The EFF invited #SliceofGasant columnist Gasant Abarder to engage with their manifesto after his recent piece about the looming elections.
At the media briefing, he found the pre-teen of SA’s political landscape ready to sit at the big table as a force to be reckoned with in the upcoming polls.
It was a big joke when Julius Malema announced in 2013 that he’d be starting his own political party after being kicked out of the ANC. In 2024, no one is laughing.
His Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) are tipped to edge out the DA as the official opposition in the national polls by South Africa’s leading political survey agency. It’s predicted the EFF will also eat up a chunk of the ANC’s majority.
The optics have not been great and the Fighters certainly polarise views. But the threat they pose to the status quo means they’re the pre-teens with a seat at the table.
What they’ve been good at over 11 years has been consistent messaging of what and who they are. They’re the political disruptors with their red overalls – the most obvious clue of the constituency of voters they’re after: The poor, marginalised, ignored and disillusioned.
The Western Cape is the hardest province to call. When asked about it on Sunday at a briefing of the EFF’s upcoming manifesto launch on 24 March 2024 in Gugulethu, Unathi Ntame, the provincial chair, announced boldly the EFF would take the province. He said second prize would be the DA finishing short of a majority and being forced into a coalition.
Ntame offered tell-tale signs that his prediction wasn’t far-fetched. To illustrate the EFF’s threat to the ANC and DA in rural areas, he pointed to a recent by-election in Saldanha where the EFF won and increased their vote from 15% to 57%.
SRCs at major universities in the Western Cape are run by the EFF too – a trend following on from the rest of the country that indicates it has a large number of the youth vote sewn up.
On my way home from the press briefing, I noticed for the first time the election posters were up. Half of the DA’s poster is red with a message alternating between English and Afrikaans: Red Suid-Afrika (Save South Africa). The EFF is living rent-free in the DA’s head, it seems. Why use valuable election poster real estate to help paint the town red?
Away from the elections bluster, the EFF has visited communities around the country to make its election manifesto a living document, the party’s central elections task force member, Nazier Paulsen, said. He described it as a consultative document with farmworkers, fishers, outsourced security guards and cleaners, taxi drivers and the millions of others who live on the margins.
‘Thirty years of democracy has seen no change in ownership patterns … what is democracy if you are still landless, still poor and you haven’t changed the ownership patterns of this country?’, asked Paulsen.
‘It is cause for instability for our country, it is oppression and job creation benchmarked against the ANC (like the DA does) is not the standard. To address poverty, you have to create jobs and the reorganisation of the economy.’ Paulsen pointed to the Western Cape’s once thriving clothing and textile industry that was on its knees, the disenfranchisement of indigenous and subsistence fisher folk, the absence of tenure and decent working conditions for farmworkers, and the harassment of taxi drivers.
‘At Saldanha, only one port in South Africa, 170 000 tons of iron ore, used to manufacture steel, is exported. We are not exporting iron ore. We are exporting jobs. Then we import steel and finished products from China,’ he said.
Paulsen said those they consulted ask why goods are produced locally, and the finished products are exported to the rest of the world to create jobs.
He smiled at the inevitable question about the EFF’s public image; helped on when it behaves like a petulant 11-year-old in parliament and elsewhere.
‘No one must be afraid of the EFF,’ he said. ‘But we have to dispense of apartheid and the racial spatial divide that exists in the Western Cape. There are large tracts of land to create new suburbs.
‘We are talking to all people. We are not a coloured, African or white party. We are not going for the coloured vote. We have membership from the various population groups and we are going to represent the poor and the marginalised.’
Results-wise, the EFF may well be the big winners of the 2024 elections. They’re on a growth trajectory that bucks the current trend. But if they’re truly to become a government in waiting they need to grow out of their pre-teens into the mature South African citizen they’ve shown they can be.
Also read:
Voting day has been announced and it’s high time we take our power back
Picture: Supplied