Dear Comrade Floyd,
My address to you, as a comrade, is not an implication of my membership of the EFF. Rather, it is a consequence of my sympathy with the politics of the Left, not only in South Africa but the world over.
I will not readily and cowardly deny the fact that your disassociation with your old comrade and EFF leader, Julius Malema, has always been a time bomb waiting to explode at the right time.
By the right time I mean the pressure of the international workers’ revolution that in many cases, as in your case, is bottled in a steamed container of political greed, a personal spaza shop and a feudal fief disguised as a party. Your decision to choose the revolution is commendable and history will exonerate and applaud you for it.
The historical revolutionary manifestation has always been that true revolutionaries do not stand the kind of heat in a pressurised bottle. The nearest historical example I can readily think of is that, in the same way as you did, Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky could not be bottled up in the Stalinist Bolshevik party that had become a political fiefdom of Joseph Stalin. It has always been the style of Stalin and other compradors and sheep-skinned Kuomintang political wolfs of the leftist movement, camouflaged as revolutionaries, to feel threatened by intellectually powerful leaders of the Central Command Committee that they refer to as close political associates.
History tells us that as a result of the threat, they tend to purge those in the party who are loyal to those who are threatened. The purging extends to the threat itself when loyalists are cleaned up, to the extent of eliminating the threat itself. The tendency has earned itself the name “Stalinism” in Marxist-Leninist revolutionary circles. It is the same Stalinist inclinations that had long compromised the ANC and manifested itself in the killing of the Black Consciousness activists in the ’70s and ’80s.
Indeed, the revolutionary spirit of the Left cannot be compromised by sticking amid the comprador in the name of personal relations, for the liberation of the people is far more important than personal relations. This is why there are neither permanent enemies nor permanent friends in the revolution. It is for this reason that I write this letter to you, in recognition of your revolutionary commitment to the liberation of black people in Azania and on the continent.
Although I do not believe that electoral and parliamentary politics are a correct path to the liberation of the continent from neo-colonial power, I was a little disturbed when the EFF was the first to pronounce the May 2024 elections as free and fair, even before the Electoral Commission of South Africa could make such assessment.
I mention the example as one of the many capitulatory politics within the party after 10 years of struggle. For purposes of this letter, I will not mention others as it is not my intention to make this a lifestyle audit of the party but it was one of the many signs that something was not right.
I do not know if this was an indication that the party was compromised at the time, but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to identify capitulation where it exists. On the eve of the May 2024 elections, a Kenyan friend and comrade sent a message wherein she pleaded with South African voters to vote for the EFF for the sake of Africa.
This was commendable since it was an indication of the impact made by the EFF commander-in-chief in the politics of pan-Africanism. He has become the best articulator of pan-Africanism in South Africa and maybe on the continent, after Mangaliso Sobukwe and Kwame Nkrumah.
The birth of the EFF has given the country that calibre of a leader in him. The stride and progress made by the party in Africa was, unfortunately, overshadowed by the feudal fief attitude that ensured that there was no full participatory effort of all party members because some were threatened by others’ political growth potential.
The revolution cannot be led by the Stalinists who feel threatened by the revolutionary growth of organisational leadership. Again, part of the Stalinist tendency is to rant and orate in political rallies exactly what the people want to hear, thereby giving false hopes of a liberated humanity and a pursued socialist agenda. Political jealousy is a counter-revolutionary satanic behaviour that must never be tolerated in the politics of the Left. It is a capitalist tendency born out of the greed for the public purse, bribes and opulence gained at the expense of the revolution, a tendency that has no room in Marxist-Leninism.
Without overemphasising the example of Stalinist Bolshevism, it is the same reason why Luxemburg and Trotsky were hunted down and executed Mafia style. It is for this reason that the people must take it upon themselves to protect the leaders of the peoples’ revolution from Stalinists on the Left who suffer from egotistic inferiority complex.
The unity of black people and, therefore, of Africa is much more important than the building of personal spaza shops called organisations. This also goes for the newly formed uMkhonto weSizwe Party (MKP) which has presented itself as a political shadow of former president Jacob Zuma, just like the Malema-shadowed EFF.
However, plausible is the establishment of the Progressive Caucus (PC) of the four formations, the MKP, EFF, African Transformation Movement and United Africans Transformation. Your youthful strength and energy would thus be better used in further consolidating the politics of the Left by a revolutionary and meaningful merger of the PC in order to avoid a fertile political field for further fiefdoms instead of a revolutionary organisation of a people’s revolution and workers emancipation.
One would, therefore, hope that your arrival of the MKP will not only seek to set up the structural organisational shape of the spear-and-shield movement, but pursue a formidable merger of the Left whose agenda is driven by the urgent need for the unity of black people and the return of their land. In this agenda, we cannot overemphasise the urgent need for a constituent assembly and a relook into the concept of the constitution and constitutional democracy.
We cannot turn a blind eye to the urgent need for the reversal of the Verwoerdian settlement and forced removals of black people that resulted in the notorious Group Areas Act which, to date, categorise our people into the so-called coloured areas, Sotho sections, Zulu sections and son and so forth, a situation that compromises the unity of black people.
It is this situation that continues to perpetuate the imposed false cultures to our people such as the abuse of drugs, gangsterism and tribal rifts. It is this kind of arrangement that sticks on the tongues of society racist, tribalist, counter-revolutionary and reactionary utterances such as: “100% Zulu”, “coloured people like gangsterism”, “Xhosa people are clever people”. The Verwoerdian mentality must go. It doesn’t make revolutionary sense that after three decades of the so-called democratic settlement, we have no meaningful societal integration, yet we want to pretend that the settlement prioritises social cohesion.
The entire leftist revolutionary movement has seen in you a great an-Africanist and a true leader of the international liberation of the working class and the workers. While we do not want to place the revolutionary burden squarely on your shoulders, your new leadership role in the MKP must be a renewal of hope of the liberation of our people.
Revolutionaries like you must be cherished and protected at all costs, for they are the only hope for the real emancipation of the working class. It is the hope of the end to class and tribal divisions and, therefore, the end of the long-waged class struggle the world over.
Let me conclude by congratulating you once more for the political talent and articulate execution of the political direction this country must take to achieve the liberation of black people and, more importantly, the liberation of the white people who are trapped in the demonic beliefs of racism and white supremacy.
Vukile Theo Phanyaphanya is a retired teacher and an author