VUYANI PAMBO: Brotherhood, the Zeitgeist and the unfaithfully departed

There have been a number of unexpected events in the political landscape of South Africa recently. In the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), this has also been the case.

I will not reiterate these unsavoury developments; they are broadcast to a point of a loop in mainstream media. I do, though, without any fear, want to make a few comments.

Part of our responsibility as fighters is to interpret these developments and their implications; it is to characterise these shifts and what they mean. We must be able to paint a clear portrait of characters who are eaten up by their desire to serve their libidinal economy, and who are only moved by an obsessive search for power and opulence.

We must be able to recognise how their fears, pleasures, and desires are distributed, because this allows us to see beyond the veil - to see what we are dealing with without any obscurity.

This is perhaps what we failed to do; hence, we were taken aback when certain characters who stood next to us at weddings, funerals, boardrooms, picket lines, and voting stations behaved the way they did. If we did not only operate on the level of trust as a guideline, perhaps we would have seen the signal that the Commander in Chief pleaded for during Mama Winnie Madikizela Mandela's funeral.

The signals were there, but we were oblivious.

Death happens every time, yet it is still shocking. What has befallen the EFF shocked us, but it is a characteristic, not an aberration, in the body politic of South Africa.

The self-professed revolutionaries of South Africa are what is sometimes called izimukanandwendwe, which means that they are not grounded on anything and have no conception of allegiance. They are no different from soccer players who follow the scent of comfort wherever it leads them, even if it is to the gallows.

They forget, though, that politics is not sports, where one entertains and the other decides the fate of people. In the classic Cain and Abelian sense, those who deem themselves leaders do not think twice about betraying those they claim to serve. They are capable of committing the highest sin, which is murder, as long as they feed their insatiable desires.

These characters are willing to operate at the depths of hell; their greed has no elixir. It is almost as if they are cursed. This is the state of affairs that historian Achille Mbembe calls “the sacrament of our era'”. We are faced with a challenge, and we must confront it.

Those who still have a soul have a duty to defend our people from those who are no longer people. If we are going to have a common future where economic freedom is a reality and not just some illusion, we must fight against izithunzela. We must build the organisation such that there is no opportunity for those abathwetshuliwe to find expression.

It is important that we see this coming National People’s Assembly (NPA) as a necessary ritual that will cleanse the EFF of all the elements of darkness and invite light back to this organisation of ours. An exorcism is necessary, where all the delegates come out of the plenary pure and cleansed.

To say there has been an exodus in the EFF is a misnomer, at least biblically.

In the Bible, the children of Israel were liberated from enslavement in a foreign land, and through Moses, they were delivered to freedom. These characters who, in bad faith, left the EFF seem to be out of place, lost and confused in what they have chosen as their new political home.

A more apt way to phrase it is that we have comrades who have departed. The use of the word departed is layered, because it means “the thing and its doubles”. The comrades did not just leave the EFF; their souls also left them. This is to say that they are as good as dead - they have become what Steve Biko would characterise as empty shells, devoid of truth - izidumbu that need life to be pumped back into them.

But is that even possible?

Only the truth is life-affirming. Ours is not an organisation of infidelities, deceit and entanglements like other organisations (the MK Party) which have crafted their constitution in ways that justify their deviousness - where members can belong to other parties (dual membership), where the leaders can be summarily dismissed, where for two years members are on probation and their membership can be terminated.

Is that a constitution, or a pact among felons?

It is unfortunate that the personal always finds a way to seep into politics and vice versa. It is unfortunate that we cannot simply keep things professional. To call someone a comrade is already an indirect invitation of the other to your space, your intimate.

Is the word comrade not a synonym for brotherhood? For family? Yes, it is. The oft-quoted slogan by Carol Hanisch, “The personal is political”, is true. The private realm is political, and this is what Friedrich Engels attempted to demonstrate in his essay, ‘The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State’.

Politics is an ensemble or mosaic of all our personal behaviours. To appreciate this assists us to always know that whatever we do, whether in public or in private, has political implications.

Let us not avoid being personal - is love not a personal thing? It is. As we head to the NPA, we must demonstrate the highest level of the personal. We must come out as a stronger and united EFF. That will be our gesture of love to black people. And that is very political.

Never has a James Thurber quote been so relevant as it is at this juncture: “Let us not look back in anger, or forward in fear, but around in awareness.”