Consumption politics, violence and ideological flaws have laid the foundation for the problems facing the EFF, writes Eusebius McKaiser.
A tellingly tense start
I have to confess I was sh*t scared on Tuesday when a few journalists ran back into the room, looking mightily upset. Something had happened outside. Or trouble was imminent. I had chosen to stay in the room where the press conference called by Economic Freedom Fighters MP Andile Mngxitama was to take place. The rest of the media pack wanted to see whether Mpho Ramakatsa, an EFF MP chairing this media briefing, was right, that in fact there were people bussed in to stop this press conference from taking place, and that these potential disrupters would try to prevent Mngxitama, and others, from entering the hotel.
One journalist walked briskly back inside, looking like she had just seen a ghost. She told me that someone seated in a car driving up the driveway into the hotel grounds - this being the car that was transporting Mngxitama - had brandished a gun as they were driving in, pointing it in the direction of the journalists, and anyone else around them. Later, Lucky Twala, another EFF MP, would admit that he had indeed waved a gun, determined to ensure that Mngxitama got into the venue. Twala was playing Robocop. This despite a very visible police presence outside the hotel, in addition to strict security clearance measures that invited media had to go through.
This startling behaviour set a tense tone for the first part of the press conference. I kept wondering whether, at any moment now, a few enraged members or supporters of the EFF might run into the building, and try beat up Mngxitama, or chase him down the streets of Sandton, in a re-run (pardon the pun) of scenes that had played out in Cape Town, where he had held an aborted version of this press conference a few days earlier.
Eventually, however, the press conference got under way. EFF MP Khanyisile Litchfield-Tshabalala read the main remarks that they jointly prepared, the entire press conference being billed as the launch of the SAVE THE SOUL OF EFF-initiative. Oh boy, were we in for colourful, and dramatic, claims about criminality on the part of EFF leadership, but also ideological and political critiques about the same alleged criminals.
Show us the evidence
Litchfield-Tshabalala made one spectacular claim after another. The EFF 4 claimed that the senior leaders of their party hired thugs to try and assassinate Mngxitama, and a hitman had allegedly been sought outside the country to come and kill Ramakatsa. The EFF leadership was also accused of looting the party coffers. And as if criminality wasn’t enough, Julius Malema and Floyd Shivambu were also accused of being in cahoots with a faction of the African National Congress. They claimed that a meeting between Zuma and Malema was meant to take place in Maputo earlier this year, but Malema cancelled at the last minute. The aim of the EFF leadership was to sacrifice the parliamentary careers of EFF MPs they didn’t want any more, by asking the ANC to help getting them expelled from parliament; in return, allegedly, Malema would agree to not disrupt the president when he delivered his State of the Nation Address.
And it was claimed that Malema and Floyd alone know ‘details of how their constituency funding is spent…under great secrecy and intimation. No one dare ask how the money is used.’ Malema apparently even uses the party’s credit card for personal groceries of up to R10 000. What should one make of these dramatic, and rather damning, claims?
For now, there is really not much to make of these claims. The journalists were practically begging ‘show us the evidence!’ – imagine the joy of your editor when you got back to the newsroom! - with each successive question that was put to the EFF 4 but none of them could corroborate these claims with documents, visuals, audio clips, proven credit card histories, etc. No prima facie evidence, let alone evidence proving these claims beyond a shadow of a doubt.
This is rather curious. The essence of the claims was not new. They had been in the public space for several days, and so one would have thought that the EFF 4 would up the ante by putting tangible evidence in the public space, or inside the party within the relevant disciplinary structures. Little doubt this evidence-insensitivity is the result of a habit among politicians who call press conferences and then treat these like they are open mike sessions where you can perform lyrical run on sentences without offering evidence. Poetic license, I guess. It doesn’t help that the media treat the slam political poetry as copy. Perhaps next time the media pack should rather go spend time with communities underreported on, and maybe then all our politicians will appreciate the media real estate, by being more evidence-sensitive.
I had asked three specific questions to Mngxitama, and had to repeat the first two after they were not substantively addressed. If there was an attempt to assassinate you, can you share the evidence with us and have you laid charges? What documentary, photographic, or some other proof do you have that Malema and Zuma met in Maputo or were scheduled to do so while there? What are your reflections on the ideological roots, if there are any, of this internal EFF battle?
