Even by its own standards, the EFF’s attack on Maria Ramos penned by its spokesperson Mbuyiseni Ndlozi is breathtaking.

In its statement on Wednesday night, Ndlozi “condemned” the appointment of Ramos; called her a proxy of “white capital” and then launched into this:

“Ramos is the blue-eyed child of South Africa’s greedy, exploitative, racist, and historically murderous capital. She, Trevor Manuel, Cyril Ramaphosa, and Tito Mboweni are direct deployees of White Monopoly Capital…”

In addition to the offence on the use of the Upper Case and the fact that Ramos is not blue-eyed, there are at least five more defamations in that one sentence.

Then, Ndlozi goes into a head-scratching account of why Ramos’s appointment to the interim board of the PIC on Wednesday 10 July is a conflict. By serving on the board of Remgro, the conglomerate owned by the cigarette and luxury goods billionaire Johan Rupert, which has investments in companies in which the PIC also has shares, she is conflicted, says Ndlozi.

Asking if there were “no capable men and women, black women in particular, who could have been put in place of Maria Ramos”, Ndlozi piles on the defamations. He says Absa is “one of the banking institutions that racially discriminates against poor black people by charging them more interest” (no proof). Then, he adds this clanger: “It is also no secret that as head of Absa, she connived to fix the rand in order to pursue greed of capitalists.” (Absa was, in fact, the whistle-blower of the investigation by the Competition Commission and Ramos was CEO when the whistle was blown; the bank self-reported).

Ndlozi throws down a final gauntlet in his final sentence: “The EFF rejects Ramos as a perfect sign that the Ramaphosa administration has no interest in the change of status quo. The Ramaphosa administration is committed to ensure that the economy remains in the hands and control of white monopoly capital.”

The EFF has spoken. But what does he omit in the efforts to create a grand narrative? By the time I checked at lunch, the EFF statement was all over the place: its view on Ramos has gone viral into social media which is now the most influential and powerful form of media. It is now the chief narrative.

He omits this: Ramos was born in Lisbon, Portugal and her family came to South Africa to seek a better life. As a young bank clerk in Vereeniging (hardly the epicentre of white monopoly capital back then), she applied for a bursary to study banking. She travelled to town three nights a week, eventually securing a banking diploma. Unusually for her community, she joined the ANC and from there on, her story is better known.

She was part of all the key study groups to determine what democratic-era economic policy would look like and then she became director-general of the National Treasury where the brightest leaders in our firmament acknowledge her role in nurturing a future generation of economic policy leaders like the SA Reserve Bank governor Lesetja Kganyago.

She is a former chairperson of Transnet; a highly regarded leader in international business circles and a long-established part of Fortune magazine’s global list of leading businesswomen. Extremely hard-working, Ramos struggled at Absa when Barclays bought in and then sold out. She is a taskmaster and probably alienated more executives than she should have, but show me an executive (of any gender or race) who has not? It comes with the tough turf.

By any measure, she has earned her place on the PIC board (and it is an interim spot) and will be a fantastic steward of public money; by any measure, she is part of the pantheon of South Africa’s fabulous set of Amazonian leaders.

To caricature her in the way Ndlozi did this week is pretty much par for the party’s misogynist and racist attitude to women it does not like.

Good Woman, Bad Woman

The EFF seems to divide women, like misogynists and patriarchs everywhere, into Good Women (and the men decide on who that is) and Bad Women (the ungovernable women who do not share their world view and who dare to speak up to the patriarchs and misogynists).

My colleague Pauli van Wyk who exposed the EFF’s receipt of VBS looted funds through front companies (and me too sometimes) are Bad Women whom you can call “Satan” and diminutive forms of insult. I am so often reduced by EFF trolls to my perceived ethnicity (“bloody Indian”) my age and my perceived ideology (“white capitalist” – in fact, I am the daughter of clothing workers with a concomitant ideology), that I don’t notice any longer. Or journalist Karima Brown (whom the EFF says is the legitimate butt of insults because she is a “politician” and not a journalist). Another colleague, Marianne Thamm, who exposed the EFF’s core hypocrisy, is now so bad she’s off the scales.

Or women like Anisha Gordhan, Pravin Gordhan’s daughter, who suffered insult and trauma as she became the EFF battering ram for its campaign against her father last year.

Who stops the EFF? Who bells the cats?

By Thursday morning, on Twitter where an EFF trolling army hunts women it doesn’t like and get their troops to drive us off the platform, I was being tagged in a picture of Ramos out on one of those morning walks with Ramaphosa. So what?

They are friends and comrades. She has been appointed to help sort out a struggling, capture institution that is at the heart of the South African economy. She is not a Gupta-like friend who walks with the President to secure contracts and patronage. The image is spat out and made viral as part of a much bigger project and that is to create equivalence between the kleptocratic administration we have come through and this one.

As I watch what happens to the women deigned BAD by the demi-gods in red onesies and as I watch myself (I can’t speak for others) get quieter and quieter against this fascism against women, I wonder: who will stop the EFF? Who bells the cats? DM