In the same week that Julius Malema delivered an indirect and blood-curdling endorsement of racial genocide in the witness box of the Equality Court, the DA’s arm was being twisted to cooperate with Malema’s EFF in building a post-ANC future.

Such cooperation would be in the country’s best interest, wrote the columnist Jan-Jan Joubert in an article on Netwerk24 (Probeer met die EFF saamwerk, 16 February 2022). His advice echoes the demand by Herman Mashaba and ActionSA for the EFF to be included in the coalitions that now govern Gauteng’s metros. ActionSA is an important partner in these coalitions, and despite being rebuffed in the coalition negotiations, they’ve never stopped doing the EFF’s bidding.    

Their case is essentially that the ANC is all that’s wrong with South Africa, and so the party must be kept out of power at all costs, even if it means bringing the EFF into coalitions under the DA’s leadership. For Mashaba and Joubert this is not just about the political ends justifying the means. Both have a romantic view of the EFF that surpasses all comprehension. 

But what happens when you ‘bring in’ the EFF? Let’s start with the one institution currently dominated by that party, not in numbers, but certainly in rhetoric and ideology - the Judicial Services Commission (JSC). The JSC makes recommendations to the president about the appointment and removal of judges. 

The commission was meant to remove from the executive’s direct control decisions about judicial selection, so as to prevent court packing. But this purpose has been defeated by a serious flaw in the JSC’s design: most of the commission’s members are government appointees and politicians.

Malema himself represents the EFF on the JSC, but his party enjoys an extraordinary advantage over other minority parties in that it has an additional member. While Dali Mpofu is there on the ticket of the General Council of the Bar, in reality he works with Malema to serve the EFF’s cause. 

With the help of acolytes, and building on the work of ANC radicals that have come before them, Malema and Mpofu have normalised racism and baseless personal attacks directed against candidates for judicial appointment and promotion. In this way the bench has been denied the service of some of the country’s best legal practitioners, black and white.  

How does an EFF minority of two achieve such outsized influence? In essence, by radicalising and co-opting a weak and divided ANC. Malema has a network of ANC informants and collaborators. He also understands ANC’s organisational culture better than most of the party’s own public representatives. And so he has the unique ability to hack into ANC factional battles to advance his personal and political agenda. 

Far from serving as a counterweight to the ANC, the EFF actually brings out the worst in the ANC, and then reinforces it. The result? Current and former ANC-dominated institutions that are more racist, more corrupt, and less committed to the country’s liberal democratic constitutional order. This happens not just in the JSC, but anywhere that EFF petrol is poured on a lukewarm ANC fire. 

Of this I have first-hand experience. For three years I served in a DA-led minority government in Tshwane, where the DA, FF-Plus, ACDP and Cope relied on the EFF's support to pass budgets, approve appointments, and make other key decisions that require a majority. Thankfully, Tshwane now has a coalition government with its own majority, but who knows what might happen if Mashaba and ActionSA cannot shake their attachment to the EFF?

After the ANC was defeated in Tshwane in 2016, the EFF used almost every opportunity to manipulate municipal processes for the benefit of the party and its leaders. The worst example of this is the way in which the EFF protected a municipal manager against a council investigation into tender irregularities. ANC councillors were co-opted to this cause.  

For months this informal coalition stymied the city government’s ability to make effective decisions. So while the EFF was happy to remove the ANC from power, it actively undermined efforts by the DA and our coalition partners to overturn the ANC’s legacy of corruption and mismanagement. What happened in Johannesburg under Mashaba's mayoralty is a story of its own, but unlike his DA counterpart in Tshwane, Solly Msimanga, Mashaba refused to stand up to the EFF.

This was a dreadful time for the DA, which we never want to relive, but it also provided us with crucial lessons about a post-ANC political order. Lesson one: the EFF is not an opposition party, it is a faction of the ANC. Lesson two: the EFF is not a check on ANC power, they are the true believers of the worst ANC excesses. Lesson three: the EFF is not the secret ingredient that will make a post-ANC coalition government succeed, it is the infiltrator who will sabotage such a coalition from within. And, judging by the behaviour of EFF councillors in working with the ANC to disrupt council meetings in the metros, little has changed since the 2021 local government election.

This is why the DA finds it quite easy to resist Joubert’s advice and Mashaba’s demands. Of course it will be difficult to keep minority coalitions like the one in Ekurhuleni standing. Still, the chance of good government is far better without the toxic influence of the EFF at the heart of decision-making. This applies not only to Ekurhuleni, but also to a national coalition government after the 2024 general election.

This is an edited version of an article that first appeared on Netwerk24 on 18 February 2022.