I was told, in effect, that the assassination attempt is sub judice, but that they know the person who tried to kill Mngxitama in Cape Town, and the EFF leaders behind him, and indeed, there would be a criminal investigation. The plan, we are told, was to stab Mngxitama to death. But no evidence was given as they would have to do in legal proceedings. In a similar vein, my Maputo question also went unanswered: first Mngxitama tried to make light of it, chuckling while asking me whether I really think it would be a co-incidence for Malema and Zuma to be in the same city, co-incidentally there to eat Mozambican prawns?! He was interrupted by Ramakatsa who said he would respond fully to the question, but he never did. Not even to present evidence that they were in Maputo on the same day.
So after all the gun toting drama, the secret late night call I got to attend this press conference at a quiet boutique hotel, including promises that a proverbial bomb would be dropped, we simply, in the end, got accusations already in the public domain, reiterated, and a few new ones added, but no proof. Until such evidence is provided, the rhetoric between EFF members can be labelled amateur verbal boxing, without a knock-out punch from anyone, in a timeless round of comic sparring.
But my last question, however, was, unsurprisingly, answered with great animation from Mngxitama; unsurprising because, whatever his weaknesses as a would be politician, he is (shem) essentially, as a friend put to me over dinner the other night, a really nice, harmless, sincere South African, with a fairly big brain, ideological convictions he is passionate about, and for which he is prepared to be unpopular.
Which raises the critical structural question about the EFF: Was there a fatal ideological design flaw right from the start?
Roots of an ideological battle
Mngxitama reflected aloud about my question on ideology. He claimed that yes, indeed, his motivation for this campaign to save the soul of the EFF reflects deep ideological fissures. As he put it, you cannot loot party funds, live beyond your means, be the face of consumption politics, but hope to dismantle white monopoly capital. That is a fatal contradiction that Malema and Shivambu are supposedly caught in. He argued that it is a knot that cannot be disentangled, for two reasons at least: one can’t focus effectively on the real enemy, which of course is white monopoly capital, while your attention is on looting and consuming; and the more intrinsic problem is that looting and consuming show scant regard for a pro-poor, radical economic and political agenda, making a philosophical mockery of talk about anti-black racism.
Whatever argumentation battles I have had with Mngxitama before, I have to say that I was listening attentively at this stage, looking him in the eye. He really meant every word, and it came from a sincere place. Or he is a drama graduate, unbeknownst to us. It was intellectually and politically a little cameo performance this, in a press conference otherwise obsessing about the immediate issues like disciplinary processes, why these guys are not in Cape Town to debate the president’s State of the Nation address, etc. But, upon reflection, one has to raise and explore some hard questions about Mngxitama’s ideological and political critique of his fellow EFF leadership.
First, the gun. Violence isn’t justified in politics. The attack on Mngxitama last Thursday in Cape Town indicts the leadership of the EFF for not engendering an internal political culture that is tolerant of differences, including tolerance of a member who goes outside the organisation to raise issues about the organisation. If such violence, and the disregard for the constitutional rights of others, are markers of EFF politics so early in the history of this young political party, then the leadership has to be roasted. What example have they set? What rules and habits have they inculcated in members? Clearly not ones soaked in the values of deliberative democracy. Mngxitama was spot on. This was like a mini-ANC outside the ANC.
But the irony is that Twala, and Mngxitama, arrived at this presser with a damn gun! And both Twala and Litchfield-Tshabalala peppered their remarks with military history and references in talking about their own political biographies, including a lengthy ode to our liberation armies at the outset of the press conference, with no connection to the realpolitik of the day. Litchfield-Tshabalala even offered a serious apology for being late for this press conference, saying that as a military person she respects punctuality and therefore knows that her being late is unacceptable, and that she wants us to know she is genuinely sorry. She gets military precision, and respects it. In his turn, Twala was utterly unfazed by his admission that it was indeed him carrying a gun, that he had waved it, and that yes he could not distinguish media from a real threat (not that there were any), but that he owns the gun legally, and since Thursday has decided to keep it on it, because the political climate changed on that day.
This violent rhetoric, and preparedness to use violence in public (why else brandishing the gun so casually?), is precisely the exhibition of violent, muscular politics that Mngxitama found to be an ideological disappointment in Malema and Shivambu. Yet, here he was, part of a group that included MPs steeped in the language of violence, and the habits of violence, while lecturing Malema and Shivambu for not being better democrats.
