Encuesta Sudáfrica (BF mar’24): la ANC volvería a ganar las elecciones

The EFF wants open borders, United States of Africa. They are losing members over this because they won’t budge despite SA’s xenophobic fit. Poor Africans are victims of a capitalist system which turns them against each other.

They are racist against whites because whites are the rich, colonial oppressors. After the July 2021 riots, where there racial conflict between blacks and Indians, they inflamed tensions between the two groups against Indians, whom they saw as disproportionately or unilaterally harming vulnerable black people.

White and Indian South Africans are also not seen as foreigners. They aren’t racist to them in so much of a “go back to your country way” but more “you are exploitative racists” way. Even with white South Africans, the idea is thay they will one day see the light and join the EFF like Carl Niehaus did.

For a long time there was a common assumption that young, born-free black South Africans who get educated and become professionals or entrepreneurs would obviously vote for the DA, as they saw themselves as increasingly middle class. That made sense, but it didn’t happen like that at all.

The key is to remember that many/most of the black middle class people you meet grew up in poverty. I have a friend who is a postgraduate in forensic pathology, but he lived in a shack for many years in school. They don’t see themselves as the middle class, with distinct interests from the poor. They see themselves as poor people who managed to escape the hood, and whose family members are still very much trapped in poverty. Their parents lived through Apartheid, many making money as domestic servants, labourers and gardeners. Their grandparents still have passbooks, and stories of being chased out of communities. Hector Pietersen, from the famous picture of the Soweto uprising, would be only 60 years old this year if he had lived. There are Coloured people in Cape Town who remember being kicked out of District Six as kids so that white people could live there.

Maybe this person happens to be good at Maths. He goes to a nice former white school and is one of the first black students in that school, and experiences racism at the hands of ignorant white teachers who grew up in Apartheid. He gets a government bursary that gets him to university. He knows he isn’t that much smarter than the girl he crushed on in high school, or more hard working than his brother. On some level, he was just luckier, and he escaped poverty. He feels grateful for the help he got from the government in escaping poverty, and wants more help for people he knows who call him to borrow money for school fees or food back home. Every December, he lives his nice professional home in Cape Town and goes back to a rural village in Eastern Cape to his parents.

When he is at university, he comes to fully understand the history of South Africa, often by speaking to his (naturally left wing) humanities friends. He meets privileged white people who bemoan the very systems that allowed him to escape poverty. Older, conservative white people complain about the government’s RDP housing program – the very house that helped his family stop living in a shack and not have to shit in buckets. They complain about all the blacks coming to Cape Town and setting up informal statements – but they have never visited the squalor of the Eastern Cape reservations that black people were banished to in 1910. They are forever whining about potholes, but they never complain about his cousin who lives in an informal settlement and got bitten on the face by a rat and now has a scar she is very self conscious about. When students ask for free education, they suddenly worry about whether we can afford it – as if we can afford to keep millions of people in the artificial poverty engineered by the Apartheid government precisely so that the white person sitting in front of you would have a nice life.

He realizes the ANC is corrupt, and the humanities friend explains to him the way Thabo Mbeki’s neoliberal policies ‘sold out’ black people. Mbeki was more concerned about complying with IMF guidelines on macroeconomics than using the power of the state to help poor black people in the same way the Apartheid people did for whites. Again, even when nobody is talking about taking anything from white people or harming them, many of the most privileged white people take offense at the idea of doing anything to help the poor masses, and become defensive at even the mere suggestion.

Enter the EFF. They go to Parliament dressed in overalls. John Steenhuisen makes fun of them and calls them Teletubbies. But you look at them and they look exactly like your parents – your dad worked as a ‘garden boy’ and your mom worked as a ‘kitchen girl’, and probably raised John Steenhuisen while his parents were out making money. The EFF are unapologetic about who they are and where they are from – they are proud of the things you were taught to be ashamed of. They embrace the coarseness of their black accents, while black DA politicians seem to hide theirs. They won’t tiptoe around the sensitivities of white people while poor black children continue to live in shacks and get bitten by rats. If it offends the white people, who gives a damn. They actually go to the schools were you experienced racism and protest and strike fear into the hearts of the racist teachers who used to bully you. They cut through the ANC neoliberal bullshit about financial responsibility (which is just an excuse to steal the money for themselves): we’re going to take the land and the wealth of this country, like the whites did, and use it to uplift your mom, your brother and your cousin.

The EFF are also very organised on campus. The EFF Student Command is full of friendly and fun people who are also receiving a quality education. When you have a crisis where you can’t pay the registration fee for the year, and the university threatens not to let you register at all, they shutdown the campus until they let you in. They say out loud what you’re thinking, about how stupid it is to withhold the very education that would allow you to ultimately pay back anything you owe. They are also a vibe – they host great parties and they look like you, sound like you and they also come from the hood. The DA student command complain about parking spots because the white kids with cars just can’t find anywhere to park on this bloody campus (“I should’ve listened to my Mom when she said study abroad honestly this country is falling apart”).

Many of these guys who live in comfortable homes and have good jobs have literal nightmares about going back to poverty, back to the squalor of the informal settlements or the poorest parts of the former homelands. They have survivor’s guilt about their family who still live there. They see themselves and their family members in the cleaners and contract staff at work. They know that their grandfather was a genius who could’ve been a great physicist, but was told he should just be a bus driver or manual labourer – not even an artisan owning his own business. The ANC promised them hope and for a short while they gave it, but then promptly stole it away – literally. The DA is populated by people with the same neoliberal policies of the ANC, but they are too stupid to even pretend to care about black people and can hardly maintain the appearance of inclusivity in their party – it’s just your racist schoolteacher who thinks government shouldn’t pay for your education because it makes you lazy. But you can’t complain about any of this publically because you need to be respectable and not make whites at work uncomfortable.

If you are thoughtful, you begin to notice that there are other people suffering in society. There are these people called LGBT who also get bullied a lot. There are immigrants who are victims of xenophobia. There are women who suffer at the hands of rapists. People tell you the EFF are evil, but the EFF leap to the defense of these people unapologetically. Julius Malema marches in the streets with a rainbow flag draped around his shoulders and calls Museveni a colonial puppet for being anti-gay. The EFF loses members because they are unapologetically in favour of pan-Africanist open borders.

Young, politically engaged, educated, black, middle class people are very pro-EFF. Not everyone is politically engaged – but the EFF is organized so you gravitate towards them as a young person because that’s just where your people are. Young people around the world tend to be left wing on average, and the ANC is a non-starter for many. The EFF is the only party which authentically speaks to their suffering, their rage and their identity – not as the petty bourgeoisie wannabe whites of the DA’s imagination, but as poor people who barely escaped from the hood and have a responsibility to save their family members.