“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time,” wrote Maya Angelou. Except, apparently, if that someone is the EFF.
If it’s the EFF, then just keep parroting stuff about good governance even when your party has literally just voted in favour of a criminal organisation taking over a city.
On Monday morning, if you’d asked South Africans to name one political party that is agreed to be fundamentally hostile to a progressive, morally benevolent agenda in this country – that has proved in word and deed that it a predatory mafia dedicated to extracting wealth from citizens – they could have named only the ANC.
Certainly, many of us have major doubts about the moral fibre of the leadership of other parties. The DA famously appealed to abandoned NP voters let down by all the white supremacist politicians joining the ANC. The ACDP doesn’t see a problem with blurring the line between church and state, mainly because it thinks that state is just a phase the young people are going through, like puberty or liberalism or allowing girls to read. In 1994 it was touch and go if the IFP were going to opt for ballots or bullets.
In recent years, however, the ANC has towered above the rest, the undisputed champion of filth. Mountains of empirical evidence have confirmed, beyond all reasonable doubt, that the ANC is fundamentally, catastrophically and, perhaps, permanently corrupt. The corruption of the ANC is as certain as the laws of physics: if the Earth is orbiting the sun, then someone in the ANC is stealing public money.
That’s what we knew on Monday morning.
On Monday afternoon, however, we knew something else with absolute certainty: the EFF, self-proclaimed champion of people oppressed by economic crimes, had signed up as a willing and public accomplice to help a criminal organisation reclaim Nelson Mandela Bay.
This is the point where ANC and EFF twitterers shout at me about DA tendencies and whiteness catching feelings and all the other cute catchphrases they lean on so heavily.
So let me be clear. I, like most South Africans I know, don’t give a damn about who governs me as long as they do it well and honestly. If the EFF could gain a mandate and summon the spine to do any actual governing (as opposed to its current strategy, which is simply an endless performance of a pantomime called ‘Don’t Make Daddy Angry!’), and if it could run a city cleanly, efficiently and sustainably, I would love to see it in charge of mine.
But thanks to Monday, I now know that the EFF is incapable of running a city cleanly, efficiently and sustainably.
I know this because those things are impossible for a party that doesn’t see a problem aligning itself to the goals of a criminal organisation.
Yes, it fell out with the ANC again on Thursday, storming out in a petulant huff when its motion of no confidence in Tshwane was a disallowed. But this was clearly a squabble over turf, not principles.
Julius Malema says a lot of stuff. Jacob Zuma is a leader worth dying for! Venezuela is a fine economic role model! I will never start my own political party! The EFF will never vote with the ANC!
Cyril Ramaphosa will never become president!
Yes, he says a lot of stuff.
But it’s his actions and those of his party that are what matters.
And by aligning with the looting machine, their actions have confirmed that their ferocious pursuit of the Guptas was merely about settling old scores with Zuma.
The EFF has nothing against corruption. Don’t say you didn’t know...