OUT TO LUNCH

I’ve been binge watching a series called ‘Slow Horses’ on Apple TV recently. I wouldn’t have bothered with yet another online video streaming service had I not recently upgraded my iPhone and been offered a three month free subscription to Apple TV as part of the deal.

Since I already have Netflix I ignored the offer for two months until an e-mail came last week reminding me that the free subscription was about to lapse. So I thought what the hell, and signed up knowing that yet another chunk of cash will come off my credit card every month along with the online newspaper and magazine subscriptions, Audible, Netflix and a couple of charitable monthly draws. ___STEADY_PAYWALL___

It wasn’t until I signed up for Apple TV that I discovered ‘Slow Horses’ which is a brilliant TV adaptation of Mick Herron’s superb stories about failed MI5 agents who have been sent in disgrace to some godforsaken place called ‘Slough House’ in a rundown area of east London to perform menial tasks for a slob of a boss called Jackson Lamb. I offer this piece of Bullard domestic trivia by way of explanation for this week’s column.

It may be that I have been overdosing on ‘Slow Horses’ and have become obsessed with a cloak and dagger world where things are not always as they seem to be but I’m afraid that I can’t possibly believe that the bromance between Julius and Floyd is over as we are being led to believe.

This is the end of the EFF we are being told and others are about to desert the sinking ship. Jimmy Manyi has already gone but, let’s face it, Jimmy is a bit of a political whore and has already been in bed with the ANC then the ATM before slipping between the sheets at the EFF. Now he’s off to join the MK-Pox lot and if another political party emerges in the next few years he will almost certainly join that.

But is it not possible that the sudden departure of the porcine Floyd Shivambu is all part of an elaborate plan for the EFF and MK to join forces in the near future and form a parliamentary opposition designed to bring down the coalition government?

Apart from their key members having a history of crime and corruption, both parties share a hatred of Pres Ramaphosa and both favour the socialist political systems of thriving democracies such as Cuba and Venezuela. Cartoons, online memes and political comment predicting the death of the EFF and the end of Malema may turn out to be premature ejaculations in the month’s ahead.

Consider the facts. Malema and Shivambu are both credited with starting the EFF over a decade ago and both have been very close over the years.

Shivambu is known to be a fairly violent man and doesn’t shy away from bullying or physically assaulting journalists. He is often said to be the ‘brains of the party’ and is credited with coming up with the seven pillars of the EFF election manifesto, most of which was outrageous communist fantasy or sheer gobbledygook.

It’s been suggested that Floyd was blamed for the EFF losing support in the election but that seems unlikely since it’s already been acknowledged that the sudden appearance of MK on the ballot paper would have cannibalised the EFF vote. After all, both the parties have equally outrageous political aims for the country.

More important though is that Julius and Floyd are, as one report succinctly put it last week, as thick as thieves. They are the Thelma and Louise of bank heists and, like Thelma and Louise, there’s nothing that binds you more than being partners in crime.

If one goes down for bank robbery (as must surely happen) then the other goes down too but that would have been much easier to achieve if the two had remained in the same political party. By moving to the MK Floyd will no doubt argue that an arrest is a sinister imperialist plot to muzzle political opposition.

While Julius has always been the showman of the party Floyd has seemingly been content to play the part of Juju’s bag carrier. It would be hard to imagine Floyd doing a Taylor Swift impersonation on a hydraulic lift as Julius did at the party’s 10th birthday celebration last August. So, until last week, nobody suspected that the marriage was in trouble and it’s only now that ‘insiders’ are selectively leaking information about how Floyd felt sidelined and humiliated by his old buddy Julius.

All this ‘inside’ information should be taken with a bulldozer full of salt when you consider Juju’s reaction to the news that his number two was hanging up his ill-fitting red beret and moving in with Jacob Zuma’s lot.

Juju is well known for his public rants and his short temper. From the days when he told a BBC journalist fourteen years ago:

“Don’t come here with that white tendency, go out bastard, bloody agent”

To his regular incitements to violence:

“You must never be scared to kill, a revolution demands that at some point there must be killing, because the killing is part of a revolutionary act”.

Malema is an unapologetically violent and mercurial creature. And yet his reaction to his colleague of eleven years leaving the party was to simply say that it made him feel pain in the way he had felt pain when his mother died.

No mention of betrayal or siding with the previously loathed Jacob Zuma (remember the EFF chant “Give back the Money” in parliament?) Just a quiet acceptance and even an offer that the door will always be open should Floyd ever decide to return to the EFF.

So what’s really going on? Well, I think it’s pretty clear that this move has been brokered and agreed by both sides and that the reason for the lack of rage on Malema’s part and the lack of gloating on the part of MK ought to be a fairly strong indication that the aim is to bring western style democracy to its knees in the next five years. What better place to do this than from within parliament and the anarchic forces of the EFF and MK are surely much better together than apart?

Both parties are not averse to violence, looting and the destruction of property to make their point and, judging by the quality of their members of parliament, both parties appear to regard the rule of law as a complete joke with one of the parties demanding African law to replace this colonial Roman-Dutch nonsense we have been subjected to so far. Does any of this give you great confidence for the future of South Africa?

Of course it’s just possible that Floyd simply decided to jump ship to the MK because there is a better class of thief there than in any other party. Birds of a feather and all that.

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The TV series ‘Slow Horses’ has a very catchy theme tune sung by a 78 year old Mick Jagger. The lyrics would seem to sum up both the EFF and the MK… “Surrounded by losers, misfits and boozers”