If you looked below the noise and histrionics of the EFF’s national conference (they had a self-aggrandising name for it — “national people’s assembly”) last week you would have realised that it was a battle between the past and the future. It was a contest between remaining a splinter of a decaying ANC or being a possible ruling party.
Julius Malema’s actions in the run-up to the conference, and during the shindig, show that he has chosen to stay in the past, to continue to swim in the slipstream of the ANC and not to strike out boldly to speak to the core of his base, which is South Africa’s marginalised and increasingly restless youth.
Malema is missing a golden opportunity. Across the continent and across the globe, populations are voting against incumbents who have run out of ideas and time. Parties of liberation in Africa and parties of the establishment across the globe face deep discontent and anger. Citizens are seeking lean and hungry young men and women with new ideas for a new world with deep new challenges.
I am not saying they are making the right choices, these citizens. I am saying they are making the choices. They are telling incumbents: you have pushed us far and you have pushed us for a long time, but this is the line, and we are going no further. Malema and the EFF are perfectly placed to reap the rewards of this movement.
Earlier this year Bassirou Diomaye Faye, a 44-year-old former tax officer, defeated the incumbent to become Senegal’s president. In Botswana, a 55-year-old has just unseated a party that has been in power for 58 years. In Kenya, William Ruto and the establishment are being shaken by young activists. Venâncio António Bila Mondlane, the Mozambican opposition leader who many say won the October elections and was robbed, is 50 years old.
Yet if you listen to the 43-year-old Malema and his rhetoric you will feel sad. He speaks as if he is Jacob Zuma. He is fixated on the ANC and its struggle history. He sees, like the ANC’s leaders, conspiracies and “Western agents” everywhere.
While the EFF was holding its conference, the SACP was hosting its own “special national conference”. Those who attended sang lustily that they want socialism, while their Mercedes-Benzes stood waiting outside the conference centre. They lambasted the government of national unity and reminisced about the glory days of the tripartite alliance.
I am not saying they are making the right choices, these citizens. I am saying they are making the choices
The SACP, like Zuma’s MK Party, has little or nothing to offer by way of a theory of change. It hankers after a mythical, nonexistent, glorious past. It fights over the ANC’s struggle history and the way to eat from the trough it has offered them.
As the ANC continues to unravel, so will these old parties. Without the ANC they are nothing, you see. Malema should be rejoicing loudly at the departure of discredited has-beens such as Mzwanele Manyi, Dali Mpofu, Busisiwe Mkhwebane and the like from his party. These are people clinging to the past, fighting old battles, and he should be no part of it. Yet he has chosen to humiliate and freeze out fresh and energetic fellow EFF leaders such as Mbuyiseni Ndlozi.
Malema should stop behaving like a leader of the ANC Youth League trying to “correct” the party from within. Instead of setting the line of march for an energetic party ready to govern, Malema’s closing remarks at the EFF conference often sounded like the gossiping of an ANC factional leader at a shebeen.
The EFF has a unique trait — it has managed to speak for frustrated young people. If it were in better hands, it would drive home the key issues: unemployment among young and old alike, the stalled economy, the corruption that is eating away at the fabric of society, the young men and women immobilised in their homes by crime and corruption. These are winning themes.
Yet the EFF is trying to seem like it fought the struggle against apartheid. I mean, come on — Malema was nine when Nelson Mandela walked out of prison. Why is he trying to pretend he was in Umkhonto we Sizwe, or that he is some kind of revolutionary leader?
It shows that he has run out of ideas. He is letting his moment slip away.
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