EFF’s toxic narcissism raises red flags

It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment that the credibility of the EFF, once SA’s most powerful changemaker, began to crumble.

But what is clear is that the opposition party, which launched at a time when SA’s political landscape seemed ripe for disruption, now embodies the very thing it once claimed to hate: an organisation that demands accountability from everyone except itself.

Nothing has illustrated the full extent of the EFF’s ethical disintegration more powerfully than its open incitement of violence against Clicks over a racially offensive advert for Tresemmé hair products, posted on the retailer’s website this month.

The advert, which has since been removed, described the hair of two black women as being "dry and damaged" and "frizzy and dull", and the hair of two white women as "fine and flat" and "normal".

It’s undeniable that the advert was both racist and spectacularly stupid. Clicks and Tresemmé parent company Unilever unreservedly apologised for it almost immediately.

But the way in which the EFF chose to "protest" threatened to undermine the genuine pain and outrage expressed by black women over the way their hair had been depicted.

EFF leader Julius Malema’s order to his followers to "ATTACK!" Clicks unsurprisingly led to violence, reported petrol-bombings of stores, vandalism and, in one incident, a threat from an EFF leader to burn down a hospital that housed a Clicks pharmacy.

Clicks was forced to go to court to obtain an interim interdict that prohibited the EFF from inciting violence against its stores and harassing and intimidating its staff and customers.

In other words, it obtained legal protection from manifestly criminal conduct.

The EFF responded with all the grace and tact of an elderly member of an organised crime syndicate, ominously warning: "It should be clear to Clicks that the court has not declared the protest illegal.

"Accordingly, all members and ground forces of the EFF must intensify their efforts to ensure Clicks does not operate, and this must be done through peaceful means."

The veiled threat contained in that statement was obvious and unsurprising, given that the EFF and its leadership continuously use fear as the ultimate political weapon.

Malema famously warned in an interview with TRT World in 2018 that "we’ve not called for the killing of white people, at least for now. I can’t guarantee the future."

Asked by the presenter if he grasped that his words may be interpreted as a "genocidal call", Malema responded: "Crybabies, crybabies!"

Two days after the EFF threatened to "ensure Clicks does not operate", it announced that Unilever had agreed to take all Tresemmé products off the shelves for 10 days and donate a minimum of 10,000 sanitary pads and sanitisers to informal settlements, identified by the party, as a demonstration of its remorse.

It was apparent that the agreement reached between the company and the party was not the result of fair and even-handed discussions. It was a hostage negotiation.

The EFF, once razor-sharp in its pursuit of accountability, now appears to focus on attacking anyone who asks for that same level of accountability

Worse still, the EFF — while savagely attacking anyone who dared to question the violence the party used to effectively force Unilever to agree to its terms — then also sought to distance itself from that violence, which it claimed was the work of "agent provocateurs who wish to tarnish the good name and reputation of the EFF".

In other words, while demanding a "reckoning" for Clicks over an advert it had withdrawn and for which it had apologised, the EFF absolutely refused to take any responsibility for how the conduct and words of its leaders may have directly incited the violence and vandalism that reportedly forced the closure of 400 Clicks outlets.

As the EFF’s recent history will demonstrate, this staggering level of hypocrisy is nothing new.

In January, when the party was ordered by the Joburg high court to apologise for falsely claiming that journalists Anton Harber and Thandeka Gqubule had worked for the apartheid government’s Stratcom disinformation campaign, it posted a tweet: "In terms of the court order, we unreservedly apologise for the allegations made against Mrs Thandeka Gqubule-Mbeki and Mr Anton Harber."

While the brevity of the tweet was telling, so was the time it was posted: 3.03am.

A month later, Malema apologised to President Cyril Ramaphosa for claiming he had abused his late wife, Nomazizi Mtshotshisa. The president had earlier apologised to Malema and his family, after ANC MP Boy Mamabolo accused the EFF leader of assaulting his wife.

"In retrospect, I accept that I should have known better not to indulge myself in the same degeneration that the ANC caucus visited upon my person and that of my wife," Malema said in a statement. "It was therefore a desperate act of personal defence which I now regret because of how critical the matter of gender-based violence is for all of us as a country."

