When Floyd Shivambu set out to woo Magasela Mzobe into the ranks of the EFF, no one would have imagined that the recruiter would end up being the recruited.
This unexpected turn of events has not only left the EFF and its leader Julius Malema tail-spinning into political confusion but has given South Africa a glimpse into Jacob Zuma’s new long game after his official expulsion from the ANC.
If anyone had believed that Zuma established the MK Party as a temporary instrument to take on the current ANC leadership and that the party would fold once President Cyril Ramaphosa lost his grip over Luthuli House and the Union Buildings, this week’s defection into the MKP by Shivambu should have put paid to such beliefs.
The story begins late last year, before Zuma revealed his hand by announcing his association with the then relatively unknown MKP. Up to that point, many of his followers were actively looking for a new political home, with Zuma-aligned ANC breakaways such as Ace Magashule’s ACT, Carl Niehaus’ Areta and other similar formations failing to gain traction.
It was the run up to the general elections, and the EFF had identified KwaZulu-Natal as an area of potentially massive growth.
For much of its first decade as a political player, the EFF had been viewed as a phenomenon of the northern provinces with not much power and influence in KZN and the Eastern Cape
Since the party’s launch in 2013, the province — home to Zuma, the country’s then president and the EFF’s then arch enemy — had not shown much love for the Red Berets.
But the picture had begun to change with Zuma’s 2018 removal from power. By the next election, the EFF was picking up impressive numbers in eThekwini and other parts of KZN previously considered ANC fortresses.
The EFF’s upward trend in the province was to continue during the 2021 local government elections, with the party performing so well in some municipalities it found itself in the position of kingmaker — deciding who from either the ANC or its old rival, the IFP, would take the mayoral chain.
For much of its first decade as a political player, the EFF had been viewed as a phenomenon of the northern provinces with not much power and influence in KZN and the Eastern Cape.
But as the 2024 elections approached, KZN increasingly seemed a lucrative prospect for an EFF that was seeking to shore up its electoral figures and strengthen its hand ahead of national negotiations that were sure to follow if the ANC, as was generally expected, dipped below 50%.
Hence Shivambu, the party’s second-in-command, was deployed to lead the mission. Since much of the change in the political mood in KZN was associated with the conflict that ensued between Zuma and the ANC after his removal from office, among Shivambu’s first steps had to be the recruitment into EFF ranks of some prominent Zuma loyalists.
There was the once hugely popular and former uKhozi FM presenter Linda Sibiya, a staunch Zuma fan who sometimes got into trouble at the SABC for allegedly promoting the then president and his then party. He was supposed to help the EFF pull in big crowds at events, especially considering his vast network within the entertainment industry in the province.
However, it was Mzobe that was Shivambu’s biggest provincial catch. The two had first known each other in the student movement when Mzobe led the Student Representative Council at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and Shivambu was a student leader at Wits.
They kept in touch when Shivambu later moved to Cosatu House, where he worked for the federation’s research division and the Young Communist League (YCL), while Mzobe joined the ANC Youth League.
In the intervening years Shivambu was to rise to national prominence — first as Julius Malema’s sidekick at the ANC Youth League and later as the co-founder of the EFF.
Although they are of the same age cohort and hail from the same province, Shivambu and Malema have not always been particularly close. While Malema’s introduction to political life is said to have been through Masupatsela (Trailblazers), an arm of the ANC that used to recruit children as young as nine to the party ranks, Shivambu appears to have discovered politics in his late teens as a university student.
Like many of his generation who came through the South African Student Congress (Sasco) route, he preferred the more socialist-orientated YCL to the “African Nationalism” of the ANC Youth League — hence his early associations with the likes of David Masondo and Buti Manamela, now both deputy ministers — rather than Fikile Mbalula and Malusi Nkanyezi Gigaba.
Since its re-establishment in 2003, the YCL had become a sort of rival to the ANCYL, with the former often taking the side of Sasco in the student organisation’s quarrels with the ANCYL.
At first Malema lived up to the expectations of the Zuma camp, allowing himself and others in the league to be turned into a Zuma version of Napoleon’s dogs in 'Animal Farm'
However, after then president Thabo Mbeki’s decision to sack Zuma as his deputy following a damning judgment in the Schabir Shaik corruption case that heavily implicated Zuma in 2005, the two leagues grew close as they joined the campaign to make Zuma the next ANC president.
Soon after the 2007 Polokwane conference that delivered the Zuma presidency, the ANCYL had its own national conference. Mbalula had long passed the 35-year-old age limit and could not be returned as president. He wanted Malema, at the time the league’s leader in Limpopo, to succeed him. A powerful faction within the league had other ideas, pushing instead for Saki Mofokeng as president.
But the Zuma camp could not risk losing control of the ANCYL so soon after taking control of Luthuli House. Since the days of its early 1990s president Peter Mokaba, the league had gained a reputation in the ANC as a kingmaker and whoever controlled the Youth League controlled the party’s leadership succession process.
