Julius Malema and the EFF — the leader faces one of his toughest weeks

There can be no doubt that Julius Malema will start this EFF conference a very much diminished figure. Just last year he stood on a crane platform at a packed FNB Stadium in a deliberate display of political power and spectacle.

What a difference MK has made.

Instead of being deputy president of South Africa, Malema now leads only the second-biggest opposition party and only the fourth-biggest party in Parliament.

Worse than all of that is the series of defections as long-time comrades such as Dali Mpofu and, crucially, Floyd Shivambu have betrayed him and moved to MK.

As a result, Malema’s path to national power looks more difficult than ever.

Even the option of working with MK and thus gaining some form of provincial power in KwaZulu-Natal now seems remote, after he called MK the party’s “biggest enemy”, and made personal comments about its leader, former president Jacob Zuma.

Read more: EFF is in a tight spot after defections and will need a tough reinvention

For this conference to be the beginning of the rebirth of the EFF, Malema might have to make several important decisions and perhaps some crucial concessions.

This would involve a very clear understanding of what needs to happen to win more votes, and crucially, to win votes from people who have not voted for the EFF before.

Embracing internal democracy

The biggest question, then, is whether he has the EQ to do this because it would involve a dramatic shift in strategy.

First, our democratic history shows that while parties can rise and fall, for them to endure and play a meaningful role they need to have democratic structures. This is why the ANC and the DA are still so important.

While MK is experimenting with a dictatorial structure where one person makes all the decisions, in the end, for decisions to have legitimacy, positions must be filled through democratic processes.

Without this, decisions will be challenged, contested and sometimes ignored. And decisions then become controlled by whoever last spoke to the leader (viewers of Succession might well recognise the problems this creates).

Read more: Malema dismisses reports of potential EFF rebellion over Ndlozi ‘ban’

This has been Malema’s Achilles’ heel. His insistence that the EFF is his to lead alone, and his actions in removing people who did not bring enough supporters to watch him on his crane at the FNB Stadium, is a root cause of its current situation.

For this to change, he would have to send a signal that he is prepared to be properly democratic in how he leads the EFF.

This might involve him bowing to a decision made by structures, even though he publicly disagrees with it.

There is a recent example of another leader doing this. In 2020, Herman Mashaba made it clear that he wanted ActionSA to adopt the death penalty as part of its policy. But the party’s structures (which are still not democratically elected) disagreed. Mashaba accepted the decision, in what was a signal that he would accept the decisions of structures beneath him.

Malema could do something similar as a symbol of his willingness to change.

Included in this might be a need for Malema to also accept that he will be challenged in his own party, and that he will tolerate someone in its top leadership who may disagree with him.

Key to this is the perception that Malema will accept the results of democratic processes in the EFF, and the removal of any kind of suspicion that he somehow manages these processes.

What may be more difficult is a change in how he manages the relationships with people with whom he has to work. While there are clearly many factors behind the decisions of people like Shivambu and Mpofu to leave the EFF, it may be that Malema’s personal treatment of them is one of them.

For any person to do the kind of introspection that this would require could be very, very difficult.

New slogan, new strategy

Then, there may also be a difficult discussion about strategy.

There are several examples around the world of parties that start as “radical” and then become more moderate, and eventually win power in elections.

There are probably fewer examples of parties that win elections while remaining intensely radical. In most countries with diverse populations, people would prefer reform to radical change.

In our country, being more diverse than most, this may be even more important.

In the past, Malema’s response to losing political battles, or voter share, has been to become more radical, to promise greater change.

But there has been one significant shift that shows his party can change tack.

When the EFF was launched in 2013, the main focus was the expropriation of land without compensation. But by the 2019 elections, the EFF changed its slogan to “Our Land and Jobs Now”. This was clearly a response to the fact that its members were complaining that they were unemployed.

In 2024, this was updated to include a promise to end load shedding. 

While the demand for the return of land taken through violence in the colonial era is entirely legitimate, it is clearly not winning elections.

Malema needs not just a new slogan, but an entirely new strategy. And the path to election victories cannot just be radical, it will need to be more moderate. 

The problem with that, of course, is that parties in the national coalition currently occupy the middle ground of our politics, thus finding a way to stand out from the crowd could be very difficult.

But the crafting of this message may be crucial.

Read more: Quo vadis, EFF? Finding a new leadership style and niche in a crowded and lethal playing field 

Of course, no matter what decisions are made at this conference, it might well be that factors outside Malema’s control come to matter more.

If it is the case that he lost votes to MK in the 2024 elections, then the potential collapse of MK could matter intensely to the EFF. 

And if the national coalition fails to create jobs and improve the lives of young people, the potential number of people who might vote for the EFF would only increase.

This means that Malema has every incentive to find ways to ensure that his party survives during this period and to place it in a strong position for the future. DM