It’s a “small, minority party”, President Cyril Ramaphosa told his American counterpart at their face-to-face a week ago. It was not a part of the government, and its rhetoric did not reflect government policy.
He was referring to the Economic Freedom Fighters, whose threatening behaviour – and in particular, the chanting of “Kill the Boer! Kill the Farmer!” – President Trump has used to illustrate particular concerns about the state of South Africa.
The meeting has been regarded in much of the public commentary as a triumph of some measure for President Ramaphosa, and the team he took with him. They’d confronted Trump’s bluster and lies and had refuted them. They’d also put clear distance between themselves as the political centre – wanting to move forward with a growing economy and a commitment to constitutional governance – and the malign forces that would like to tear up the constitution, and drive a political programme that promised only economic retardation and social exclusion.
Democratic Alliance leader and agriculture minister, John Steenhuisen, did something to rescue the situation by pointing out that the Government of National Unity had been formed with his party’s participation to ensure that parties like the EFF and the uMkhonto we Sizwe Party were excluded from the government. (I love the word “rabble”…)
And this was President Ramaphosa’s trump card – such as he had one (and the pun being unintentional) – in that uncomfortable meeting.
Political rallies
President Trump commented that the footage didn’t seem to indicate an insignificant group. I’d question his reasoning, since political rallies are stage managed events to which supporters may be transported from far afield. But in a broader sense – the EFF’s presence on South Africa’s political firmament – he makes a valid point.
While it suffered a setback in the last election, the EFF garnered over 1.5 million votes, 9.5% of the votes cast, and 39 of the 400 seats in the National Assembly. Whether that is “small” is a matter of perspective, though at one voter out of ten, it was hardly an insignificant showing.
Moreover, with its haul of Parliamentary seats, the EFF had the numbers to enable a viable ruling coalition with the post-election ANC. Together, they mustered 198 seats, just three shy of a majority.
It’s worth going back to the aftermath of the 2024 election, and recalling that there was no guarantee of an agreement between the DA and ANC. There had been considerable speculation prior to the election that an agreement between the ANC and EFF was a distinct possibility. The DA received numerous maulings from analysts for apparently ruling out cooperation with the ANC.
As Melanie Verwoerd curiously put it, the DA would be responsible for an ANC-EFF coalition. The logic here is not strong – and Ms Verwoerd’s antipathy to the DA comes clearly through in her work – but it was notable that she viewed an ANC-EFF coalition as inevitable unless the DA agreed to a deal with the ANC on the latter’s terms.
Ultimately, the ANC under its existing leadership was averse to a deal with the EFF, though this seems to have been a political rather than a principled choice. Joining with the EFF would probably have meant the end of President Ramaphosa; it would also have meant subjecting governance (and even more so, the patronage networks that it enables) to a demanding and unpredictable partner. The ANC of mid-2024, it seems, simply saw the EFF as too great a threat to itself.
This does not mean that there was no support or coming to such an arrangement. The South African Communist Party was in public support of a deal with the EFF, although it did warn against doing so with the MKP. This is not hard to understand. As UJ politics professor Siphamandla Zondi told ENCA at the time: “It wouldn’t be difficult for them to form a coalition because they have similar policies and similar tendencies.”
Behaviour
If “tendencies” can be a colloquial stand-in for behaviour, he is correct. The EFF’s conduct was incubated in the ANC, and particularly in its Youth League. Nor is this about Julius Malema. There is very little in the EFF that would not be unfamiliar to an observer of South Africa in the 1990s, even if it has been rebranded in red coveralls and converted into a standalone formation in which no countervailing pretension of non-racialism or ideological accommodation are to be seen.
In blinkered certainty of its infallibility, in invoking “the people”, and in bursts of sometimes violent intolerance, the EFF’s lineage traces perfectly back to the ANC.
So, too, does its rhetoric. As I noted a few weeks ago, “Kill the Boer” came to notoriety under Peter Mokaba. And while it was inconvenient to some in the ANC at the time, it was stoutly defended – not just by the more populist elements. Then Deputy President Thabo Mbeki defended it at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, where he emphatically denied any connection to violence against farmers, or any untoward meaning – indeed, any meaning at all. It was a chant, not a slogan. (He returned to this after the presidential meeting.)
It appears now that President Ramaphosa has been able now to discern the meaning that was so elusive in the 1990s, at least to the extent that he can now indicate that “our government policy is completely, completely against what he was saying.”