Thus, despite the league's conference, held in Bloemfontein in April 2008, descending into chaos, with delegates hurling plastic chairs and bottled water at each other, Malema was declared a legitimate winner — marking the beginning of his colourful career as a national politician.
The “bums conference” — dubbed as such after the now defunct The Times newspaper published a front-page picture of one pro-Malema delegate publicly displaying his buttocks in celebration of his victory — also marked Shivambu’s arrival on the national stage.
Although Shivambu had not made it to the upper echelons of the league leadership, Malema made him national spokesperson — thus making him one of the organisation’s most recognised faces.
At first Malema lived up to the expectations of the Zuma camp, allowing himself and others in the league to be turned into a Zuma version of Napoleon’s dogs in Animal Farm, even declaring at a Youth Day rally that he was “prepared to kill for Zuma”. But this was not to last.
With Shivambu now firmly entrenched as his ideological wingman, Malema started propagating radical policy positions that were often at odds with Zuma’s ANC and government — the nationalisation of the mines and land expropriation without compensation are but two of the examples.
By this time the two had become bosom friends. Gone was the Shivambu of free red or yellow party T-shirt. Like Malema, he had acquired expensive tastes in all things fashion. If in his younger years the frugal lifestyles of his academically-inclined comrades such as David Masondo appealed to him, by now he had completely bought into the ways of the nouveau riche.
Relations with Zuma continued to deteriorate. They reached what was thought to be the lowest point at a league conference in 2011 when Zuma, while trying to explain his government’s role in the events that had led to the toppling of the Libyan government by Western forces, had his speech interrupted by Floyd who reportedly said to him “unamanga” — you’re lying.
A visibly angry Zuma snapped: “Uthini baba? Ukhuluma nami? — What did you say, are you talking to me?” The writing was on the wall for Shivambu and Malema.
Almost a year later, they were out in the cold, with Malema having been expelled from the ANC while Shivambu and others had their Youth League structure disbanded and membership suspended.
While Malema’s charisma and super-skills as an orator guaranteed them large crowds at gatherings, Shivambu brought to the party the organisational skills needed to make the new venture sustainable
By all accounts, it was Shivambu who finally convinced a sceptical Malema that venturing into forming a new political party would work. They had seen COPE and other ANC breakaways collapse within five years of existence and were anxious not to suffer the same fate.
While Malema’s charisma and super-skills as an orator guaranteed them large crowds at gatherings, Shivambu brought to the party the organisational skills needed to make the new venture sustainable.
Largely due to him, the EFF formulated an ideological position for itself that was sufficiently distinct from that of the ANC, making it easily distinguishable from the ruling party for the voter. One can detect his fingerprints in the party’s choice of the colour red as its brand as well as the adoption of the red-overalls as official party attire.
While all of this did help the EFF gain a foothold in the political game, even rising to become the country’s third biggest political party, as it successfully completed a decade of existence last year some were beginning to wonder if its brand of politics was not limiting its growth potential — especially within the black middle class.
The outcome of the last elections suggest that the party may have hit the ceiling and that a review of some of its fundamental positions may be needed.
As in the ANC and in all other parties that suffered losses at this year’s polls, the EFF’s worse than expected performance has led to finger pointing and internal tensions. Suddenly Shivambu was blamed for the party’s walloping in KZN. He spent too much time purging associates of the EFF’s secretary-general Marshall Dlamini rather than watching what the MKP was doing and how that would negatively affect the EFF’s campaign.
Dlamini, who has grown closer to Malema as the latter and Shivambu grew apart, was said to be working on the campaign to unseat Shivambu as the EFF’s deputy president at the party’s conference scheduled for December.
Now that Shivambu has decided to walk away, Dlamini seems a shoe-in for deputy president in December.
There is a lot of talk out there of all of this being a ruse, part of a complicated game played by EFF and MKP leaders that would eventually lead to the merger of the two parties. As the Shivambu defection saga reminds us, it is wise to never say never in South African politics.
But if there are those with such designs, they obviously do not include Malema. Judging by his body language at the press conference, the EFF leader was genuinely crestfallen.
He cut a figure of a man who had, for years, taken his lifetime partner for granted and had just learned not only that the partner had found another soulmate but that lobolo negotiations have long been concluded and the wedding day set. He looked astounded.
If these were real lobolo negotiations, Mzobe — Shivambu’s acquaintance from student politics days — would have been umkhongi, the chief negotiator.
The man Shivambu successfully recruited in October last year to win votes for the EFF in KZN had returned to the Zuma fold soon after the elections with news that all was not well at Winnie Madikizela-Mandela House.
In desperate need of young but experienced political players who will ensure that the MKP endures beyond the current term, Zuma wasted no time in pouncing — reportedly promising Shivambu a lucrative position within what is now the country’s third largest party and official opposition.
He will now be hoping that Shivambu can do for him what he did for Malema at the EFF.
The big question, however, is whether there is big enough space in our politics for both a Malema-led EFF and a Shivambu-driven MKP. Would the one end up swallowing the other?
