Why the EFF gets all this media attention

They came in with a bang; the likes of which, we’ve actually seen before. If you cast your mind back to 2009, Congress of the People (COPE) faced its first election and garnered nearly 7,5% of the vote. This was more than even the EFF in their first time of asking in 2014.

By 2014 though, COPE had disappeared into obscurity with their biggest contribution to our discourse since arguably being Willie Madisha’s honk honk meme. By contrast, the red berets grew substantially in their second election last year.

It bodes well to bring up COPE because their media machine was incredible around the time of their formation, and highly strategic to boot. COPE consisted of many disgruntled members of the ANC who defected to Mosiuoa Lekota’s new party. Thing is, it wasn’t all at once. Defections kept happening one by one and each one became a headline.

COPE knew what it was doing as it sustained media attention and grew its message.

Many would say that they played the media, as they would say of the EFF today, but that’s pretty lazy analysis. Really they’re playing us using the media as a conduit.

In COPE’s heyday, the upset towards the ANC was rife and whenever something happened to challenge them, it was newsworthy. Why? Because it offered hope to those who disliked the government and fear to those who liked them. Both hope and fear tend to be significant political motivators.

The EFF is no different save for the added advantage of carrying disfavour themselves. So they have the benefit of being loved and hated, all while challenging those who are hated (in their case, on more than one front). So whatever they do tends to manifest in media that’s easily consumable and widely appealing. Don’t get me wrong. The appeal doesn’t mean we’ll always like the story. The appeal means that we want to know the story, even if it’s upsetting.

And that’s what sells. They know this. We want it. The media hosts it. The EFF just need to provide it…and provide it they do; provoking and prodding at every opportunity playing on the disenfranchisement of a massive group of people. Whether they have any realistic plans to empower the disenfranchised amidst their Louis Vuitton and VBS issues is another issue entirely…but even those issues keep the spotlight on them and inspire debate.

In the same way as American voters often vote against their interests because of an emotional appeal, EFF has a way of speaking to people that targets their emotional vulnerabilities that the ANC has since lost. This is probably why their voters don’t really care if Julius Malema is wearing an expensive suit as long as he can get them out of the hole they’re in.

It’s why, even if they carry scandals, the Twittersphere will back them as long as the message remains the same and remains clear; empower the children of the soil who were disenfranchised by white structures. I mean, that’s not officially their mission statement but if you were to blast their rhetoric together, you’d get something like that.

The point is that they know how to remain relevant in the minds of the people and that unless there is an absolute total media boycott of the party, no journalist will pass up an opportunity for the number of clicks an EFF story will generate if it means another will get it. So they play into that but they know it doesn’t translate directly into votes. Malema himself affirmed the disconnect between Twitter support and electoral support on affidavit in court.

The support, however, is clearly growing. Sure, the kind of message coupled with scandal will have its limits but we’ll have to wait and see where those limits are.

In the meantime, love them or hate them, we sure do like to read about them…and knowing this makes them happy to keep making us love or hate them more…as long as we don’t forget about them in the way we did COPE.

Richard Anthony Chemaly -entertainment attorney, radio broadcaster and lecturer of communication ethics.

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