It is tempting to feel a certain amount of sympathy for EFF “commander-in-chief” Julius Malema these days.
The man must be suffering what his invective-filled followers like to claim are “chest pains” induced by one political hit after another.
Malema deserves no sympathy, though.
He is the architect of the winter of discontent and despair that he and the EFF are going through.
Last week, two EFF MPs resigned from their posts.
The first was the racist, conspiracy-peddling, disgraced, defeated and impeached former public protector Busisiwe Mkhwebane.
The second was long-standing party activist and parliamentarian Fana Mokoena.
The departures provide deep lessons for Malema and those who still value the EFF and what activists like Mokoena have built over the past 11 years.
In the resignation of Mkhwebane, the EFF should realise that its departure from its core principles, its blind obedience to Malema and his obsession with accommodating corrupt and discredited Jacob Zuma and Gupta family acolytes, are factors that will continue to make it bleed unless it returns to its roots (even if they were on paper only) underpinned by a hatred of corruption.
The departure of Mokoena should teach the EFF that it had built something real, something that resonated with many South Africans.
When Malema and Floyd Shivambu were kicked out of the ANC by Zuma in 2012 and went on to launch the EFF in 2013, their plea to change the depressing economic situation of ordinary South Africans struck a chord.
Malema said at the time that the EFF was “inspired by people’s suffering on the ground”.
This is why people like Mokoena worked day and night with him to build the party that is the EFF today.
They are not just disgruntled ANC members.
They believe in a different path for SA and a different reality for black South Africans in particular.
They believe in justice for the years of colonial dispossession and apartheid oppression.
Say what you may about the likes of Mokoena, these are patriotic, honest, driven South Africans.
They are not the corruption-tinged types one finds in the MK party.
Over the years, however, they have been put by Malema and others into the same pot as discredited, divisive, racist, conspiracy-fuelled individuals such as Mkhwebane, Mzwanele Jimmy Manyi, and other Gupta-linked political hustlers who could only rise in a world where the corruption-accused Zuma was in charge.
They have watched in horror as incompetent people such as Mkhwebane, and race hustlers such as Manyi, have been parachuted from nowhere to become MPs while serious, dedicated, upstanding party members are frustrated.
Nothing better illustrates Malema’s flip-flopping, and his failure to acknowledge even a basic fidelity to ethics, than his misguided loyalty to Mkhwebane.
If there is anything that shows how power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, it is how Malema shoved the discredited Mkhwebane down the throats of people such as Mokoena and the rest of the EFF membership.
In January 2017, Malema addressed a press conference in which he was scathing about Mkhwebane.
He claimed that Mkhwebane was failing to uphold the independence of the office of the public protector, an institution which had become a darling of the public under the courageous and astute leadership of advocate Thuli Madonsela.
“We just took a Gupta puppet from the Guptas’ kitchen and went to plant her there,” Malema said of Mkhwebane’s appointment to the office in 2016.
“She has proven without fail that she was sent there to destroy that office.”
Mkhwebane had little relevant experience for the job and had been employed by the State Security Agency before her appointment, raising questions about her impartiality amid allegations that she was still a spy deployed by the Zuma administration to defang the public protector’s office.
Malema claimed he had been tipped off by members of the intelligence community that she was a spy, and he knew this when he recommended her for the public protector’s job in 2016!
“I was the first one to receive a message she was a spy, by reliable spooks,” he said.
“I was told by spooks themselves, she was a spook.”
Just three years later, in an address to the Press Club in Cape Town in February 2020, he had changed his tune: “We have never called her [Mkhwebane] a spy.”
Malema has over the years embraced the Mkhwebanes, the Manyis, and other Gupta and Zuma stooges and given them succour in the EFF.
He allowed snakes into his house, and they are now biting him in the behind.
The EFF could have grown much bigger based on its core message that Africans have not benefited from the new SA.
Instead, he turned the EFF into the Zuma reserve team.
Now the chest pains are here. They are going to get worse unless he changes his ways.
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