wiseMusings

The EFF election manifesto is.. long.

I say that as both a compliment and a criticism.

I compliment the EFF for such a document because it was EFF’s coming-out party. It laid out precisely what the EFF supposedly stands for – more accurately and precisely than anything spokesperson Mbuyiseni Ndlozi or commander-in-chief Julius Malema ever have in the six years of its existence.

I criticise the manifesto because what the EFF seemingly stands for isn’t to be a future governing party. The EFF once named themselves as “kingmakers” in the wake of the 2016 local government elections – and they were right. Case in point: reading the diagnosis of contemporary South African problems hit the spot more often than not. Obviously, there are ideology-specific diagnoses which I disagree with – but the EFF has its fingers on the pulse when addressing despicable problems we have such as unemployment, the disenfranchisement of women and children still walking long distances to school.

But can those problems be solved by an EFF government? I think not.
Part of that is due to the socialist system that the EFF emboldens, part of that is due to the character of senior EFF politicians. Either way, I’m not buying what they’re selling.

Be that as it may, the EFF manifesto is not a waste of time to read. It’s a document that illustrates an alternative government: some policies are cheap, some policies are actually not that bad.

We’ll look at a few policies and see how they hold up.

• LAND – I doubt I am in contention for any Libertarian of the Year awards, but I am opposed to the idea that the end game of any society should be to fully submit to the state. The state, instead of absorbing more responsibility, should be reducing its capacity on as many people as they can, and only giving a hand up to the most destitute.
  All this is to say that expropriation without compensation under exclusive state ownership is not “the people owning the land”. It is the state owning the land. Instead of handing people title deeds so that they can be in charge of their own destiny, the state (in true socialist fashion) would be deciding the mechanics of who lives where, when and why FOR us. How would they treat people who don’t align with their party? Would they evict them from the land which they (the EFF) would own? There’s nothing which makes me think they wouldn’t.
  At the end of the day, land will not be “returned to black people”, as the slogans go. It will be Malemaland. Literally.
• JOBS – Industrialisation is a dead concept. I understand the EFF’s desire to create employment opportunities for unskilled labour in a non-intrusive way – however if they want to label themselves as the ultimate party of the youth, they have to think long-term in ways that other, more established parties will not. “We will build more factories!” is a generic response to unemployment, and is more likely to be uttered by a politician who has just read a book or two on the Industrial Revolution rather than a politician in the 21st century.
  The second employment-creating sector determined by the EFF is “the intensification of small scale farming and agriculture.” Despite the fact that agriculture just isn’t what it used to be because of climate change (where industrialization isn’t innocent), they want to put forward quick-fix solutions that will fall short of expectations.
• CORRUPTION – I will make an ad hominem argument here, because it is highly relevant to this particular point. The VBS saga highly implicates certain members of the EFF and it is, simply put, a case of corruption. This puts the EFF in a tight spot. Based on the events of the past “nine wasted years”, any political party election manifesto simply must provide a party stance on corruption. Yet, if that party is suspected of harbouring corrupt individuals itself, then they face a major credibility crisis. Because of that, I cannot trust anything the EFF claims about “introduc[ing] a minimum sentence of 20 years for all public representatives and servants convicted of corruption.”

• GENDER, WOMEN AND LGBTQI – Here, again, I’d like to present a blatant case of ad hominem because the ideas in and of themselves are perfectly sound. The people presenting these ideas.. well, let’s have a discussion about that.
  The EFF have a clear male majority in their leadership structures. Julius Malema, Mbuyiseni Ndlozi, Floyd Shivambu and Dali Mpofu are the most well-known EFF politicians. Not a woman in sight. For a progressive pro-black movement, the EFF cannot claim that there are no ready, willing and capable women who can enter their leadership structures. To give the EFF free advice, the best way to promote gender equality is not to write fanciful ideas in a manifesto but to live out gender equality in the EFF itself.
  Women who have a grasp of intersectionality and Black Radical Feminism – as per the ideology of the EFF – should be influencing the party and its direction. As it stands now, though, the EFF is steeped in hotepism: loud on matters of racial discrimination but not nearly as loud when the Gender Question is asked.
  However, I will give them props for the inclusion of the LGBTQI community. While I believe that it’ll ultimately ring hollow because of the same reasons the fight for gender equality will, it’s always good to see the LGBTI community recognised as people who may have legal rights but often cannot withstand homophobia/transphobia on all levels of society.
• CRIME, EDUCATION, HEALTH, PERSONS WITH DISABILITIES, TRADITIONAL LEADERS, AND ENERGY – These sections are all lumped together because they.. aren’t bad. There are valuable points (such as re-educating the police, professional and personal needs of teachers being met in order for them to teach better, the building of post-sexual trauma centres across the country) and even a commendable effort from the EFF to identify problem areas where schools and clinics need to be built, for example.
  The underlying problem is that there is no coherence to any of these sections. The sections seem like the product of discussions with the people which, of course, is a positive. The negative is that there was no concrete policy plan other than “this is what the people want.” This is not an anti-democracy rant from me. It’s more of a request to the EFF to tighten their arguments and have a plan that might not please every black person, but that will lead South Africa forward according to their ideology. These sections of the EFF manifesto read like a Zuma compromise “let’s-do-everything” decision and not the measured decision of technically proficient politicians. This is disappointing, considering that the section on land was particularly meticulous in terms of the “how”, something that is lacking in these sections.
• SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT – Some of the ideas here are very good. It is one of the stronger sections of the manifesto, quite frankly. The doubling of the social grants, however, is pure and simple electioneering. It lends credence to those who dismiss the EFF as simply a populist party which would fall out of flavour with the country when their policies do not come to fruition due to their sheer impossibility.
• ECONOMY – With a manifesto that was so promissory, this section was the most important as it sought to answer the question “yes, but how will we pay for all this?” The EFF have duly answered: huge state intervention.
  For reasons previously mentioned, I am of the belief that statism is the last thing South Africa (or any other country) needs. To then make bold claims that “under the EFF government, the economy will grow at 6% in the first two years and 10% in the remaining three years” is political suicide. Not to mention that the idea of tax-free zones is antithetical to the idea of increasing grant money as noted in Social Development.

Quite frankly, Malema and company have proven that they are not quite aware of how to pay for the promises made in their manifesto. That is a huge crack in the foundation of the manifesto itself, maybe even the biggest.

• CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENTS – Objectively, there are quite a number of proposed constitutional amendments featured on the manifesto. Subjectively, I believe the South African Constitution is rightly the highest law in our land and should not be tinkered with when we have existing legislation that can realise the same task. For example, the increasing of the minimum alcohol drinking age to 21 years old does not need a constitutional amendment. It just does not. When the EFF has an advocate in Dali Mpofu in its senior leadership, elementary errors like this are not only embarrassing but take on a dictatorial tone.

The EFF churned out a sometimes finely-researched, sometimes wishlist-esque election manifesto which is sure to excite EFF members and supporters into now providing an idea into what the EFF is about when other parties are not on its radar. On that front, the EFF succeeded. But it would do good to learn from history rather than repeat it. If the socialist failure does not keep the EFF awake at night, maybe the following maxim, which I will conclude with, will: overpromising often leads to underdelivering.