Malema's resort to the politics of farce will be his party's ruin

On July 26 1953, a small group of ill-trained militants stormed the army barracks in Santiago, Cuba. They were led by a 26-year-old idealist, the then little-known University of Havana student activist Fidel Castro.

The armed attack on the Moncada Barracks, Castro hoped, would spark a revolutionary uprising against the corrupt and repressive Fulgencio Batista regime.

The attack was a military disaster and many of the 137 militants were killed or captured by Batista's army. Castro was among those jailed.

Yet, as political propaganda, the failed attack was a major success, spreading the revolutionary message of the insurgents across the island, and Castro subsequently named the campaign that drove the Cuban revolution to victory in 1959 the July 26 Movement.

It is not clear whether Julius Malema had the historical signifi-cance of this date in mind when he decided to launch his Economic Freedom Fighters on July 26 last year.

But, given the fact that he fashions himself as South Africa's answer to the likes of Ernesto "Che" Guevara and Thomas Sankara of Burkina Faso, it is reasonable to speculate that he sees the EFF as his own version of the July 26 Movement that will one day propel him to really being South Africa's commander-in-chief.

Unlike the Cuban movement, however, Malema's outfit did not start with a disastrous failure.

As it celebrated its first anniversary yesterday, the EFF - with its red berets and brash brand of politics - was ensconced in parliament as the country's third-largest political party, with repre-sentation in all nine provincial legislatures.

Although the party failed to gain a majority in the three provinces which it had said it would win ahead of the general elections in May, even its detractors would agree that attracting just more than one million votes in less than 10 months of existence was a notable achievement.

Whereas most of South Africa's new opposition parties have tended to run out of steam soon after their MPs have been sworn in, Malema and his "fighters" have made a point of being noticed - sometimes even overshadowing the official opposition party, the DA, in parliament.

"There is no one who can talk about the politics of the country, including a six-year-old, without talking about the EFF. That is what we have achieved," boasted Malema to a Sunday Times colleague this week.

Given that the DA seems to be in a rudderless state in the National Assembly, with its new parliamentary leader, Mmusi Maimane, still unsteady on his feet, there is a real opportunity for the EFF to position itself as the second most important voice in the house.

Its basic policies are distinctive enough to allow the party to use parliament to promote itself among the poor and the previously oppressed as a real alternative to the governing ANC.

The best example of this was demonstrated by the reply from the party's chief whip, Floyd Shivambu, to President Jacob Zuma's state of the nation address last month.

Unlike most of the EFF MPs who spoke ahead of him - and whose use of highly inflammatory language meant they were constantly heckled by ANC MPs, making it hard for their message to be heard - Shivambu used the platform to systematically expose what he saw as contradictions in the government's economic policies.

His speech has had close to 30000 hits on YouTube.

Yet Malema's penchant for drama, arising mainly from his obsession with emulating revolutionary insurrectionists of yester-year, means the party may never fully realise its parliamentary potential.

Instead of making headlines with radical policy alternatives, the EFF has dominated parliamentary news for mostly frivolous reasons.

The party may have a point in questioning the strict and Eurocentric parliamentary dress code, and its tactic of walking out of provincial legislatures in defiance of such rules may guarantee it front-page coverage in the short term.

But, in the long run, the EFF may end up alienating some of the same supporters who voted it into parliament.

Its approach, which this week included the violent storming of the Gauteng legislature, has certainly not won Malema any new sympathisers.

Gauteng legislature speaker Ntombi Mekgwe may very well have been high-handed in her decision to eject EFF members for wearing their trademark red overalls and domestic worker uniforms. If she was, it is up to the courts to decide.

But there is absolutely no excuse for the anarchic behaviour that Malema's supporters demonstrated when they attacked the provincial legislature.

Storming the building, destroying property and trashing committee rooms is beyond what could be regarded as acceptable democratic protest.

Some of these actions might have been justifiable in the 1980s, when the vast majority of South Africans had no say in the running of the country and had to resort to civil disobedience to be heard, but they are inexcusable in a constitutional democracy.

As a parliamentary political party, the EFF has ample space and opportunity to agitate for "economic freedom" without resorting to extra-parliamentary and illegal means.

Malema and his supporters should make peace with the fact that their generation missed the "exciting" insurrectionary phase of politics. Even that phase of our history ended with a negotiated settlement.

Today's reality is that the administration in Pretoria will not be toppled by a popular revolt in which Malema drives down Church Street to occupy the Union Buildings.

If there is going to be change, it will come through the mundane - call it bourgeois, if you will - process of voting.

To be taken seriously as a "government-in-waiting" - the term most EFF supporters prefer to use to describe themselves - Malema has to engage seriously with parliamentary politics.

Instead of threatening to shut down the Johannesburg central business district the way he did when he led that chaotic 2002 Congress of South African Students march, Malema should be using his party's parliamentary presence to persuade other lawmakers that the dress code is an outdated throwback to a bygone colonial era.

He would probably find that there are many outside the EFF who agree with him, but they cannot say so now because his approach has been so alienating.

If, indeed, some presiding officers are wrongly using the dress code to deny the EFF its constitutional right to participate in legislative processes, then Malema should wait for the courts to rule in his favour.

The alternative is a short-sighted militant strategy that can only consign the EFF to a fringe, left-leaning role that will not win it broad support from the electorate.