South Africa’s two main opposition parties, which should be riding rampant after receiving almost a quarter of all votes cast in the 2024 election, are in trouble.
The Marxist Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) of Julius Malema secured 9.5% of the vote in the election, while the populist-nationalist uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) party of former President Jacob Zuma got 14.6%. MK is the official opposition in the National Assembly. It controls 58 seats, while the EFF has 39. Together, they control 97 of the 400 seats, or 24%.
This should augur well for their power. But so far neither MK nor the EFF have managed to translate their electoral successes into much influence. Having had the opportunity to go into national government by forming a coalition with the African National Congress (ANC), each party overplayed its hand and got shut out.
At the provincial level, MK is the largest party in KwaZulu-Natal, having secured 45% of the vote. But even there it did not manage to find its way into government because smaller parties – the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), ANC, Democratic Alliance (DA) and National Freedom Party (NFP) – ganged up on MK by using their combined 41 seats in the 80-seat legislature to form a provincial coalition government. MK was relegated to the opposition benches, along with the 2-seat EFF.
In Gauteng, Premier Panyaza Lesufi of the ANC, who is said to be close to the EFF, has formed a rickety minority government that excludes the DA, MK and EFF and controls just 32 of the 80 seats in the legislature. There appears to be a tacit agreement for the EFF to support Mr Lesufi on important votes. But this constellation does not look particularly stable, nor does it enjoy the enthusiastic support of the ANC head office.
This means that MK and the EFF are not represented in national government or in any provincial government. Even where the EFF is represented at the local government level, such as in coalitions with the ANC in Ekurhuleni and Johannesburg, its relationship with its coalition partners appears to be going through a rocky patch and may not last.
But the travails of MK and the EFF do not end there. For all its impressive successes, MK has been flying by the seat of its pants since its dramatic take-off in December last year. This approach can work for a while, as events have shown, but it does not form the basis of a sustainable and effective movement.
MK continues to be dominated by a single person: Jacob Zuma. He calls all the shots and makes all the calls. He has shuffled and reshuffled his senior leadership team and does not appear to be building a solid organisational structure for the party.
Ironically, while Mr Zuma’s frequent personnel changes represent an effective assertion of internal power within the party, they reduce its external effectiveness because they do not allow for proper delegation to empowered subordinates. In an organisation the size of MK, delegation is an essential mechanism of coordination; running everything on the personal instruction of a single person is not going to work in the long term. It represents a single point of failure and a large risk to the organisation, even more so when the protagonist is advanced in years, as Mr Zuma is.
A further concern is that Mr Zuma is the glue that holds MK together by force of personality. This means a fragmentation is likely when he is no longer there to play that role. He gives MK meaning – what is its meaning without him? Without a clearly defined purpose that goes beyond embodying the revanchist aspirations of a former president, the knives will be out when Mr Zuma leaves, and there will be no restraint on the comrades’ competition for positions and resources.
Already, the fact that MK does not have a presence in government at any level limits its scope for dispensing patronage and granting access to state resources. The fact will not be lost on the party’s financial backers, who will realise that they are betting on what looks like a fading horse. They may try to ginger it up in the hopes that it will achieve greater access to power in the future, but if it fails to demonstrate potential the taps will be turned off sooner or later.
A similar argument applies to the EFF. Although its funding is opaque, what is known points towards a mixture of backing on the promise of future influence on the one hand – a reverse takeover of the ANC being a commonly cited possibility – and on extortion on the other hand, where businesses were aggressively targeted until they agreed to “make a donation” to the party to make the problem go away.
Both funding channels are at risk if the perception of EFF influence wanes, as it already has done on the back of a loss of 18% of its votes from 2019 to 2024, as well as its exclusion from government power.
Add to this the recent revelations in the VBS scandal and the EFF is a party under pressure. An affidavit by the former chairman of the VBS Mutual Bank, Tshifhiwa Matodzi, alleges that he paid R16.1 million to EFF leaders Julius Malema and Floyd Shivambu and that the recipients used the money not for the party, but to enrich themselves. In exchange for the payment, the expectation was that the EFF would halt its attacks on VBS for having given a home loan to Mr Zuma.
As we wrote in a recent note: “The story is damaging to the EFF’s credibility on three fronts: it implies that the EFF is susceptible to bribery and willing to use extortion to fund itself; that its leaders are willing to use money stolen from the underprivileged, as many of the depositors who lost their savings when VBS collapsed were, to do so; and that its leaders act not in the interest of their party and its members, but in their own interests. Potential criminal prosecutions are a further risk the EFF leadership will have to deal with.”
In this context it is noteworthy that the minister in the Presidency, Khumbudzo Ntshavheni, this week said that everybody named in the affidavit should be prosecuted and serve time in jail. While South Africans have heard such laudable sentiments before, they are inclined to dismiss them because the politically connected rarely seem to be prosecuted.
But here the situation is subtly different: the EFF leaders are less likely to be able to count on political cover to avoid prosecution because their power and relevance in the political context are clearly on the wane. It will still be a surprise if Messrs Malema and Shivambu are prosecuted. But it will be less surprising than it would have been two months ago.
If this sidelining of the EFF and MK continues to play out the way these early signs are indicating, this will have important repercussions within the ANC itself. Here, the pragmatists who want to prioritise economic growth and better governance in partnership with the DA, the IFP and other parties are in the ascendant over the more radical elements that wish to turn South Africa into first a socialist and then a Communist society by means of the National Democratic Revolution.
This is a positive development for South Africa. A healthy dose of pragmatism can kick-start the economic growth which the country so urgently needs. Although the economy will not kick into high gear immediately – it will do well to achieve a modest growth rate of around 2% initially – in the medium to longer term this can be raised towards the 5% that is required to bring unemployment down and raise incomes broadly and perceptibly. This will stabilise democracy and make South Africa a much more hopeful country, one that offers the opportunities which its people deserve.
To achieve this, the pragmatists in government need broad support from business and civil society. In this spirit, the IRR has started publishing a series of “Blueprint for Growth” policy papers that provide practical advice on how to get the economy growing. The importance of getting growth quickly, and ramping it up towards higher rates, cannot be overstated: if this is not achieved, the door will be left open for South Africa’s radical left and ethnic populists to reclaim the ground they are currently losing. If they are allowed to succeed, the country’s prospects are bleak indeed. To avoid this outcome, South African businesses and individuals are well advised to support the country’s pro-growth voices.
John Endres is CEO of the Institute of Race Relations
