The EFF at their manifesto launch earlier this year. (Photo by Darren Stewart/Gallo Images via Getty Images)
We shouldn’t forget how significant the Economic Freedom Fighters’ (EFF) first parliamentary disruptions were a decade ago. The heckling, taunting, chanting and relentless — albeit deliberately misused — cries of “point of order” shook up a stolid political scene.
As juvenile and churlish as they might have been at times, South Africa needed boisterous defiance at that point in its history. The ANC ruled with a presumed majority, unchallenged by an insipid opposition that had demonstrated scant willingness to think or do differently.
With the tentacles of state capture (which we only later found out about) slithering beneath the surface, dreary politics would have wonderfully suited the country’s bad actors.
But the EFF allowed disruption to become the status quo. In only a few years parliamentary protests went from being “hold the press” events, to barely justifying a tweet. The EFF, too, had settled into a brand — one characterised by reactionary tactics and opportunism.
Over the past two weeks, we’ve seen that once-bright flame flicker weakly. Some even murmur that we’ve seen it extinguished as a relevant political force.
Floyd Shivambu, deputy president and founding member, has gone to the uMkhonto weSizwe Party — the establishment’s new noisy neighbours. EFF leader Julius Malema, faced with rumours of further departures, has doubled down on his strongman rhetoric, doing away with any pretensions that the party and his personality were ever two separate entities.
But Monday’s show of strength painted a fragile figure.
We are watching the culmination of three months of remarkable lack of introspection. Malema has refused to acknowledge any poor performance in the decline in the national elections and will seemingly watch the organisation he has built implode before he does so. That attitude, as much as anything else, explains why he could never adapt and build on the support base he had initially established.
What makes the situation infuriating to the neutral is that South African politics still needs the EFF. The Red Berets speak to the interests of the downtrodden to a degree that no one else does. Its manifesto has some objectively intriguing ideas about addressing the grossly unequal nature of our society.
Malema is equally infuriating. Intelligent and beguiling, he promised us a new type of politician after he was ostracised by the ANC. We still see glimpses of that politician when smart questions are put to him in interviews and he is given the scope to respond. But at the lectern he resorts to the same tired populist gameplan.
The party that was marked as the antidote to political stagnancy has become one of its most painful symptoms.