Floyd Shivambu (National Convener of Mayibuye Consultation Process) during the media briefing on Mayibuye Consultative Process at Mhulu Luxury Boutique Hotel on June 27, 2025 in Johannesburg, South Africa. The media briefing aimed to unveil the members of the Mayibuye National Consultation Team and share updates on the consultation process. (Photo: Gallo Images / OJ Koloti) 
If one were to measure a revolutionary by the state of their facial adornment, then Floyd Shivambu’s dalliance in politics currently looks as patchy as his beard.
Shivambu – edging closer to what might be the political wilderness after a Darwinian coup in his new political home, the uMkhonto Wesizwe (MK) party, prompted by a “false intelligence report” – is on a mission – to find a rightful place in South African revolutionary politics. On Friday, 27 June, Shivambu announced he would be “consulting” widely to gauge the temperature for the launch of his own political party to contest the 2026 local government elections.
While there appears to have been no formal announcement that Shivambu has in fact left the MK party, it is clear he is eyeing the party’s spinning revolving door.
The party’s ver verlate vlaktes (far and desolate plains) are already home to the hungry ghosts of Jimmy Manyi, MK party founder Jabulani Khumalo, Mervyn Dirks, Arthur Zwane, Sifiso Maseko and several others who have been through Zuma’s meatgrinder.
Last week, still dressed in his MK party regalia, Shivambu announced on Elon Musk’s platform X: “On Friday, 27 June 2025, we will announce the National Consultation Team (NCT) of Mayibuye Consultation Process.
“As always, we will use the opportunity to exercise what Amilcar Cabral taught us that as revolutionaries, we should ‘hide nothing from the masses of our people’.
“Tell no lies. Expose lies whenever they are told. Mask no difficulties, mistakes, failures. Claim no easy victories ... Tell no lies … Claim No easy victories …,” he trailed off.
Those who have thrown their lot in with Shivambu’s initiative include former Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) MPs Vusi Khoza and Fana Mokoena, and former MK party members Patrick Sindane, Menzi Magubane and Bishop Stephen Zondo.
Downfall
Shivambu’s slide in 10 months from top leadership of the country’s largest opposition party was lubricated after the staunch Marxist’s visit, over Easter, to fugitive pastor, Shepherd Bushiri, in his hideout-in-plain-sight in Malawi.
Bushiri skipped bail and SA with his wife, Mary, in 2020 after facing charges of rape, money laundering and fraud.
In an interview after the controversial drop-in, Shivambu said that joining the MK party had been “the best political decision” he had ever taken, until it appears it wasn’t.
Read more: Shivambu still at odds with MK leadership over visit to fugitive pastor Shepherd Bushiri
Zuma, claimed Shivambu, had given his blessing, so to speak, for the meeting but others in the party distanced themselves from this tea diplomacy, smelling more fish than cookies.
Shivambu was first demoted – the eighth secretary-general to come through the party’s chaotic works – and offered a spot in the National Assembly (NA), which he has turned down.
It is clear that his Mayibuye Consultation Process, an attempt to bring together “progressive forces” on the left, will consume his spare time in future, and he will have a lot of it.
How he will fund this initiative is yet to be revealed; however, Shivambu said thousands had already volunteered their time and money.
Read more: Former MK party secretaries did many ‘wrong things’, says Zuma after Shivambu’s axing
The problem with ‘we’
Earlier this week, prior to announcing the media conference, Shivambu referred to himself as “we” on social media.
Read more: How Floyd Shivambu caused his own MK party downfall
The slippery slope begins when politicians begin to use “we”. It is the red flag, the flare, the canary in the coal mine, the straightjacket moment.
Before “we” was always a duo, Malema and Shivambu, now it is Floyd alone in the spotlight.
After betraying Julius Malema, his childhood fellow-revolutionary and EFF commander-in-chief, Shivambu fell in August 2024 into the warm arms of former president Jacob Zuma, followed by a chilling embrace from Zuma’s charming daughter, Duduzile.
Read more: Malema says ‘pain’ of Shivambu quitting EFF for MK party like hearing of his own mother’s death
Shivambu’s Mayibuye Africa Movement feels a bit bit like Agang, Mamphela Ramphele’s “political platform” or Mmusi Maimane’s Build One South Africa movement, which turned into a political party that now has three seats (two in the NA and one in Gauteng).
It was needed, said Shivambu, because the MK party, led by a man he once publicly called a thief, was a “Zulu nationalist movement”– as if he were born yesterday and wasn’t aware of what the rest of us knew from the start.
Was Shivambu asleep during all those memorable “pay back the money” chants in the NA?
“With this in mind, we will be visiting all corners of South Africa to listen to the people,” Shivambu promised.
