EFF failing people they claim to represent

It’s great fun, sometimes, to have a laugh about individual members of the EFF whenever they make like Andile Lungisa, with that long-distance stare in his eyes, trying to look and sound intelligent, or parade knowledge he has acquired off the dust jackets of otherwise good books.

The only problem is that the EFF are a dangerous lot.

As written many times in this column, their references to blood sacrifices to achieve their policies, scapegoating of non-Africans, threats of rapine and Biblical types of punishment, where the sins of colonialists of centuries earlier are avenged on white people today, should make us all quake in our boots.

So too, I guess, should those of us who do not support their politics of revenge.

It was reported last week that EFF MPs protested or rejected everything and anything that comes from the ANC.

It seems that the EFF has not heard the lesson that if you want to be taken seriously, don’t yell and scream (don’t raise your voice, raise the strength of your argument).

The problem, one EFF leader said, speaking on condition of anonymity (of course), “is that they are programmed to reject everything that comes from the ANC.

“I don’t think those members knew what they were rejecting when they voted against [the Civil Union Amendment Bill],” a week earlier.

“Our members usually don’t know what they are fighting for.

“They don’t understand most of the things that are being argued.

“For example, our MPs who voted against this bill; I can tell you confidently that they didn’t understand what they were rejecting.

“It shows that they don’t keep up with the bills we agree to and those that we do not. Our stance on this matter has been clear — we support the LGBTIQ community.”

And so, last week, the EFF had to apologise to the LGBTIQ community for the decision by Thembinkosi Apleni, Brenda Mathevula and Sam Zandamela to vote against the bill and oppose the party’s position.

There are at least two lessons we can draw from this.

The first remains the lure of populist manipulation of emotions.

It makes you feel great to stand and pontificate about the poor, the hungry, the marginalised.

It is especially grand if you can dress up in your performative politics gear, and make the most noise in the legislature — even if you’re doing it only for the performativity.

Which means you are in the legislature to sing and dance, pretending that you represent workers; hence the bargain-basement fire hazards that pass for costumes.

They have completely missed the irony of them “passing” as workers by day and returning to their comfortable beds at night, and the parallels with CEOs “sleeping out in the cold with the homeless”, only to return to their comfortable middleclass lives after the curtain has dropped. It’s all rather pitiful.

The second is about the failures in education.

I have raised this issue in this space before, and received one of the de rigueur threats of violence to my person (and my family).

The apartheid education system was successful in under-educating black people (by which I mean everyone who is not white).

The first 25 years of the post-apartheid period has been diabolical.

Listen to Lungisa speak and you will get a sense of what I’m talking about.

One of my favourite books on education, is by Carter Woodson.

In The Mis-education of the Negro, he explained the pathologies of what may well have been apartheid education.

“The education of the Negroes,” Woodson wrote, “the most important thing in the uplift of the Negroes, is almost entirely in the hands of those who have enslaved them and [segregated] them.”

This “enslavement” came out in the wash of 25 years of democracy.

But the EFF have not moved on from the mis-education Woodson wrote about and have instead turned it against everyone and anyone indiscriminately.

How else can one explain voting against something without having read — and understood — it?

The EFF’s behaviour is risible and, as Woodson explained in the Mis-education of the Negro, “when a white man sees persons of his own race tending downward to a level of disgrace he does not rest until he works out some plan to lift such unfortunates to higher ground; but the Negro forgets the delinquents of his race and goes his way to feather his own nest, as he has done in leaving the masses in the popular churches.”

The EFF may be the biggest danger to the very people they pretend to fight for.

The least they can do is develop reading skills and dispense with performative politics.