The end of Julius Malema and Floyd Shivambu — they could’ve been contenders, now they’re just crooks

The Economic Freedom Fighters’ Julius Malema and Floyd Shivambu are going to jail. Not tomorrow, no, but certainly in your lifetime, should you take your medication on schedule. And it all comes down to Kurt Cobain. 

Rather be dead than cool, said the Nirvana frontman. He is now both dead and cool. While Cobain’s koan remains excellent advice for a rock star, the opposite is true for a politician. Let’s recall Cyril Ramaphosa’s honeymoon charm offensive, back in the early days of the First New Dawn, when he jogged with people named Chad on the Sea Point Promenade, and did the all-time classic “reformer” photo op: a short-haul economy class flight with the hoi polloi. 

(Former president Jacob Zuma pulled the same trick, perhaps hoping that the courts would be more lenient if he flew nearer the rear toilets. They weren’t.) 

Indeed, Ramaphosa’s late 2017/early 2018 ascension so upended politics in South Africa that the opposition was in near complete disarray, and the cool kids — namely, the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) — entirely lost their chill. There has over the years been much discussion over what exactly happened to the party, almost all of it as hilariously overblown as the EFF itself. But there’s no question that they hit the Ramaphosa wall with their airbags failing to deploy. As a result, they ran around the political arena screeching wildly for a medic. 

This was inexcusable for two reasons. First, it’s uncool to be uncool, as the EFF’s Central Command Team full of photogenic bad boys should intrinsically know. And second, in March 2019, the EFF won the most significant victory of its then five-year history: it forced the hand of the ANC, which voted for an EFF-promulgated parliamentary motion to crack open section 25 of the Constitution. 

Land expropriation without compensation, whatever that meant, was now upon us, for better or worse. And the EFF could rightfully insist that they owned this piece of national policy.  

If time stopped at that moment, the EFF could’ve been considered a success, at least by their own self-professed standards. After all, they were founded on nationalising stuff. So, how did a party that was handed such a significant victory lose momentum so quickly? 

The short answer, of course, is that the Zuma window had closed. The EFF did not have as long a period to exploit it as did the Democratic Alliance (DA). But then again, Malema opened the window in the first place. (To his eternal credit/shame, Malema’s Zuma boosterism was one of the important factors in the 2007 palace coup that ousted Thabo Mbeki.) 

The longer answer poses another question: how does one formulate a genuine leftist party in South Africa without the buy-in of organised labour and the Communist Party? The short answer to the question posed by the longer answer is: you don’t. 

The EFF’s reluctance (or inability) to form a broader coalition suggested that the party was only coherent when it was considered as a component of the African National Congress (ANC) — which is to say when it was properly understood as the ANC Youth League (ANCYL) in exile. Then, and only then, did the narrowness of its self-imposed mandate start to make sense. Then, and only then, was it possible to place some of its antics in context. 

Since its formation in the 1950s, the ANCYL has posed as the Screamers-in-Chief, pushing the Congress towards both greater radicalism and militancy in the fight against apartheid. It’s nice to think that members of the EFF, once the de facto Screamers-in-Chief, were serious about finishing the job — which is to say, ending economic apartheid. But their rhetoric, without the rest of the ANC’s broad church to serve as a moderating factor, had to be carefully pitched if it was to win mainstream acceptance. 

Now, given the swagger, you’d imagine that they didn’t care about such things. But they very much did, which is, frankly, very uncool. During the second half of the Zuma debacle, the party hit the Goldilocks zone, and even moneyed white folks were happily espousing Malema’s political genius, and agreeing with a number of his policies, “in principle”. He neither was a “fascist” when he was banging a hard hat against a parliamentary table demanding Zuma “pay back the money”; nor was he a “fascist” when he tried to shut down successive State of the Nation Addresses. He wasn’t a “fascist” when he banned from his press conferences the Gupta-owned ANN7 and The New Age’s reporters; he wasn’t a “fascist” when he claimed, in a rather forceful fashion, that whites and Indians needed to share the wealth, or else.

