I have been wrong about very many things across many areas of our social world. With the results streaming in as I write this evening, it is clear that I have been wrong about the EFF in the LGE21.
I really believed that it would do outstandingly well in the election. As for having been so wrong, I will paraphrase Cardinal Newman and say that I am perfectly happy to admit to the worst that can be said of me as a writer on current affairs; this occasion being that I was wrong. (Don’t ask me where I read that, I only remembered that he wrote something like that)
For what it’s worth, I have studied the EFF closely for about three or four years, and only Covid-19, my chronic lung problems and a battered immune system prevented me from travelling to remote places, digging into archives and gathering facts to strengthen or support all the information I had collected by the start of 2020… Nonetheless, there remains ample opportunity to make up for lost time.
The EFF is a fascinating study of a leftist organisation and its drift to extremist right-wing politics in the same way that Benito Mussolini started out as a socialist and ended up as a fascist, or the way that Juan Peron used his ersatz “progressive” political base of labour and the church to establish the ratlines — escape routes for Nazis after the World War 2. But that’s for another discussion.
With the LGE21 almost fully behind us, all bar the shouting, to which, I am sure, we will return once legislators return, the fact that the EFF seems (at the time of writing) to hover around the 10% mark overall may be a reflection of at least two things.
The first is that South Africans seem to not have the stomach for the EFF’s particular brand of contemporary fascism blended as it is with populism, race-baiting, name-calling and scapegoating. The second is that the EFF and its loyalists mistook performance for substance. To these, I would add that South Africa provides fertile ground for Julius Malema’s type of populism and politics of revenge, but it may be that South African voters are a lot smarter than we (particularly I) give them credit for.
Populism makes for good soundbites
Everything that the EFF has said and done in the weeks before the election has come from Malema. It’s easy to say that the EFF has come to resemble a cult around his personality. But there is an analogy (from my least favourite sport, baseball) I want to try.
Malema has been good at getting his followers on to first base, sometimes to second base, but he just could not bring it home. Not for want of trying.
Let’s stretch the analogy a bit. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, I watched a few New York Yankees matches. Please don’t ask me why I went to watch them play, because I hated the sport. The truth is that I hated the spectacle; the symbols of national pride, triumphalism, gorging of junk food and excessive patriotism. For what it’s worth, when the Springboks won the Rugby World Cup it had absolutely no meaning or significance to me…
Anyway, the Yankees had among their ranks a “closer”, a pitcher called Mariano Revera. His sole job was to go to the mound for the last two or three innings (I think) when the Yankees had a lead and basically shut down any opposition efforts at beating the New Yorkers. Rivera is sometimes described as the best closer in the history of Major League Baseball.
The EFF’s problem, it seems to me, is that it (Malema, actually) was quite brilliant when it came to winning hearts and minds, but it did not have a Mariano Riviera, someone to protect its gains and convert them into wins. We should be intellectually honest, the same socio-economic conditions (poverty, unemployment, distrust of international liberalism and dispute over lost territory) and disaffection with the peace settlement (in 1919) that gave rise to Mussolini, are somehow replicated in South Africa.
We have poverty, mass unemployment, a ready-made enemy in “white monopoly capital” our own version of 1920s Italy’s international liberalism, the loss of land and the dissatisfaction with South Africa’s peaceful political settlement of the 1990s. On paper, then, the country is ripe for populism which may account for Malema’s popularity. The problem is that the EFF could not translate that into “electability” — it did not have a Mariano Rivera.
The people necessarily have the ultimate say
Malema has a brilliant way of addressing crowds that verges on shamanistic — I’m probably being unfair to shamanism. Nonetheless, Malema has a way of almost intoxicating his audience and making it seem delirious with a toxic brew of racial hatred, revenge, vitriol, name-calling song and dance. However, what Malema seems to have misread is that the objective of institutionalising a particular rhetoric, hoping that it will shape a particular mode of thinking which will follow seamlessly into a particular mode of acting has not quite panned out. I hasten to add that there is time, yet.
The EFF’s brand of populism, and Malema’s drift into contemporary fascism alongside Narendra Modi and Amit Shah, Donald Trump, Rodrigo Duterte and Victor Orban, should appeal to the poor, the unemployed, the disaffected, the homeless and the “anti-globalists” and liberal internationalists. But the electorate, small as it may have turned out to be in the LGE21, have had the ultimate say.
In some ways it is business as usual at the top. The ANC’s losses/gains, the DA’s losses/gains, the EFF’s marginal losses/gains, the revival of Herman Mashaba and the mushrooming of small parties may throw up some interesting permutations in lawmaking (and hopefully in governance).
What is clear is that for those who voted for populism and the EFF was just not enough, and any way, Malema could inspire people with rhetoric, but could not translate that into votes. Perhaps he took on too much, maybe he needed a closer, like Mariano Rivera, but it doesn’t matter — for now.
The basic point I have to make is that I was wrong in thinking that the EFF would at least replace the DA as official opposition or as actual local government in most local government legislatures and municipalities around the country.
I was wrong to think that South Africans would be seduced by Malema’s rhetoric, that he would intoxicate them with his oration and that this would lead to votes. I misread the electorate. DM