Oddly, though, this was a cause that the ANC has in the past been willing, if not to die for, then at least to put up a stout defence of. It stuck by Malema during his own travails around this song (or slogan, or chant), and when he was ultimately expelled from the organisation, this matter seemed to have nothing to do with the decision. Rather, this had to do with Malema having sowed “division” and demonstrated indiscipline.
And it is an expression of sentiments that President Ramaphosa, his party, and his government have resolutely refused to condemn. This was the case as recently as March this year, when he declined to do so.
Distraction
In a way, though, this is a distraction. Yes, chanting “Kill the Boer” is provocative and intimidatory – and I’d say it is intended to be. The more chilling proposition is that the EFF represents a mode of politics – albeit a hyperbolic one – with which the ANC is comfortable. Hence, incidentally, the dark warnings of someone like Melanie Verwoerd.
Part of the message that President Ramaphosa took to Washington was that he headed an inclusive, reform-minded Government of National Unity. The EFF stood apart from this, excluded from power and peddling an antithetical politics. This is not quite the case. The ANC has been willing to co-operate with the EFF at municipal level, most notably in the Gauteng metros. It is no secret that many in senior positions in the ANC – such as Premier Panyaza Lesufi and Deputy President Paul Mashatile – would be amendable to an agreement with the EFF. Even President Ramaphosa has extended an open invitation to Julius Malema to return to the fold.
It’s also worth noting that even President Ramaphosa’s commitment to the GNU as a force for progress and a bulwark against the pathologies embodied by the EFF (and the MKP) has been qualified to say the least.
There is little in his and his party’s conduct over the past year that suggests it takes the idea of cross-party co-operation seriously. It needs (for now) the DA to make up its numbers – and, of course, to put on a good face for President Trump – but the policy agenda remains unchanged, and the President himself has dealt a number of studied insults to his nominal coalition partners.
The most egregious of these was in signing the Expropriation Act without notifying the DA minister in charge of its implementation (though the latter’s deputy, from the ANC, was well briefed on it), and having declined to respond to an extensive legal opinion expressing concerns with the act.
There is an interesting contradiction in this. While President Ramaphosa has stuck to principle in defending the rights of a “small, minority party”, he has treated his own partners in government as opponents. Except, of course, where for external consumption different messaging was opportune.
Dilemma
President Ramaphosa’s dilemma is actually very simple. He is, and always has been, first the president of the ANC, and only in distant second place the president of the country. In his partial defence, the ANC’s worldview finds it hard to disentangle them. The unity of the ANC is always and in everything paramount. This is not just an organisational matter, but one of ideology and identity. President Ramaphosa will not be remembered as the President who took the decisions that split the party, or compromised its “revolutionary” pretentions. When people speak of President Ramaphosa looking towards his legacy, this is the legacy he is desperate to avoid.
And at some level, the EFF and MKP – their supporters and most of their leaders, though with some exceptions – belong to the same family. Estranged, certainly, but not to be forsaken. The DA, by contrast – supporters and leaders alike, even those sitting in the cabinet – are not so regarded. Nor, I would argue, within the mindset prevailing in the ANC’s leadership will they ever be.
If South Africa’s future as a constitutional democracy were to be front of mind for the President, he would have used his not inconsiderable personal popularity to appeal directly to South Africa’s people – to all of them, clearly and without equivocation – for a fresh direction for the country, and for his own party. This would be one that saw the political centre as its home, and the DA – if not as a friend – than at least as a party of fellow citizens with which progress would be made. That is, unfortunately, neither his worldview, nor an appeal he is ever likely to make.
Tragically so. This path would damage the already fragile unity of the ANC, but it would find a favourable reception among the country’s people. There is a wealth of polling that demonstrates a fundamental moderation, goodwill and material orientation across the population. Revolution and race-baiting have a limited purchase. A recent poll by the Social Research Foundation reported that even a majority of EFF supporters felt that chanting “Kill the Boer” was wrong. And there remains a lot of support or the principle of the GNU as it is currently constituted.
In fact, all evidence is that a handsome majority of South Africans would support a change of direction, without which the country’s prospects are dim indeed.
The EFF may be a “small, minority party”, but it is one whose presence reveals a great deal more than its numbers suggests. President Ramaphosa’s explanation to his American counterpart on this matter was, to put it politely, economic with the truth. Small though it is, it represents a strain of the politics that the ANC is unwilling to dispense with, and a constituency it is reluctant to offend. And while it chooses to follow that course, South African will pay a high price indeed.
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