Dog whistles for EFF voters

IT PRETENDS IT’S NOT RACIALLY CATEGORISING WHILE SIGNALLING TO ITS SUPPORTERS THAT IT IS

EFF chief whip Floyd Shivambu’s continued smearing of the National Treasury’s deputy director-general, Ismail Momoniat, is as Parliament’s standing committee on finance has commented, baseless and crude. The more interesting question is why the EFF is targeting Momoniat particularly and what is behind its larger effort at racial incitement.

The EFF claims racial incitement is not its goal and that racial rectification is. But in fact the party plays a dangerous game with race, trying to pretend it’s not racially categorising while at the same time signalling to its supporters that it is. Internationally, this phenomenon is known as “dog-whistle politics”, since the politician is making sounds only a section of his audience will hear.

The EFF statement on Shivambu’s outburst in the standing committee is a good example. The statement says: “The Economic Freedom Fighters reasserts the statement made in the standing committee on finance by the EFF deputy president that National Treasury deputy director-general Ismail Momoniat undermines and disregards African leadership in the National Treasury. Momoniat has assigned to himself virtually all powers of National Treasury, micromanages its entities and also try [sic] to micromanage parliamentary legislative processes.”

The statement doesn’t, in fact, refer to Momoniat’s race, but the emphasis on his notional disregard of “African leadership” makes it clear there is an undercurrent at work here. The suggestion is made more explicit in tweets by party members and supporters. Shivambu could easily have simply made the claim that a certain technocrat was trying to undermine the people working for him.

There is, of course, no evidence for this outrageous claim, so why make it? Here we enter the realm of speculation, but it is worth noting that the EFF statement explicitly mentions the VBS Bank saga. The EFF claims that when the standing committee on finance first called for the curator of VBS Bank to appear before Parliament it was Momoniat who instructed the curator not to come.

Even assuming this were true, why is the EFF so worried about this issue? There could be many entirely justifiable reasons why a curator should not, in the middle of an investigation, speak publicly about the issue. Once the curator has completed his report, the answer to this conundrum might become clear, but there is at least the possibility that the EFF has decided on a preemptive strike in case its name comes up in the report.

From a broader, political perspective it’s obvious that the EFF, rather like the DA, is floundering in the post-Zuma era, searching for a new rallying cry and raison d’être. Simply to state the obvious, former president Jacob Zuma’s departure has left a gaping hole in its election strategy. The Zuma-focus of its campaign was clearly resonating with the electorate, somewhat ironically since the prominent EFF members were instrumental in bringing Zuma to power.

In any event, Zuma’s departure has meant all the opposition parties need to develop a new election strategy, and quickly. In this moment of political panic, the EFF is experimenting with new messages and campaigns. Using race as a way of forcing voters to take sides dangerously mixes populism with identity politics in a way that has become a repellent but shockingly effective trope of modern politics internationally.

In taking this path, the EFF is ironically turning itself into a shadow of all the race-aligned political parties in SA’s benighted history. In that fact, there is some hope, because South Africans have all seen this before and know how it turns out – it turns out badly. This is all very unfortunate because the EFF does potentially have a constructive role to play in SA’s politics, representing marginalised communities and keeping the governing party, the ANC, under close scrutiny.

Yet, if it travels too far down this road, it will lose not only some of its support but also its credibility, which will become drowned out by the stench of the very racism it claims to be fighting.