Democracy snares EFF
Is democracy killing the EFF?
As Marikana recedes in our memories, the wind goes out of the sails of Julius Malema’s party, the EFF, and it now risks becoming aligned more with democracy than with revolution
In October 1987, a week before Burkina Faso president Thomas Sankara was assassinated in a coup, he memorably said: “While revolutionaries as individuals can be murdered, you cannot kill ideas.” He was right, on both counts, and one of the places his particular brand of revolutionary thought would find a home, about 30 years later, was with Julius Malema’s EFF. “We are a proudly Sankarist organisation,” the party’s Jackie Shandu wrote in May 2014. Sankara joins a long list of revolutionaries the EFF cites as inspiration; among them Vladimir Lenin and Che Guevara. There are other influences — that of West Indian psychoanalyst and philosopher Frantz Fanon, for example — and together they make up the EFF’s cut-and-paste ideology. It’s a messy affair, but the general thrust is simple enough: an overturning of the state and, in its place, a new order, underpinned by radical policies designed to uplift the poor and marginalised. Sankara is a hero to many, often referred to as “Africa’s Ch...
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