The EFF’s plan to fix Eskom is genuinely brilliant. Not because it will fix Eskom, of course: the EFF hasn’t given that any serious thought, mostly because it doesn’t have to. But the real plan is working as perfectly as it has since the first politician stumbled across one of life’s greatest grifts: getting paid for years to make promises you know you’ll never have to keep.
This week, during the so-called debate about the so-called state of the nation address, that age-old hustle was on full view as the EFF’s Floyd Shivambu reiterated the party’s position that it wants Russia’s Rosatom company to build nuclear power stations in South Africa.
For readers who can remember the EFF loudly and angrily denouncing this exact plan in 2016, the party’s sudden flip-flop in 2020 and Shivambu’s latest reiteration will still feel confusing.
They will no doubt try to find a rational explanation for that radical and largely unexplained change of heart. They will wonder if Russian dealmakers explained to Julius Malema and Shivambu that the kickbacks around a nuclear deal would make the VBS Mutual Bank heist look like a church collection plate. They will ponder whether the party’s cigarette smuggling friends want to expand into the Russian energy sector.
All this thinking, however, will be overthinking. The high priests of the EFF cult may well have personal and potentially lucrative reasons for doing a 180 on Rosatom, but when it comes to making bold pronouncements on how they would solve SA’s power crisis, they don’t need to back up their promises with anything but more promises.
This, after all, is one of the immense perks of being in permanent opposition: you know you’re never going to have to deliver on anything you say.
Free of the burden of governing alone anywhere, the EFF has no such constraints. Everything it breaks can be blamed on its coalition partners or shadowy cabals of counter-revolutionaries.
The DA, a less millenarian set-up trying to herd a variety of cats into a mid-sized tent, ranging from religious conservatives and libertarians to cynical youth and elderly liberals, is more restricted in what it can promise, especially to voters who tend to be more financially literate than the EFF leadership. More importantly, the DA actually governs large numbers of people in SA, which means it’s lost that priceless asset of being able to run its mouth and offer vivid fairytales instead of dull, unsexy compromises and, sometimes, failure.
Free of the burden of governing alone anywhere, the EFF has no such constraints. Everything it breaks can be blamed on its coalition partners or shadowy cabals of counter-revolutionaries. Everything else, like fantasies of Russian nuclear builds or promises of eternally vague “economic freedom”, can simply be handed out like a smooth-talking con artist showering his unwitting investors with IOUs.
Personally, if I had to speculate why they’re reiterating their support for Rosatom now, I’d suggest that it’s more about scoring some easy points ahead of next year’s election than offering any realistic long-term solutions to the Eskom crisis: humping Vladimir Putin’s blood-soaked leg costs the EFF nothing, but it wins them plenty of sweet anti-western street cred while owning the neolibs and transatlantic intellectuals.
It’s also very much on brand: Malema and the EFF have shown unerring aim when it comes to picking losers, from Jacob Zuma and Busisiwe Mkhwebane to fatally ineffective Covid-19 vaccines from China and Russia. Given how badly the invasion of Ukraine has gone for Russia since the EFF first announced its support for it, doubling down this week as a supporter of war crimes is pretty much true to EFF form.
None of this, however, matters. Not really. In the end, it’s just talk; rhetoric; fantasy.
No, what really matters is what’s real. And it doesn’t get more real than the cold, hard cash that gets deposited into MPs’ bank accounts every month, at least 100,000 very real rands, adding up to about R350m in total since the EFF won its first seats in parliament in 2014.
Granted, these days a million and change per year isn’t enough to make you properly rich, but it certainly keeps a fighter in onesies and puts them very close to where the make-you-properly-rich money is flowing. And for what they actually do in this country, it’s money for next to nothing.
Like I said, it’s actually a pretty great plan once you do the maths. And it sure as hell beats working for a living.
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