Santaco delivers EFF its biggest blow by shunning national shutdown

South Africans are doing it for themselves. They have to, since their nominal president and his ministers suffer from a debilitating, potentially fatal – to us – state of political paralysis.

For weeks, the only response to the growing threat of public violence around Monday’s national shutdown came from the official opposition, individual business leaders and ordinary citizens.

They stood alone. Our executive president, a man with an almost pathological fear of conflict, was invisible.

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His government ministers, including the normally voluble police minister, were silent.

Despite panicked captains of industry pleading for President Cyril Ramaphosa to speak out in response to the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) call for a national shutdown, there was not a word.

The shutdown, which has as its chief goal Ramaphosa’s resignation, appears to have struck him dumb and left him quivering in a bunker under the Union Buildings.

Okay, I exaggerate. The president did surface briefly this week to speak virtually at an international meeting of the China-aligned World Political Parties Summit.

There, shoulder to metaphorical shoulder with the likes of North Korea and Venezuela, he heaped praise on the great wisdom and exceptional ethical values of President Xi Jinping’s “nonaligned” foreign policy.

But nothing from Ramaphosa about the threatened rerun of the July 2021 riots.

It was left to Fikile Mbalula, a party official and no longer even a parliamentarian, to utter on Thursday the first words from within the ANC or government on the matter.

The EFF’s militant pronouncements, said Mbalula, opened the door to “anarchy of the highest order”. If there was violence, the ANC wanted EFF leaders to be held personally responsible, Mbalula said.

The ANC secretary-general’s response was not only tardy in coming but did no more than parrot the position taken by the official opposition, the DA, a week earlier.

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However, perhaps the biggest blow to EFF leader Julius Malema’s “no school, no university, no factory, no bus, no taxi, no trucks, no trains” moving on that day, came from the SA National Taxi Council (Santaco).

The shutdown, said Santaco spokesperson Bafana Magagula, was “an injury to the economy”.

“Our drivers have been briefed … We are more than certain that our drivers can defend themselves should they come under attack by people taking part in the shutdown,” he said.

It is an indication of how enfeebled the South African state has become, that the Santaco announcement has substantially weakened the ability of the EFF to terrorise communities on Monday and enforce its shutdown.

Malema was quick, within hours of the Santaco statement, to tone down the belligerence.

No longer was it: “Like Sharpeville, we are not scared. Let the state come with its power, we will come with our mass power, they will find us ready.”

And while he reiterated that anyone who wanted “to take away” the EFF’s constitutional rights would “meet their maker”, this was now Malema the innocent: “The EFF comes in peace and has not threatened violence,” he told a media briefing.

READ MORE: ‘Let’s avoid unnecessary conflict’: Mbeki calls on EFF to protest peacefully during national shutdown

If there was any violence on Monday, it would be because the DA had “hired agent provocateurs” to undermine the EFF’s peaceful protests.

Emboldened by the taxi drivers, Police Minister Bheki Cele, at last, found his voice on Thursday.

All citizens and their property would be protected, roads and ports of entry would be operational – the EFF had warned that OR Tambo International Airport would be closed – and those trying to prevent others from going to work would “face the full might of the law”.

And, unsaid by Cele but far more frightening than police to the EFF, the taxi drivers.