Perhaps the less jarring criticism of Malema’s politics is the aesthetic complaint about the consumption habits of those who love expensive whiskeys in Sandton clubs, pricey labels beyond the reach of the poor, and top of the range cars. Mngxitama exclaimed at one stage – get the salt ready – that it was Malema and Mngxitama, and not him, who were friends with Kenny Kunene, the King of Bling. ‘I regard Louis Vuitton as ugly!’
As the EFF 4 put it, ‘A leader who takes money from imperialism and white monopoly capital…is a servant of the paymaster and uses the struggle to enrich himself. A leader who lives beyond his means is a compromised leader.’
But this critique is limited, even if Mngxitama isn’t susceptible here to obvious hypocrisy. It’s not clear whether his distaste for these consumption patterns is rooted in sheer personal preference – some of us love sushi, others prefer pap; still others want it all! – or whether this is hard-hitting moral and political disgust. Mngxitama, like me, loves hanging out in bohemian Melville, here in Johannesburg, and Braamfontein, parts of the cityscape which, although not ostentatiously Sandtonian, certainly cannot be thought of the ultimate hangout spots for someone punting the politics of Thomas Sankara. Mngxitama is middle class, and while that is not a sin, it does mean relative wealth compared to the black majority living in the kinds of conditions that Mngxitama wishes Malema and Shivambu would take seriously enough, and conditions they should not spit on with their politics of consumption.
I’m certainly not implying Mngxitama should live in poverty as a marker of his commitment to pro-poor politics. I never bought that criticism of the lifestyles of Leftist politicians. The point is narrower: that there is a difference in scale and taste in the consumption patterns of Mngxitama and Malema, but I am not convinced that either politician escapes the aesthetics of consumption politics.
Speaking of Sankara, he is the only thinker who got more than a passing mention, as inspiration of the ideology of EFF, from the EFF 4. But this shows these guys aren’t fundamentally different to Malema et al. Sankara is a hero for some, but also simultaneously an anti-Christ for others. His politics, rooted in rhetorical commitment to eliminate poverty, implement public health policies that included vaccinating the population, emphasising and implementing progressive agrarian reform policies, and so on, are all fine and well. But he also became authoritarian in the pursuit of such noble social justice ideals. And so, while Sankara’s pissing on the neo-liberal policies of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, and rejecting aid, speak to the kind of self-affirming pro-poor, anti-racist rhetoric Mngxitama raps about with the sincerity I observed earlier, Sankara also became renowned for clamping down on fundamental freedoms like a free and open media and public space, and his military roots as a leader determined his methods once he was in power. The very violence which Mngxitama ran away from in Cape Town was a key feature of Sankara’s rule. Is Sankara healthy inspiration for South African politics? I am not so sure.
This is precisely the depth of the design flaws of the EFF. One day you get Marx thrown at you; the next day it is Fanon; then it is Sankara or a bit of Lenin; who knows, maybe Shakespeare tomorrow? On some days, we just get a hyphenated bunching of these terms. It is a mix of confusion, and when it is not confusing, the names, once you dig into their political etymology and history, scare the living daylights out of a liberal democrat. Not because competing ideologies aren’t welcome in a pluralistic society but because the militarism of someone like Sankara makes the security cluster’s jamming device looks like a toy.
Ultimately, after a disciplinary process has been dragged out and the EFF 4 are either expelled or simply break away, the EFF mothership may or may not remain intact. I don’t think this rupture in the leadership, despite being rooted in an inadequate commitment to an ideological framework that is undermined by resource accumulation, means the end is in sight for the EFF just yet. They enjoy the gift of an ANC unable or unwilling, or both, to put an end to president Zuma’s tragicomic leadership, and they are not reducing the sins of incumbency quickly enough. So the kind of rhetoric we have just heard from Malema in the debate on the State of the Nation Address, that draws attention to the material inequities that prevail in our communities, will have some impact in the body politic for a while yet, while the bling lifestyles, linguistic violence, actual violence, and ideological insincerity continue unabated.
Perhaps the ultimate diss of Mngxitama is the fact that he knew this about Malema and his friends. He was one of their most damning critics as a pundit, before turning politician. What on earth made him think he could change them? Or that he was mistaken all along? The answer, I think, is this: Mngxitama was never cut out for the mechanics of politics. He is at his best outside of party politics, penning a venomous piece of commentary about all sources of power. He should return there, even if it means burning fewer calories sitting at a desk, than when you are running down a street chased by the watchdogs of your hypocritical political principals.
* McKaiser is the author of A Bantu In My Bathroom & Could I Vote DA? A Voter's Dilemma
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.