GARETH VAN ONSELEN: The EFF’s five-year hate-fest
Julius Malema has fixated on and flirted with nothing but the words of war and vitriol — too quickly turned to violence — since the EFF’s inception
As South Africa reflects on the EFF’s five-year anniversary, the record would suggest its primary contribution has been to fuel loathing, engender racial division and espouse violence. Indeed, if the EFF has done anything, it is to provide the country’s latent animosity with a colour and a figurehead — and in doing so, to give a formal, elected voice to hatred. Enmity infuses the EFF’s rhetoric. There will be those who point to its contribution to accountability or the pressure it has applied to the government on certain policies, but central to it all is the unadulterated anger that permeates everything the EFF does and says. For a party that cares nothing for truth or consistency, rage is the common denominator. The EFF is a party of hate, and it has made that particular emotion its own. "A revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate," a banner read at the EFF’s launch in October 2013. It was reportedly accompanied by other like-minded messages, such as...
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