Damn, these guys are good.

But before we delve into the specifics of the Economic Freedom Fighters Student Command’s (EFFSC) democratic hijacking of Vaal University of Technology (VUT) student council, I want to pen something of a political encomium, which is really just a rehash of the sort of thing sport’s coaches will say about great athletes.

It’s the little things. Attention to detail. Following through on the swing. Concentrating on the footwork. Proper hydration. Picking the right tattoo artist.

Julius Malema in the flesh does not easily bring to mind an athlete. But Julius Malema on the political stage most certainly does. It is, indeed, the little things. And when the little things are taken care of, insist the coaches, the big things take care of themselves.

The EFF Central Command Team, while they keep many secrets, make no secret of their tactics. They outline what they’re going to do, provide their constituents with a timeframe, and then they do it. Late last year, they identified three priorities. The first and most obvious (to say nothing of the crudest, in purely political terms) was the SONA Showdown, live on TV, beamed into millions of South African living rooms. It went off without a hitch, by which I mean it went off with many hitches, and that’s exactly what the EFF had hoped for.

Their second priority was building their structures up in “every ward in the country.” Again, they’ve plainly stated that 2016 is their real electoral coming out party, and therefore 2015 demands, well, attention to detail: hard work in the wards; stumping in hot stadiums when there are no obvious stakes; speeches in crowded halls at 10am on Sunday mornings; miserable tours of horrendous outhouses in maligned communities across this maligned country.

Their third priority was less obvious, but by far the most ingenious: the slow accumulation of student councils across the country. While it was once unlikely that the country’s blue chip institutions would embrace the EFF (although these joints have suddenly found a bit of militant mojo), it’s the hundreds of smaller schools that present the real prize. If you’re looking to groom an electorate, get ‘em while they’re young, mobilize ‘em, make sure they’re registered to vote, and watch that 6 percent tick up like the speedometer on Floyd Shivambu’s Porsche Panamera.

And so we come to the landslide victory at VUT, a school—like many in this country—roiled by the National Student Financial Aid Funding Scheme (NSFAS) crisis. VUT’s NSFAS piggybank was all but bare this year, which meant (according to the EFF at any rate) that almost 3000 students were unable to make class at the beginning of the year. The EFFSC exploited what has become another education clusterfuck, and bumped the ANC-aligned South African Student’s Congress (Sasco) from the council. EFFSC won fifteen seats. Sasco won zero.

The campaign, which culminated in two days of voting last week, was small beer by almost any standards. Who cares about a tiny technicon in the middle of nowhere? But, as with any post-structuralist university anywhere, there were lots of signs and lots of signifiers. The campaign was run with almost military precision. Malema himself showed up to address the students, and told them that, “We do not sleep with management, neither are we scared of management. And management knows that when the EFF comes, they will have to listen.”

Of vice-chancellor Irene Moutlana, he was of course less than complimentary, and suggested that she might want to begin searching for another gig. “We will make her stay here a nightmare. The same way we’ve made Parliament a nightmare for Jacob Zuma, we will make this place a nightmare for anyone who’s not prepared to listen to the demands of the students.”

There’s an enormous gap for smart politicking in the country’s universities, and that’s largely because the one flank the ANC are protecting right now is the Zuma Lacuna. So great a time and energy suck has the president become that one of the world’s greatest political brands is literally unraveling at its source. By 2019, a quarter of a century into South African democracy, the ANC will need to have replenished its stock of voters or the cupboards will be running bare. But the gerontocracy that owns the alliance doesn’t seem to grock the fact that people actually die.

But people do die. And their children vote in their stead. The ANC assumes they’ll remain faithful because Mandela or something. But if you’re young and politicized, are you going to go with the party that officially supported UCT’s Rhodes sculpture protest without actually owning the issue, or are you going to go with the guy who said:

“It is that statue that continues to inspire [whites] to think that they are a superior race, and it is through collapsing of these types of symbols that the white minority will begin to appreciate that there’s nothing superior about them […] We should never be questioned, ‘When Rhodes falls then what.’ It is not an event, it is a process. We collapse Rhodes today and then collapse all other systems and then begin to educate the white minority that you are not superior. You are equal.”

You get where I’m going with this?

Now, I’ll certainly agree with anyone who insists that the ANC has made it easy for Malema and his troop of red-swag-wearing rabble-rousers. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that every student council campaign takes an incredible amount of hard work, especially since Sasco is entrenched as the sort of de facto, white noise political entity on almost student council across the country. The VUT, much like Malema’s iteration of the Rhodes Statue, is “not an event, it is a process.”

It’s a win that will presage many wins, and those wins will lead to other wins elsewhere along the democratic conveyor belt. South Africa remains an incredibly vibrant democracy, and every vote counts. The EFF seems to understand that. The ANC of course, doesn’t.

Take care of the little things, say the coaches, and the big things will take care of themselves. VUT, with all apologies to its students, is a little thing. Much bigger things are coming. DM

Main Pic: Julius Malema. Onwards, upwards. (REUTERS/Siphiwe Sibeko)