What the EFF could never do, however, was win. At the peak of its electoral success — call it around 11% of the electorate — the party was a failure. Barely bigger than the ANC breakaway Cope, and much smaller than the latest defectors, the MK party. They gained little over the years. They were, in essence, losers.

And, indeed, as their rhetoric adapted, so did the narrative. In the light of Ramaphosa’s New Dawn, Malema became Black Mussolini. What changed? Nothing, except for the fact that we were back to the ANC’s default centrist setting, with a president who was concerned with nonracialism, foreign direct investment and the price of the rand relative to the dollar. Non-moderate voices were no longer necessary. 

In other words: We were fine now. Stop causing nonsense. Leave the nice whites alone. 

Except we weren’t fine. In fact, we were in a downward spiral. And at some point the EFF decided to make a bad thing worse. 

* * *

In retrospect, it’s easy to see that it all started coming apart during the dawn of The New Dawn. There was Floyd Shivambu’s manhandling of a journalist inside the parliamentary precinct in 2019. Shivambu apologised immediately and unconditionally, but come on — not cool. They singled out SAfm for the sin of hiring a white broadcast journalist, Stephen Grootes. They retaliated against veteran journalist Ferial Haffajee, who had referred to Malema as “Kiddie Amin” in an op-ed piece. Haffajee had taken Malema to task for race-baiting, and her point was clear — there was a big difference between forcefully and unapologetically calling out racial power imbalances, and stoking the embers of race hatred to score cheap points. Malema was doing both. 

That was a dangerous tactic, as evidenced by the most unconscionable misstep the EFF made in its short history. 

Welcome to Nelson Mandela Bay (NMB) Municipality, where, in a bout of near complete political incoherence, the party decided to “punish” the DA’s refusal to support its Section 25 motion by deciding to remove its backing for then Executive Mayor Athol Trollip’s tenuous coalition. Out of three DA coalition mayors, Trollip was singled out by the EFF because he was white. But Trollip was born white, he will likely die white, and he was certainly white when he squeaked his way into office. (He will not die a DA politician, having switched to ActionSA some years ago.) 

The man is no one’s idea of a drinking buddy, but was running the viper’s nest of NMB because it was a complete shitshow under the ANC, governed by a criminal syndicate which endeavoured to steal the metro into penury — and mission absolutely accomplished. The ANC’s tenure in NMB was a disgrace, and by rights they should have been banished from the municipality for a political generation. And yet the EFF was willing to back a “high-calibre” cadre such as former deputy finance minister Mcebisi Jonas, a move so politically daft that even the ANC wasn’t willing to participate in realising it. 

This brand of emptiness increased over the course of the New Dawn’s first year, and calcified through the pandemic and into the bad latter years of Ramaphosa’s first administration. The amateurish herky-jerk nonsense is bad politics for an opposition party — Malema became something of a joke, the Flip-Flopper-in-Chief. But what if the EFF wasn’t an opposition party? What if it was something more sinister, something more in line with the party from which it had defected? 

What if the EFF was a business? 

Back in the old days, when the organisation was just getting its start, Ramaphosa was one of Malema’s primary whipping posts. In his inaugural address of the 2014 general election campaign in the Elias Motsoaledi informal settlement in Soweto, Malema lambasted Ramaphosa, along with billionaire businessman Patrice Motsepe, whom he accused of being latched to the Black Economic Empowerment teat until the milk ducts went dry. He mentioned buffaloes, and he mentioned Ramaphosa’s involvement in Marikana — an issue about which he was clearly enraged. He barely mentioned Zuma. In that long-ago construction of the ANC mainframe, Motsepe and Ramaphosa were the problems, while Zuma was merely the effluent — a noisome by-product of a party dedicated to the enrichment of its elite business deployees. 

He then backed off from those positions. For one thing, it became far more profitable to slam Zuma. For another, as allegations of corruption started to form the bedrock of our political discourse, lambasting Motsepe for buying another cravat seemed like a waste of airtime. But when Zuma was (temporarily) sidelined, the EFF went back to the ANC. Indeed, a faction of the ANC needed them. Not just their numbers, which may have been small but were nonetheless useful, but also because the Congress was a mess of non-ideological survival techniques. The party required energy, but it also needed a means of quelling an existential internal rivalry that pivoted not on matters right or left, but rather on the role of the Constitution in the South African political imaginarium. 

