BRYAN ROSTRON: Revolutionaries, robbers or turnips

While not yet the end of days, as the country abruptly plunges into (another) crisis, this government already feels like a doomed ancien regime. After 28 years in power the ANC is sclerotic, consumed with intrigue and infighting, seeming to be as unaware as the court of Louis XVI of the social ferment boiling up outside the palace walls. It will not be too long before the irreconcilable internal contradictions force a resolution.

The three most likely outcomes all revolve around the ANC being desperate to cling to power. One possibility is a dramatic political realignment, with a centrist ANC grouping coming to an uneasy coalition or informal accommodation with the DA. That would represent a desperate resort for ANC leaders, and an admission of their total failure. It would also be harrowing for many followers on both sides, given long-entrenched racial attitudes.

A second prospect could be that, as electoral support for the governing party inexorably drains away the ANC entices Julius Malema back into the fold, hoping that he will bring enough young supporters along with him to keep the gravy train on the rails a while longer.

A third option is an internal ANC coup by the pseudorevolutionary faction, many already facing corruption charges. Even if President Cyril Ramaphosa were to survive the looming ANC elective conference, this could take the form in the new year of his early recall as president, following the precedent set by the defenestrations of Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma.

This might result in a pact with the ever-opportunistic EFF: an alliance trading under the misleading slogan of radical economic transformation. If so, to deflect from their own lack of policies more blame would be heaped on the West, racism and colonialism — fuelled by further clapped-out Marxist rhetoric alongside a stubborn attachment to “democratic centralism”.

The logic of that mirrors Leon Trotsky’s attack on Vladimir Lenin in 1904, when he predicted: “The party organisation substitutes itself for the party, the central committee substitutes itself for the organisation, and finally a ‘dictator’ substitutes himself for the central committee.” Trotsky should have heeded his own warning; his nemesis, Stalin, was the incarnation of “substitutionalism”.

That would represent an ominous lurch towards authoritarianism, a role I suspect EFF “commander-in-chief” Malema fancies for himself in future, with his Mussolini-style bluster and penchant for militarism. Stalinist contortions still run deep in the more retrograde parts of the ANC, as does (along with the EFF) racial chauvinism, parading as African nationalism. It is profoundly reactionary.

“Each generation must discover its mission, fulfil it, or betray it,” wrote Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth. The verdict on the radical economic transformation clique, and Malema, is already in. They are not revolutionaries, even if they cloak themselves in combat fatigues or red overalls. Instead, these charlatans are “turnips”, Trotsky’s favourite insult for phoney revolutionaries.

As opposed to the slur “coconut” (black on the outside, white on the inside) Trotsky’s “turnip” is a political verdict: “red on the outside, white on the inside”, where white refers to the anti-Bolshevik White Army during the Russian Civil War of 1917-1923.

How did we arrive at such a grotesque distortion? As the current presidential crisis illustrates, it results from the ANC’s failure to govern coherently. Into that void, for the lack of an obvious alternative leap a gruesome crew of crooks and hustlers.

Fanon (on the EFF’s recommended reading list) asserted: “Because it is a systematic negation of the other person and a furious determination to deny the other person all attributes of humanity, colonialism forces the people it dominates to ask themselves constantly: ‘In reality, who am I?’” It’s a profound question.

But just as sometimes the lesson history teaches us is the wrong lesson, the evidence shows that after independence the response to Fanon’s question is often distorted. In postapartheid SA the same contortion is clearly evident in the EFF leaders, for it seems unlikely that either Malema, his deputy, Floyd Shivambu, or former EEF chair (and virtuoso of the slimy smear) Dali Mpofu have genuinely asked themselves, “In reality, who am I?”

An honest audit would include a crass love of expensive accessories, the best champagne (Moët for Malema), and a bully’s delight in violent rhetoric and racial insults. In truth, the authentic response to Fanon’s “Who am I?” for Malema and his shiny red lieutenants is a resounding chorus of, “Turnips!”

• Rostron is a journalist and author. His latest book is a memoir, ‘Lost on the Map’.