Mzwanele Manyi has asked how polls conducted in October 2023 failed so dismally to account for a political party that was only launched in December 2023, and I think we all deserve answers.
“Now that the dust has somewhat settled,” he tweeted on Thursday, “there's something to be said about the miraculous drop in the EFF from double digit to single digit even with MKP in the mix. How could Ipsos be so wrong in October 2023?”
Yes, we need an answer. Not to his question, obviously, but to the more urgent one, namely, how a human adult can tweet this kind of thing and also be a MP.
Then again, perhaps this is unfair. Manyi, after all, is the man who once suggested there were too many coloured people in the Western Cape and that some of them should be moved to other provinces; and by those standards, not understanding that December comes after October is a fairly small oversight.
It would also be a mistake to allow that particularly dim-witted question to distract us from the rest of the tweet; one that offers a useful insight into the existential crisis currently facing the EFF and how it plans to deal with it.
Manyi is right about one thing: the EFF is now a single-digit party. That digit depends on how you’re measuring it — the EFF won 9.7% of the vote in May, which was 5.5% of registered voters — but what doesn’t change is the fact that the EFF now has three options.
The first is that it keeps doing what it is doing now, without changing anything. It accepts it has dropped out of contention as a leading political force, and goes the COPE or UDM route, enduring a slow but inexorable decline in popularity until it splinters, merges with another party, or disappears.
This, obviously, is not something the EFF can tolerate. Which brings us to the second option: the party does some honest, difficult reflection, realises that it is has become a personality cult, and finds a way to change course to become a party that makes news by helping the poor rather than by wearing R28,000 shoes.
This, too, will be almost impossible. Personality cults are incredibly hard to reverse without party-splintering purges, and for many members — perhaps even most — Julius Malema’s shoes are more or less the whole point. The EFF is a prosperity church preaching personal enrichment, and those shoes — carefully chosen for maximum effect — weren’t hypocritical: they were aspirational.
More importantly, however, Zuma and his MKP have cornered the election denial market.
Which leaves the third option: wading into the same cesspool as Donald Trump and Jacob Zuma by questioning the results — and therefore the legitimacy — of elections.
Certainly, by describing the EFF’s drop as “miraculous”, Manyi seems to be dipping a toe in those fetid waters, offering innuendo instead of a sober admission that a small but significant number of EFF voters prefer the fairy-tale Zuma is selling to the stale Ponzi that Malema is slowly choking to death.
Even this option, however, offers limited gains. First, Malema accepted the results of the election almost immediately. Manyi can whisper and wink behind his fan, but barring any flip-flops, the EFF’s official policy is that the election was legitimate.
More importantly, however, Zuma and his MKP have cornered the election denial market. Alleging and then retracting and then reiterating that they were robbed is now their official brand, and any other party that tries the same thing will just look, well, like the EFF: also-rans behind Grandaddy Zuma.
No, the EFF is facing a tough few years ahead, and you don’t have to read an Ipsos poll — or, if you’re Mzwanele Manyi, gaze blankly at one that’s months out of date — to see the writing on the wall.
