Wandile Kasibe
Cape Town - This year marks a decade of selfless sacrifice and political ingenuity since the EFF was born from the billowing dust of the winter of July 2013.
It was Karl Marx, the son of a successful Jewish lawyer, Hirschel Marx, and a close friend of Friedrich Engels, who once said: “Necessity is blind until it becomes conscious. Freedom is the consciousness of necessity.”
These words may have been uttered more than two centuries ago in a different context: space, place and time, but the gravity of their meaning has come to find expression in our particularity that for too long we have been blinded to the things that are a necessity to our existence as a race.
In this passage, Marx seems to deposit in us the sense that true freedom is to become conscious and awoken to the very things that are a sine qua non to our sense of belonging and being in the world.
To be more specific, it is a ceaseless fight to attain by any means necessary that which is central to our existence, meaning land and economic power.
Our conscious freedom to demand land as a necessity has for the longest time been thwarted by the neo-liberal policies of the former liberation movement, the ANC.
For close to two decades before the EFF was born, these policies of willing buyer-willing seller, Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative for South Africa and many others kept us numb to the idea that without land we are an unpeopled people and pariahs in the land of our forebears.
Though Marx never set foot on the continent, his idea of a slave who cannot exist without the master and the master who cannot exist without the slave, is perhaps what gave birth to his understanding of dialectics.
Dialectics contain the idea that the subject cannot be separated from its opposite other and that these two are in a constant conflict while at the same time bound together by historical circumstances to an asymmetric and parasitic relationship of one feeding the existence of the other and the other existing through exploiting the other.
It is this never-ending contradiction and confrontation between two opposing sides that sometimes creates new pathways in our Struggle for freedom.
It is precisely this asymmetric and parasitic relationship between the settler communities and the African natives that the ANC has administered and presided over as a middle man since it took over political power in 1994.
For too long South Africans have lived under the tutelage of the governing party without their own voice, until of course the EFF was born in July 2013, and presented an ultimate alternative for the poor and working class.
The year before it was born, on August 16, 2012, the Marikana massacre occurred, plunging the country into a deep political abyss and point of no return, thereby exacerbating the county’s fragility.
The darkness of what had happened in Marikana had befallen us, as words could not bring solace to the deeply wounded families of those whose loved ones were mercilessly massacred by the government of the ANC.
A permanent scar had been gored into the “soul” of our nation by a state that had long sought to protect the interest of White Monopoly Capital at the expense of the poorest of the poor and working class.
On the instruction of the country’s then second in command, Cyril Ramaphosa, who instructed the heavily armed police and special force to take “concomitant action” against Lonmin miners who had gone on strike to demand better wages of R12 500 a month.
That concomitant action led to the lifeless bodies of many of these mine workers with bullet wounds and blood gushing out to the ground.
In retrospect, it could be argued that the Marikana massacre happened as an outcome of a toxic collusion between greedy politicians of the ANC and owners of the means of production in the mining sector.
In its final analysis, the Marikana miners were sacrificed at the altar of this dangerous liaison by people who put profit before the sanctity of life itself.
The agonised cries of the Marikana miners prompted the formation of the EFF.
A year later in July 2013, the EFF was born. At the time of this ongoing political morass, when all hopes had faded, our people betrayed by those whom they put to power, it came almost like a gift, exactly at the time when our moment of doom had come.
A gift like this only comes once in a long while.
As a Marxist-Leninist and Fanonian movement, the EFF, was born to defend the defenceless and landless masses of our people as it carries their intergenerational aspirations and dreams.
At the zenith of its noble resolve, it has been given the revolutionary baton passed down from the battlefields of the Khoi-Almeida confrontation of 1510, the Khoi-Dutch confrontation of 1659, the wars of resistance on the escarpment of the Eastern Cape, the battle of Isandlwana, on the banks of the Ncome (“Blood”) River, and many other battles that had been fought by our people in defence of our land.
In fact, in its founding documents, the EFF acknowledges this intergenerational Struggle when it reminds us that, “Economic Freedom Fighters locate the struggle for economic emancipation within the long resistance of South Africans to resist colonial and imperialist, political, economic and social domination.
“This glorious resistance started with the Khoi and San people rising against colonial domination, marked by the arrival of the settler colonialists in 1652 in the Cape.”
In this passage the founding minds of the EFF already knew that there is no single generation that can define itself outside the collective sacrifice of those who came before it.
And those who came before are heroes and heroines who continue to be our guiding lodestars in the delicate path towards the attainment of economic freedom in our lifetime.
The fact that the EFF presents a unique political niche to South African politics and is led by a president and commander in chief, Julius Sello Malema, who possesses true courage befitting a leader of the vanguard of the poor and working class, is undeniable.
It was he who stood and addressed the Marikana miners after the calamity of August 2012, when all other politicians and leaders had retreated into their self-centred cocoons of complacency.
His time had come.
It was under his leadership that the EFF was kicked out of Parliament for demanding accountability from the then president Jacob Zuma.
Many pundits and prophets of doom had proclaimed his political demise at the time of great strife and state repression and yet again he stood at the cusp of the turn of the century’s tide to proclaim the EFF as an alternative.
On one hand, South African white racists would be agitated at the mention of his name as they nurse their white fragilities, and on the other, the clever blacks would heavily criticise him for confronting institutionalised racism and racism in general, for it disturbs the sensibilities of their white masters and mistresses, and yet again Malema stood tall like truth.
It is only now that many of his critics have come to understand and appreciate his deep sense of vision and genuine love and empathy towards the dejected masses of our people.
Ten years later, the movement that advocates for the expropriation of land without compensation for equitable redistribution, nationalisation of mines, banks and other strategic sectors of the economy, building of state and government capacity, free decolonised and quality education, health care, houses, sanitation, massive protected industrial development to create sustainable jobs, open, massive investment in the development of the African economy, accountable and free-corrupt government, celebrates its 10th anniversary.
Many fell along the way due to lack of organisational discipline and political stamina, suffering from the delusions of grandeur and lack of allegiance to the revolutionary cause.
These are men and women who today regret their decision to abandon the only weapon in the hands of the poorest of the poor.
If it were up to me, I would create a special dispensation and allow them back home, but under very strict conditions, such as: they must bring back all the people they misled, and they should not occupy any leadership position for a period of five years.
And those who went and started political parties shouldn’t be allowed back and must be regarded as unrehabilitated.
Dr Kasibe is the EFF Western Cape Spokesperson, Media and Liaison Officer, but writes in his personal capacity
Cape Times
* The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.