikimedia Commons)