BUTI MANAMELA
JULIUS Malema, leader of the EFF, should be unmasked rather than written off as a political buffoon. He is a very astute political leader, and precisely for that reason, it is necessary to describe the chaotic game that he is playing.
The EFF’s planned national shutdown next week reveals the true political character of this anti-democratic clad in revolutionary regalia. The Julius I know would care less about the cause he pretends to advance even when the democratic stakes are this high.
The national shutdown is but one example of how Malema’s politics is about merely paying lip service to the law while actually relying on chaos to get the necessary attention that feeds his political character.
Storming parliament. Storming the stage of the ANC NGC in Durban back in 2010.
Or opening gunfire at the EFF rally in Mdantsane in more recent times. Each one of these moments produced deliberate political chaos.
Each moment of chaos was the result of Malema choosing to abandon reasoned engagement and getting bored with playing inside the arena of constitutionalism, followed by him indulging his performative politics.
He is happy to smudge the principle of legality because political performance becomes his main goal.
Malema is now defined by this addiction to political theatre more than he is defined, in any authentic way, by his professed commitment to working class struggles.
In Malema’s world it is all about Malema, and the struggles of the poor are simply co-opted to keep the main spotlight on the boisterous self-styled commander-in-chief. That is why he calls press conferences every other day.
He lives for setting the agenda for open line shows and social media more than he cares for genuinely changing the material conditions of society.
In understanding Malema’s (and now the EFF’s) modus operandi, you need to understand the rise of Malema. Chaos is the midwife that birthed this anarchist political genius.
From the Congress that elected him as the President of COSAS back in 1998 up to the moment he was expelled from the ANC, the only condition that was necessary for his election has been curated chaos to bring exactly the result that will get Malema his desire, that of being elected to the highest position in an organisation, at all costs.
In that Congress, where he contested against Kenny Morolong, delegates were throwing each other with condoms filled with water.
Ten years later, in another Congress, this time of the ANC Youth League, some of the delegates showed their behinds in protest of a suspected rigging of the voting process.
I remember back in 1999 when Malema’s COSAS unleashed a small army of students to wantonly loot shops around Johannesburg CBD.
He spent some time in Modimolle that night, fearing that if he travels to Seshego, the police may arrest him.
It took Winnie Mandela, at the time the honorary President of COSAS, to mediate between him and the police.
But critical to Malema’s rise has been performative and theatrical politics with the hope that there will be no consequences and, if there are, ways must be found to mediate for his reincarnation and survival.
When he was President of the ANCYL, he organised a march from Johannesburg CBD to the Stock Exchange in Sandton and ultimately the Union Buildings.
The sole intention was not for the attainment of the scribbled demands, but to firmly place Malema as the revolutionary and center of attention.
That, too, is part of his method, activating a wily capacity to reinvent himself if the association with his leadership becomes too negative.
That is why, as we have seen this week, he can again call a press conference, ahead of their planned shutdown march next week, and have the gall to say that they do not encourage nor condone violence or any kind of breaking of the country’s laws.
He knows full well that there is a legal, and certainly a political, duty to make sure that as organisers of an event of this magnitude, you do not enable the destruction of property, and other acts of illegality.
Malema wants to pretend that he embraces the rule of law so that he can have a rhetorical cover if chaos were to play out on Monday.
What is particularly pernicious about Malema’s politics, is that there is a distinct possibility that he believes his own verbal trickery.
The context of this trickery is the reality that of course we face many challenges as a country. There is the rising cost of living, high unemployment rate, and persistent socio-economic inequalities. We have a severe energy crisis, crippling corruption we still have to root out fully, and all of these make it hard to deliver quality services to our people.
We acknowledge that as a government. But this government has not been imposed on the majority of the people, but was duly elected as part of one half of a social contract with the citizens; and its responsibility is to ensure that the commitment that it has made to the people are met.
This is the basic tenet of our democracy. If at all that government is deemed as a complete failure, the electorate has the chance of changing it and voting for a new one.
The EFF, in participating in elections, are part of that social compact. Their Members of Parliament have taken an oath or affirmation of office to abide by and defend the constitution. This cannot be a half-hearted measure, but requires that our opposition to this democratic government is done in accordance with the letter and spirit of the constitution and other sources of law.
We cannot have threats of disrupting businesses and the normal lives of citizens who do not agree with the modus operandi of the EFF just so they can impose their will on the majority. We cannot have, just as we saw a few members of the EFF posing for pictures the other day at the OR Tambo International Airport, threaten to render the country and its national key points ungovernable.
There is nowhere in the constitution of the country provision for one part of society to push the rest into a state of panic merely because they are impatient with the democratic processes put in place to replace a government.
This is pure adventurism posturing as revolutionary.
It is an open flirt with insurrection and a coup of a democratically elected government. And because of Malema’s grasp of political oratory, it is easy to be fooled by his assertion that he and his disciples are constitutionalists.
Their actions do not show a sustained commitment to constitutionalism.
What is going on here is a combination of two things: Firstly, Malema’s addition to political theatre is playing out at the expense of our baseline democratic norms and values and, secondly, the EFF is revealing its sheer political cowardice.
Only political cowards fear contesting national elections, which is why they want to pre-empt their electoral losses by creating chaos as a substitute for persuading voters to give them a chance to govern.
Our democracy is too important to be irreparably harmed by fake revolutionaries, and we would do well to collectively express discontent at the engineering of political chaos.
Buti Manamela is a member of the SACP Central Committee and ANC National Executive Committee.
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