JUSTICE MALALA | EFF’s new recruits paint a damning picture of the party

The exodus of the ANC’s radical economic transformation faction to Julius Malema’s EFF has started. For now, it is a trickle that started with Mzwanele Manyi, the Gupta family business associate and ideological confrere, and continued this week with the announcement by the disgraced, impeached, former public protector, Busisiwe Mkhwebane.

Before long, and as the election looms ever closer, the taps will open and you will see the likes of former ANC secretary-general Ace Magashule (another Gupta lackey whose children were in business with the family and who has now launched a political party that is going nowhere), former ANC spokesperson Carl Niehaus (who has also formed his own political vehicle), and others begin to sign up and pledge allegiance to the red berets and its leader Julius Malema.

Many of the professionals who used to do the dirty work of the Jacob Zuma state capture era are already part of the ideological network around the EFF. For example, one saw the revelations during Mkhwebane’s impeachment of how Gupta-linked social media influencers, academics and lawyers on the run from the law were paid from state coffers to essentially do the dirty work of undermining the state.

So the drip-drip-drip of compromised, even corrupt, individuals from the ANC or the Zuma-Gupta faction of the ANC will continue. The zenith of this process will be when members of Zuma’s family — already close to the EFF and its leadership — finally sign up and wear the red beret. Indeed, Zuma’s son Duduzane has over the past year flagged the idea of contesting elections as an independent or starting a political party. Recent reports have indicated he is working on starting a party that refers to its activists as “game changers”. What happens when the endeavour fails? The EFF will be waiting with open arms. His twin sister has already been congratulating Mkhwebane on joining the EFF.

When the Zuma ANC bludgeoned through Mkhwebane as a public protector, for example, Julius Malema blasted her, saying: ‘We just took a puppet from Gupta’s kitchen and said let’s give her a chance.’

That won’t be all. Malema, who used to boast that his blood is red, green and gold and he would never leave the ANC, is leader of the EFF. Ace Magashule used to tell journalists the same thing, now he is leading an inconsequential new formation. Zuma, who has a battery of litigation against his successor as ANC president, often speaks of his loyalty to the ANC. But he is on a short leash. As legal gambit after legal gambit to evade his corruption trial fails, Zuma will try to play the Samson card (which he used in 2021 and again this year to threaten that the country will descend into riots and chaos if he is jailed). As that fails, he will be tempted to find a new home, one where he is allowed to undermine the rule of law. That home is the EFF.

In summary, a huge chunk of the ANC’s effluent is making its way to the EFF. ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula is right when he says Thabo Mbeki is wrong to say that the party is not renewing itself. Maybe the ANC is not renewing itself, but it certainly has purged itself of some of the key players in the Gupta-Zuma state capture project. When they are not on trial, like disgraced SA Airways chief and Zuma acolyte Dudu Myeni, then they are joining the EFF like Mkhwebane.

All this presents a problem for the EFF. When it was formed 10 years ago it presented itself as a force for good, an ethical and principled organisation that would have no truck with the ANC’s corruption under Zuma. When the Zuma ANC bludgeoned through Mkhwebane as a public protector, for example, Julius Malema blasted her, saying: “We just took a puppet from Gupta’s kitchen and said let’s give her a chance.”

The more than a million people who follow and vote for his organisation are now faced not just with this one “Gupta puppet” being a leader or parliamentarian of the organisation, they are faced with many more to come. Those who believed the EFF was a new, fresh, creation are only now realising that the party is nothing new. Instead, it was an extension of the ANC all along. Instead of being a force for the poor, it is merely a wing of the maggots who tried to eat away at South Africa in the 2010s.

It reflects the cultish nature of the EFF that there has not been a single leader or even member who has pointed out just how compromised the likes of Manyi and Mkhwebane are. Not one of the EFF’s many voluble supporters have pointed out just how deeply these new recruits were intertwined with the state capture project. How will the EFF in Gauteng castigate Panyaza Lesufi for giving the Gupta puppet, Des van Rooyen, a crucial board position, when they would welcome him with open arms?

The EFF’s new recruits tell you a lot about what the party is really about. It is the real Gupta-Zuma State Capture party.