Personal Cults R Us
Shivambu has explained this quest noting “we ask these questions because our strong conviction and belief is that no individual should start a political party out of their own personal convictions and not collective convictions”.
He added that “a political party should never be a family project”, nor should it be “tribal” or a “regional or provincial project”.
It should also “never be a private property” nor a “cult or fiefdom. Instead it should be a “fighting instrument” for “the people as a whole”, espouse “deep democratic principles and values” and be “transparent and accountable to the people”.
Hoor, hoor.
Speaking of which.
The ghost of VBS
At this point it would be appropriate to drop in the fact that Tshifhiwa Matodzi, former chair of VBS bank, is serving 15 years in jail after pleading guilty to 33 counts of corruption, theft, fraud, money laundering and a pattern of racketeering activities.
In July 2024, Matodzi entered a plea deal and signed a 70-page witness statement which, with annexures, totals 263 pages and took around three weeks to draft.
Read more: Ex-VBS chair lifts the lid on how Julius Malema and Floyd Shivambu grabbed R16.1m from dying bank
As my colleague Pauli van Wyk wrote at the time: “Malema and Shivambu knew the funds they received from VBS were unlawful, Matodzi claims, because Malema and Shivambu created a front company called Sgameka Projects.
“There was no legitimate business reason for these payments — they told him they needed money for their restaurant in Soweto and, tellingly, they tried to ‘regularise’ the payments after the curatorship of VBS by backdating a contract that was never entered into”.
Later, after four years of investigation by the joint committee on ethics and members’ interests, a letter to the Democratic Alliance from the Parliament’s acting registrar of members’ interests, advocate Anthea Gordon, indicated Shivambu’s salary was docked nine days for breaching Parliament’s code of ethics.
The committee found that Shivambu had failed to disclose money transferred to him from Sgameka Projects, which was owned by his brother Brian. This was an R180,000 transfer to his account in August 2017.
In 2019 Brian Shivambu was ordered by the Johannesburg High Court to pay R1.78-million to the bank’s liquidators.
Read more: Floyd Shivambu’s brother quietly pays back R4.55m, admits he received the VBS money gratuitously
SARS payback
In June 2021 Brian Shivambu signed a secret contract admitting to having received R4.55-million from VBS, promising to repay the money, which belonged to municipalities as well as pensioners in Venda.
As Van Wyk reported, Brian Shivambu’s attorneys insisted on a secrecy clause before their client signed an “acknowledgement of debt” for R4.55-million in favour of Vele Investments, the majority shareholder in VBS Mutual Bank, during Vele’s insolvency inquiry.
Vele and VBS, along with other related companies, created a single criminal enterprise under the stewardship of bank chairman, Matodzi, with the goal of fraudulently siphoning off money from the bank’s depositors and laundering proceeds to participants in the scam, which amounted to about R2.7-billion.
Several arrests related to the VBS Mutual Bank scandal have been made, including Limpopo ANC heavyweight and businessman Danny Msiza, who is facing charges of fraud and corruption for pushing mayors into supporting VBS.
Swings and roundabouts
According to Matodzi's claims, Malema and Shivambu’s EFF had been counted among the most vociferous critics of the VBS loan to Zuma. Malema had in fact campaigned on stage against VBS at political rallies.
“As chairman of VBS, I then decided that Malema and EFF should be approached for VBS to explain its position and how the loan was granted.”
Van Wyk revealed that Matotzi had claimed that a meeting was arranged “with Julius at the EFF’s penthouse in Sandton around April/May 2017” .
While Van Wyk found no deed document registered to the EFF that suggested the party owned a penthouse in Sandton, journalist Jacques Pauw had published in his book Our Poisoned Land that Malema had had access and at times full use of tobacco baron Adriano Mazzotti’s penthouse at the Raphael Penthouse Suites in Sandton.
Matodzi’s version is that he explained to Malema and Shivambu that their political rallies were embarrassing and damaging to VBS and that “as black brothers, the EFF’s constituencies were VBS target market also”.
It was then that Matodzi swung the vociferous VBS/Zuma critics in his favour:
“I further informed them that VBS was willing to offer a donation to the EFF. I then proposed that VBS can donate R5-million immediately once a bank account has been opened at VBS and R1-million per month to the EFF. I also made it clear that the amount could only be deposited into a VBS account, and that EFF should therefore open a bank account with VBS.”
The money pipeline
Daily Maverick’s Scorpio investigation also highlighted that VBS funds were funnelled through fronts towards the building works of a restaurant, Grand Azania.
Were the NPA and SIU not so busy chasing the State Capturers who live among us, they might now have time to consider Shivambu, who is politically more vulnerable having, like Icarus, flown too close to two suns, the one (Malema) hotter than the other (Zuma). DM