The 2024 election manifesto of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) confirms that the party will again run on a profoundly anti-working-class platform, decorated with seemingly pro-poor slogans. To hoodwink the electorate into voting for the EFF, the party is bound to inflate its leftist posturing.

Making sense of the electoral politics of the EFF helps to unmask its bankrupt ideology. Its parliamentary antics and insults hurled at its opponents in government circles in effect amount to an assault on progressive anti-capitalist electoral politics. EFF enforcers are notorious for bullying and heckling incompetent opponents on the basis of flouting banal, obscure and pointless parliamentary rules. Such calculated spectacles – mere stunts to trend in media headlines – fit into the typical public relations modus operandi of the EFF.

Through its devotion to electoralism, the EFF seeks to enrich the party’s elite. For a seat in parliament unlocks the prospects of becoming a career bureaucrat, bankroll flashy (bling) lifestyles from parliamentary perks and co-optation into the capitalist corporate executive. Coupled with this self-enrichment lobbying, participation in electoral cycles since its euphoric birth in July 2013 points to a party aiming to reinforce the repressive capitalist state, defend South Africa’s bankrupt constitution and safeguard capitalism.

On 11 November, the EFF leader, Julius Malema, spoke at his party’s Ground Forces Forum in Mbombela, Mpumalanga. Advertised as part of EFF preparations for its 2024 national election campaign, Malema used the occasion to talk on a scattered range of issues. (SABC televised proceedings which were also livestreamed via YouTube and social media.) In a perfunctory gesture to appease some EFF detractors, Malema instructed his ground forces: “People must elect us based on our manifesto, not because we intimidated them.” (Julius Malema, SABC News, 11 November @ 18:00) As in previous electoral cycles, the EFF manifesto to hook voters also serves as a bargaining chip to compromise with shady allies once elected to state institutions. The track record of the EFF in self-justifying its ‘post-election opportunism’ speaks for itself.

At the Ground Forces Forum, Malema defended their 2024 manifesto, urged youth to register for the forthcoming elections, pontificated about the war on corruption and advocated for legitimate black businesses. As expected, he also touted their shallow and sham slogans on land expropriation and nationalisation in their election manifesto. When Malema told his audience that President Cyril Ramaphosa has dismally failed to uproot corruption from the government and the ANC, he went beyond re-echoing well-known and inescapable facts. However, his insinuation that the EFF has a better anti-corruption plan than Ramaphosa deflects spotlights from the longstanding corruption scandals of EFF leaders. Duplicity, a hallmark of EFF politics, overshadows Malema’s utterances and their 2024 election manifesto.

The EFF adopted ‘2024 is our 1994’ as the umbrella slogan to win electoral support. This slogan is also etched in the subtitle of their manifesto and is as insidious and patronizing as their refrain about ‘doing stuff for our people’. More importantly, such hubris betrays the EFF complicity in sanitizing the history of our liberatory struggle. It parrots the absurd fairytale that an individual or single organisation defeated our supremacist oppressors, propaganda that the liberals and imperialism contrived to boost the ANC. Three decades of worsening socioeconomic hardships are direct outcomes of the ANC’s blatant betrayal of the interests of the oppressed and exploited during the pre-1994 negotiated settlement. The 2024 election rallying cry of the EFF thus glorifies twisted narratives of our protracted liberation struggle and the petit bourgeois double-dealing on which Malema’s ilk cut their political teeth.

The EFF has been coopted into parliamentary structures to prop up the legitimacy of the bourgeois state. This subservient and self-seeking electoral politics charts a course to the enduring enslavement and repression of the labouring majority. Alternatives to bourgeois electoralism exist that do not simply reduce to blind abstention from electing progressive representatives to state institutions. However, such representatives must operate under the direct, democratic and organised control of the oppressed and exploited. This progressive anti-capitalist electoral politics finds expression in APDUSA’s programme for eco-socialist democracy, which demands that every elected representative “must be fully accountable to those who elect them and they must be fully bound by the demands and aspirations of the working class and its allies, the landless peasantry.” [APDUSA, 1995. The Struggle for Socialist Democracy Continues.]