Those words would prove particularly ironic during the Clicks protests. EFF members were caught on camera manhandling eNCA reporter Nobesuthu Hejana as she tried to report on an EFF demonstration outside a Clicks store in Cape Town.

After eNCA posted a video of the incident, the EFF’s Mbuyiseni Ndlozi tweeted that "merely touching" Hejana was "not harassment".

"The touch has to be violent, invasive, or harmful to become harassment!" he tweeted. The remark was slammed by women on Twitter as not only deeply misogynistic but, in a country ravaged by gender-based violence, also extremely dangerous.

Yet again, Ndlozi’s comments illustrated the EFF’s apparent refusal to take any real responsibility for the conduct of its members or to acknowledge how words uttered by its leaders emboldened certain of its members in their harassment and intimidation of a woman journalist who was simply trying to do her job.

Ndlozi’s words arguably also demonstrate just how far from grace the EFF has fallen.

When the party launched in July 2013, Jacob Zuma had been in power for four years. The cracks that would turn into seismic political and economic earthquakes during his administration had already started to show.

Reports about exorbitant taxpayer-funded upgrades to Zuma’s Nkandla homestead had led the then public protector, Thuli Madonsela, to launch a history-defining investigation that she would pursue doggedly, despite being denied access to information and threatened with court action by the ministers of the security cluster.

The results of Madonsela’s investigation would eventually be released in 2015, sparking court battles that would cement the public protector’s authority as a watchdog body and define the EFF as a legal and political force to be reckoned with.

When Zuma ignored Madonsela’s orders to pay back a portion of the state funds spent on his swimming pool, cattle kraal, chicken coop, amphitheatre and other nonsecurity upgrades, the EFF demanded accountability from the president in SA’s highest court. And it won.

"Pay back the money" became a refrain that echoed through parliament, transforming what was once the most staid arm of the state into SA’s most popular reality TV show.

The EFF was, it seemed, a political rock star.

The party’s star only seemed to rise as Zuma’s plummeted. Bizarre late-night cabinet reshuffles were followed by revelations that the president’s most important decisions may have been made for him by the Gupta family, prompting another far-reaching Madonsela report on the capture of the SA state.

Again, the EFF bolstered the public protector against Zuma’s failed efforts to block the release of that report and, later, to review it in court.

When the Pretoria high court ruled in Madonsela’s favour, she and her daughter Wenzile — then an outspoken EFF supporter — were sitting on a court bench surrounded by the red-clad party faithful.

As Madonsela fought back tears, EFF members celebrated her victory, in a moment that would be beamed across television screens all over SA.

But even then there were signs that the energetic convictions of the fighters had the potential to turn into something nasty.

The EFF openly targeted reporters from the Gupta-owned television station ANN7, refusing them interviews, denying them access to press conferences and openly bullying them — without any significant pushback from other media organisations.

Maybe it was at that moment that the party and its leadership started becoming convinced that it had the right to silence voices it didn’t like. Or perhaps it was at the height of its incredibly successful litigation and political campaign against the Zuma presidency that the EFF would start becoming intoxicated by its own sense of self-importance.

Perhaps it was then that the confidence that had once suffused the upstart political organisation with endlessly watchable charisma had turned into something else: a deep and poisonous narcissism.

It was after Zuma stepped down from office, after the ANC leadership victory of his political adversary Cyril Ramaphosa, that the full implications of that narcissism became apparent.

The party, once razor-sharp in its pursuit of political accountability, now appears to focus its energy on attacking anyone who asks for that same level of accountability from it — including, in an almost tragic twist of irony, Madonsela herself.

In the apparent absence of any capacity to genuinely self-reflect, the party’s leadership may continue to delude themselves that their ability to scare people into acquiescing to their demands demonstrates their political prowess, relevance and power.

It does not.

What it does show, sadly, is that the EFF — once regarded as the legal assassin of the SA political landscape — now believes its true "power" lies in its ability to create fear.

It is no longer a relevant or credible voice for the poor and the powerless people it claims to represent. It’s a protection racket, run by thugs.