On the one hand, there were the true believers, led by Ramaophosa — men and women who believed that transformation and progress could happen under the aegis of the document they helped draft. Unfortunately, they didn’t have the temerity to defend it when it was under threat in Parliament, and voted along with the EFF to amend section 25. Which brings us to those who genuinely feel that the Constitution holds black South Africans back, that it is yoking them to economic and social mechanics of the apartheid era, and that is an impediment to creating an equitable South Africa — where blacks, as Malema would put it, can have what whites have. 

That bourgeois consumption is incompatible with the (rather slippery) socialism the EFF preaches seems to have been lost in all the hubbub. But it’s another of those core inconsistencies that reminds us of Malema’s central political problem, which is not that he’s Mussolini in red overalls, but rather that no one believes his bullshit any more. 

Indeed, after the rise of Ramaphosa, Malema faced a mightily dangerous political problem: he was a player with name recognition easily equivalent to that of the President’s, who couldn’t seem to translate his celebrity into votes. Part of this must be attributed to the lingering mistrust of his ANCYL “Anything For Zuma” rampage, which was so over the top that, when he finally turned on the man he helped make king, it seemed less like the principled stance of a young man who’d finally come to his senses, and more like an old-school political flip-flop. Part of it comes down to the fact that outside of the EFF’s foundational principle — nationalisation — Juju has been far too mutable, and has changed his register on certain issues as often as Ramaphosa changes Mandela shirts on a full day of ANC photo ops. 

For regular punters, changing one’s mind is part of the privilege that results from living in a democracy — spirited engagement with your peers, and all that good stuff. For politicians, it’s interpreted as expediency. And in politics, there is nothing more deadly than being labelled a flip-flopper. It’s uncool. 

* * *

What we will never know is which came first: Malema’s failure as a politician, or his success as a crook. What we do know is that the two are unquestionably intertwined. Cause and effect being what they are, the thieving at VBS began before Malema’s decline as a politician was cemented in the post-Ramaphosa era. The stupidity and cravenness of his party in coalitions in Johannesburg, Tshwane and elsewhere are all connected to the party’s current focus: graft. 

How many “scandals” must we list to prove this point? I suggest just one. When the VBS story was broken on these pages, there was barely any surprise at the deep engagement between the leaders of the bank’s collapse and, at first, Floyd Shivambu’s brother, and then, later, Julius Malema’s lifestyle. By then, most South Africans knew what they were dealing with. That said, the VBS robbery exposed a rotten seam that ran through the EFF: the whole thing was a lie. The party was a front, a means of accruing illicit wealth while destabilising the ANC on the political front. This, in turn, allowed them to steal more. It also provided them with political cover: the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) would not make a move against the EFF leadership unless it felt it had the backing of the political structures. 

It didn’t. Until now. 

With the affidavit of VBS kingpin Tshifhiwa Matodzi circulating in the public domain, a new phase has begun. Said Matodzi: “Myself, Julius and Floyd understood the concept of donation to mean gratification, hence Floyd and Julius did not provide me with EFF’s own banking details for these ‘donations’ [to the party’s leaders].” Put another way, the bank’s failure was in part due to daylight robbery perpetuated by the EFF’s leadership. They likely assumed the bank would be bailed out by the state and its black victims made whole. They were wrong, and many people have suffered due to their actions. 

As the evidence now makes clear, this is the NPA’s case to lose. Julius Malema and Floyd Shivambu robbed a bank and now they must face the consequences. They failed politically — because they refused to do the work of real coalition-building. And they failed as bank robbers — because they thought the loss would be squared by taxpayers. 

Malema especially had his own future in his hands. How many South Africans can say the same thing? Instead, he chose to be another Gucci-wearing succubus. He is both uncool and politically dead. 

As Kurt Cobain once said, “The duty of youth is to challenge corruption.” Malema and company have flunked out. Time for them to face the consequences.

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