The SA Institute of Race Relations (SAIRR) believes the EFF's economic policies could harm South Africans and the party should instead adopt a classical liberal path to prosperity to achieve its objectives.
This is detailed in a report released by the institute, which analysed the EFF's party and its founding pillars.
Despite the institute contextually clarifying that its perspective of economic freedom as a classic liberal think-tank is far removed from the party's foundational conception of the ideal, it argues that their positioning ought to be studied and understood.
“The EFF is often caricatured in a one-dimensional manner, but its political manifesto is far from shallow and is rooted in very real and often-justified grievances. Its policy proposals, therefore, ought to be approached with understanding and fair-mindedness, as the sincerely held beliefs of a party that has been able to command significant electoral support.”
The party, which holds that though black Africans in South Africa have won political freedom after long years of valiant struggle against racist, colonialist and imperialist oppression, “the black people of South Africa still live in absolute mass poverty, are landless, their children have no productive future, they are mistreated, and they are looked down upon in a sea of wealth”.
The institute, describing this as an over-generalisation dating back to 2013 when the party wrote its founding manifesto, said it is, however, true that a large percentage of black South Africans, more so than any other race group, remains mired in poverty, and that on average, black people remain worse off than their compatriots.
“It is fair to say that a majority of black South Africans have not earned much economic dividend from their political liberation, and continue to lag especially behind their white-skinned compatriots. Because ‘political power without economic emancipation is meaningless’.
The institute attributes to the EFF a desire for what they call economic emancipation for the people of South Africa — and incidentally for the people of Africa and the world.
“In pursuit of this objective, it blames the capitalist economic system both for the racist oppression of the past, and for what it considers to be the continued marginalisation, oppression and exploitation of the black majority today. It describes itself as ‘a radical, leftist, anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movement’.”
The party’s political outlook is inspired by “the broad Marxist-Leninist tradition and Fanonian schools of thought in their analyses of the state, imperialism, culture and class contradictions in every society”.
The institute offers commentary that while many of the EFF’s policies are well intended, many are misguided, unrealistic or outright harmful.
Ivo Vegter, who authored the report, begins by dissecting the party's infamous call for the expropriation of land without compensation, dismissing it as not only a violation of property rights but an elimination of them in respect of land.
“It anticipating dispossessing all South Africans, regardless of race, does not make the proposal any more palatable. That it will do this without compensation is problematic. Land that has been legally acquired, by purchase or inheritance, is private property. To deprive people of that property is morally wrong. It also has practical consequences. A great deal of private property is mortgaged to banks, as collateral for loans. If all that capital is destroyed at the stroke of a pen, the banking sector will be thrown into chaos.”
The EFF correctly points to continuing injustices in South Africa, and in particular the gulf between the material conditions of the average black person and the average white person in South Africa.
In respect of the nationalisation of mines, banks and other strategic sectors of the economy, the institute holds that doing so in a country where virtually every state-owned entity is chronically over-indebted, permanently underperforming and on the verge of collapse is tone deaf.
“The SOEs — notably the critically important Transnet, Eskom and the Post Office — have also been a major locus of looting, as documented by the Zondo commission on state capture.
“That the South African economy can be transformed to address unemployment, poverty and inequality without transfer of wealth to the people as a whole (read: to the government) is neither a supposition, nor is it illusory.”
The EFF advocates free, quality education, health care, houses and sanitation — which the institute criticises as “fatally flawed”.
“Education, health care, housing and sanitation cost a lot of money. And when the government buys them for the people, Friedman’s principle says they’ll cost even more than usual. There is also a moral dimension to the notion of free government services.
“The government cannot create anything, except by confiscating money that citizens, or companies, have earned, meaning that services that are free to one citizen cost money paid by other citizens. This is a violation of property rights — forcing one person to pay for services to provided to another is sometimes described as theft. Sometimes even as slavery.”
Vegter says the red berets may have “economic freedom” in name, but the party's conception of what that means is diametrically opposed to the idea of economic freedom that is broadly accepted among economists, and lies at the heart of classical liberal ideology.
“The EFF correctly points to continuing injustices in South Africa, and in particular the gulf between the material conditions of the average black person and the average white person in South Africa. Its prescriptions for addressing this inequality, however, are, in its own words, ‘radical, leftist, anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist’, inspired by Marx, Lenin and Fanon.
“The institute acknowledges that while the party's ideological thinking is deeply immersed in the rhetoric of decolonisation, its policies, therefore, are inconsistent with the classical liberal’s commitment to individual liberty, property rights and free enterprise.
“The EFF has, however, said it embraces the values of human dignity, equality, human rights and freedoms; those of nonracialism and nonsexism; and open, accountable democracy with universal suffrage.
“On these principles, classical liberals heartily agree.”
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