EFF comments can’t go unpunished
ALLOW me to respond to the vexatious statement made by Julius Malema in his speech during the Youth Day event on June 16, 2018. In summary Malema said “our oppression was worse than that of Indians and Coloureds…”
The worst was to come from him, now even more shocking and abhorable, that “the majority of Indians are racist”.
This is the sequel to the statement by Floyd Shivambu in Parliament when he refused the DDG to address the portfolio committee on the pretext that he was “undermining African leadership”.
These two statements and comments by the leadership of the EFF reflect deep-seated prejudices and ideological confusion within the EFF.
These warped views from the EFF must be challenged by all democrats and revolutionaries because left unchallenged, they seek to distort history and give fuel to the persistent racial populism dominant in the EFF.
Malema makes a grotesque distortion of the ANC policy posture and the resolution of the 1969 ANC conference.
In that 1969 resolution, the ANC made a profound assertion about the analysis of oppression, analysis of the motive forces of the revolution and the focused approach to intensification of armed struggle.
For instance, when it discussed the white community in South Africa, the conference made the most profound and bold statement when it stated that “our policy must continually stress in the future (as it has in the past) that there is room in South Africa for all who live in it, but only on the basis of absolute democracy”.
The statement, grotesquely distorted by the EFF, was on the characterisation of the motive forces as defined by the oppressed groups – Africans, Coloured and Indians.
The 1969 conference stated the following: “The African although subjected to the most intense racial oppression and exploitation is not the only oppressed national group in South Africa.
“The two million strong Coloured community and three-quarter million Indians suffer varying forms of national humiliation, discrimination and oppression.
“They are part of the non-white base upon which rests white privilege.
“As such they constitute an integral part of the social forces ranged against white supremacy.”
If Malema and Shivambu had time not just to spew bile, but to internalise the profoundness of that 1969 statement he violently distorts, they would have been wiser.
But again, a party founded on the basis of populism, jaundiced ideological stance and racist populism can never be wiser.
Even more importantly, the oft distorted statement Malema likes to quote ad nauseam with scant disregard to its historic value, ie “the main content of the present stage of the South African revolution is the national liberation of the largest and most oppressed group – the African people”. The EFF leadership spectacularly fails to understand the significant caveat to the statement above.
And that is that “Our nationalism must not be confused with chauvinism or narrow nationalism of a previous epoch. It must not be confused with the classical drive by an elitist group among the oppressed people to gain ascendancy, so that they can replace the oppressor in the exploitation of the masses.”
Here comes the nub, oops the rub, not to with chauvinism nationalism.
The attack on Ismail Momoniat and Indians by the EFF must evoke revulsion and protestation in all those committed to a non-racial and democratic South Africa.
Failure to do so will be a tacit endorsement of backward and racial populism being spewed and propagated by the EFF.
Malema and Shivambu comments on the DDG of Treasury, Momoniat, refers.
Failure to respond with revulsion to this racial snobbery may actually be tacit approval of this backwardness.
Reverend Martin Niemöller warned, “first they came for the socialists but I did not speak out because I was not a socialist…
“Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak for me.”
This is as relevant today as when racial populists pop up their ugly words. What the EFF said about Momoniat in the hallowed chambers of Parliament must not go unpunished.
Each MP makes a solemn oath on being inaugurated to Parliament, and this oath is taken in front of a judge.
The oath states, “… swear that I will be faithful to the Republic of South Africa and will obey and respect the constitution and all other laws of the Republic…”
What Shivambu said and later Malema, in a typical autopilot defence of his kind, cannot go unnoticed by the Speaker or Ethics Committee of Parliament.
Ngculu is an MK veteran and author. be confused and narrow