Is Malema driving the EFF to the MK?

On the eve of the EFF’s commander-in-chief Julius Malema’s exit from his then beloved ANC, his late grandmother, Sarah Malema, called him to berate him because he had made Jacob Zuma angry.

Fiona Forde, in her book, Still An Inconvenient Youth, says his grandmother told him he was the first person to make the country’s president so angry that he had to give him a tongue-lashing on national television.

She says his grandmother was his barometer, a measure of “…the feeling of the last ordinary people and how they feel about what you do.”

The past three months must have felt as though he was especially unanchored, what with his closest friend and confidante, Floyd Shivambu, leaving him for Jacob Zuma’s uMkhonto we Sizwe Party (MK).

His other barometer, besides his beloved grandmother, had just abandoned him and their pet project for the party of the man who once branded Malema’s utterances whilst he was still in the ANC an “alien to the movement”.

Shivambu was notably followed by advocate Dali Mpofu out of the now permanently open door that leads directly to MK.

ALSO READ: ‘They can go to hell’: Malema looks over his shoulder as some allies allegedly ‘betray’ him

He can’t have been hurt much by former public protector Busisiwe Mkhwebane leaving because, truth be told, she wasn’t there for sweat, blood and toil in 2013, when the EFF was born.

But two questions must have crossed his mind recently: am I the problem and is the EFF going to survive this?

One of the incidents that led to Malema’s first disciplinary hearing in the ANC was when he verbally attacked a BBC journalist, Jonah Fish, during a press conference at Luthuli House.

He later explained his reasons to Forde, summed up as “feeling undermined in my own house…” Malema has done a lot of growing since that incident and there have been few public outbursts towards reporters.

But the fierceness has been displayed many a times during press conferences and in parliament. While the fierce intensity might work in galvanising angry youths to swell the ranks of a radical youth movement, it will not work in leadership structures with vastly educated and independent individuals who have their own hopes and aspirations of ascending to higher office.

Will the EFF survive the MK onslaught that left the EFF with only 2% of the vote in KwaZulu-Natal?

ALSO READ: Is the MK takeover of KZN so bad?

It is worth noting there is a school of thought that says the EFF and MK were always going to come together, hence Malema being unusually reserved in his utterances on Jacob Zuma since the MK started poaching his leadership personnel, starting with Shivambu.

Zuma himself said last week he is on a mission to unite black organisations and although he did not spell out if there is a secret agreement between MK and EFF, his confidence in his convictions about the unity he is forging might be an indication of something the public is not privy to.

Whatever eventually happens to the party that came in and changed South African opposition parliamentary politics forever, if Malema is honest with himself, he will acknowledge that the centre of the EFF did not hold when challenged by a more populist movement in the last general election in May.

And that he was the leader in charge and therefore responsible for the EFF’s fortunes.

This pointing to sleeper agents, and “assassinations” by his leadership leaving does nothing for the EFF but further destroy it and push members towards MK’s open arms.

If that’s what he wants to happen he must tell his followers.