TOM EATON | What would Julius do? EFF threatens worse than violence

Sometimes, a politician being slowly raised on a hydraulic platform into a confetti-filled sky is a symbol. Sometimes it’s an admission. This weekend it was both.

Before that act of levitation happened, however, there was the rally; and as 95,000 EFF supporters filled the FNB stadium to capacity to celebrate their party’s 10th birthday, even its critics had to admit it was an extraordinary turnout and wondered how the party managed it.

I can only assume they’d missed the news from a month ago when it was reported the EFF had issued a “directive” in May warning that any member who failed to sell tickets to this weekend’s gala dinner, or arrange transport to the stadium, would be “banished” from the rally.

When that report first did the rounds I read a few comments below the line grumbling about the EFF and its Stalinist, authoritarian tendencies. This weekend, however, showed the limitations of that analysis.

The EFF wasn’t threatening violence or reprisals. It was threatening something infinitely worse to its members and perhaps more dangerous to our democracy: the withdrawing and withholding of Christ-like love.

We should be careful of ascribing cult-like behaviour to mere megalomaniacs or con men or legitimate political groupings we disagree with. And yet that directive cut to the heart of how cults maintain themselves, forcing compliance, not through violence or physical coercion (at least not at first), but rather by threatening members with the terrifying prospect of being sent away — banished, to use the EFF’s own word — beyond the glow of the life-giving aura of the messiah.

To be fair, Malema has made it clear he doesn’t want EFF members to openly proclaim his divinity, perhaps because it rather gives the whole game away.

He would have been very cross, for example, with the supporter, shown on Twitter, who greeted him at the stadium by yelling, “You are God, o Modimo!”

In 2019, likewise, when a number of supporters knelt before him at a conference and sang him a song of praise, he angrily told them: “I am not the EFF, neither am I the Holy Spirit ... and then the papers write that Malema is a cult, people are kneeling before him as if I asked you to kneel before me.”

And fair enough. I mean, just because Jesus said exactly the same thing in Matthew 16:20, telling his disciples not to refer to him as the Messiah, it doesn’t necessarily mean Malema is running a faith-based personality cult.

Yet, it’s hard not to think it, especially since now, 10 years and countless flip-flops later, the party still only has two coherent policies: Malema is right; critics are Satan. Certainly, it’s abundantly clear that the EFF is neither anticolonialist (having wholeheartedly supported Russia’s colonial aspirations in Ukraine), and if its gala dinner is any indication, it’s less anticapitalist than simply anti whichever capitalists won’t donate to it.

I mean, it’s possible that Mao, Castro and Sankara might have paid a lot of money to get gussied up to look like colonial railway barons and shipping tycoons from the 1890s, performing all the rituals and using all the props of the brutal social and economic hierarchies they were trying to overthrow. But I hope the Fighters will forgive us for wondering if they really want to raze Versailles or simply redecorate and move in.

And yet, can we blame them if they do? Can anyone in SA’s middle class honestly tell any of the EFF’s supporters that they are wrong to want everything that the ultrarich have, or that they shouldn’t feel inspired when they see Malema looking like an oligarch? Of course not.

I believe that the EFF is a personality cult. I believe that it uses psychologically coercive techniques common to many cults. And yet one of the dangers of calling it a cult is to dismiss its followers as brainwashed or naive. This would be a mistake.

People don’t join cults because of what they believe. They join because of what they need. At least at first, the first act of any horrific exposé is always distinctly utopian, full of kind, gentle, inspired people doing great things for each other.

The EFF’s vision is not particularly kind or gentle, at least not to anyone outside the compound, but that’s because SA is neither kind nor gentle. What millions of people need is help, but until that comes, they’ll take a loud angry voice disrupting the polite paralysis of parliamentary democracy, denouncing the negotiated settlements that made the rich get richer and got young people trapped in permanent unemployment; a voice that howls that justice has not yet been done. The EFF is the only one offering to supply that need, and if it’s being done to the personal glory of one man, so what?

On Saturday, as Malema was slowly raised into the sky and fireworks erupted and confetti rained down, every person at the FNB stadium saw and instantly understood two things.

They saw Malema embodying the raising up of the forgotten, betrayed and dismissed masses. And they saw that he is above everyone else on that stage, literally untouchable, ascending towards the heaven from which he came but then stopping, because his work is not yet done.

It was a symbol. It was an admission. It was perfect.

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