In the last four months Ismail Lagardien has penned at least three ad hominem attacks on Julius Malema, the leader of the Economic Freedom Fighters, the South African political party which looks set to challenge ANC’s dominance of South African politics in the 2024 elections.
By Ugo Akpan
The South African general elections are scheduled to be held in 2024, within 90 days of the end of the term of the current Parliament. Recent polls indicate that support for the African National Congress (ANC), which won 57% of the vote in the last election in 2019, has fallen below 50%, raising the prospect of coalitions among parties to form a government.
Among the opposition parties, the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) led by Julius Malema, which currently holds 11% of the seats in Parliament, appears poised to leapfrog over the Democratic Alliance (DA) and challenge the ANC for the majority in Parliament. Yet, analyst consider this a tall order but view the EFFs position as the main opposition party to a much-diminished ANC as a potential outcome. The precarious fortune of the DA is rooted in its perception as a White minority party and the exodus of high-profile Black leaders from the party in the last decade has hurt its positioning as an inclusive institution in a multicultural nation like South Africa where the aftermath of the apartheid racial strains still plays a prominent part in the politics of the “Rainbow Nation”.
On the other hand, the EFF has struck a more resonant chord with working class South Africans after 30 years of the establishment of bourgeois democracy in Africa’s largest industrial nation. At the same time, it has struck a sensitive nerve in the machinery of “white power” which is at the heart of South African bourgeois democracy. The EFF has done this by identifying with exquisite precision the fundamental issue of economic redistribution and the stalled land redistribution that remains at the heart of this wealth inequality. According to a blog post by the Wilson center Africa Program in 2021, though agricultural land makes up nearly 80 percent of South Africa’s total area, blacks — who make up more than 80% of the population — control just 4 percent of individually-owned farmland, while whites — who comprise less than 9 percent — own 72 percent of land. In the years since the end of apartheid, South Africa’s efforts to rectify land inequality have had limited results. Between 1994 and 2019, just 8 percent of white-owned farmland was redistributed to black citizens. Discontent over lingering inequality has made land reform a hot-button issue in South African politics, and has helped fuel the rise of the EFF, which advocates uncompensated seizures of white-owned land. In response to this pressure from the EFF, the ruling ANC has taken steps to allow a faster pace of land redistribution. A Joint Constitutional Review Committee (Joint CRC) conducted public hearings in all the provinces of South Africa in 2018 to get public input into a constitutional amendment changing the restrictiveness of Section 25 of the current Constitution. The purpose of the amendment is to facilitate expropriation of land without compensation (EWC), a departure from the “willing seller willing buyer” basis by which land was historically redistributed since 1994. The recommendations of the Joint CRC were that (i) Section 25 of the Constitution must be amended and be clear about the expropriation of land and property without compensation. This will address historic wrongs of land dispossession, ensure fair access to land and empower the majority of South Africans; (ii) Parliament must urgently establish a mechanism to effect a necessary amendment to the relevant part of Section 25 of the Constitution; and (iii) Parliament must table, process and pass a Constitutional Amendment Bill before the end of the 5th democratic Parliament to allow for expropriation without compensation. The current 6th Parliament is working on finalising this recommended amendment.
Thus, within a short space of its existence from July 2013, the EFF has shifted the sway of power dynamics in South Africa to the point where it now constitutes a clear threat to the entrenched bourgeois interests in the country. Its revolutionary progressive policies which include not only expropriation of white-owned land without compensation, but also the nationalisation of mines and banks, has found mass appeal among the disenfranchised proletariat and peasant classes in South Africa. Further, its electoral fortunes which have astronomically launched them into the third largest party in Parliament, look set to launch them further if recent polls are maintained, with the potential to possibly give them the ruling mantle as ANC’s prospects come under pressure from high unemployment, an ongoing electricity crisis, and out of control crime in big cities. In addition, the wedge driven by the ANC’s schism with its former leader, Jacob Zuma, who has founded a new party, Umkhonto we Sizwe (“Spear of the Nation”), which has been registered to compete in this year’s elections, may yet erode ANC’s seats in Parliament given a razor thin advantage to the EFF.
Response from the Forces of Reaction
Enter Ismail Lagardien writing in the Daily Maverick, an online newspaper that regularly churns out editorial viewpoints that mirror the liberal bourgeois press of western countries, thus placing this newspaper firmly in the camp of western imperialism. The newspaper’s sources of funding, skilfully obscured through venture capital and angel “not-for-profit” investors and investment vehicles reveal the usual suspects. Media Development Investment Fund (MDIF), a company founded in 1995 by Saša Vučinić and Stuart Auerbach with seed funding from regime change enthusiast, George Soros, this organisation was “initially established in 1995 to support media companies in Europe transitioning from communist systems to free markets”. Tucked inside a carefully obscured webpage, the following sponsor list of bourgeois white monopoly capitalists, whose interested are reflected in the editorial policies of the newspaper, is unearthed. These sponsors include Donald Gordon Foundation (apartheid era founder of Liberty Holdings Limited, which has been implicated in the theft of unpaid benefits of poor South African pensioners), Vital Strategies, Roy McAlpine Charitable Foundation (foundation of Scottish chartered accountant who helped Donald Gordon build Liberty Life into “one of South Africa’s greatest companies”), Claude Leon Foundation, and the ubiquitous Open Society Foundation (owned by billionaire “philanthropist” and regime change sponsor, George Soros who has weaponized his vast wealth in support of US foreign policy for several decades), among other white monopoly capitalists.
It is only appropriate that Mr Lagardien would choose this channel through which to launch his all-out attacks on the EFF and its leader, Mr Julius Malema. Since October 2023 until the time of going to press, Mr Lagardien has published three articles aimed directly at vilifying the EFF and its leader, conflating Mr Malema with Donald Trump, and then ramping up the hysteria to frame Mr Malema as the next Hitler or Mussolini. The tone of Mr Lagardien seems to be taking on an increasingly hysterical pitch, perhaps as he observes the EFF’s advances in the polls as South Africa enters an election year in which both the ruling ANC and the main opposition party, Democratic Alliance, are expected to lose substantial votes, potentially placing the EFF in pole position to form a ruling coalition, or more probably placing the EFF as the main opposition party with the ANC ruling in an unstable coalition.
“The almost eerie similarities between the playbooks of Julius Malema and Donald Trump”
In the 25 October 2023 article, Lagardien goes directly after Julius Malema by raising the bogeyman of Donald Trump. He says, “Trump has described himself as a “really smart” person, and a “stable genius”. Malema and his followers believe that they, and especially he, represent “the future” and “superior logic” through their belief in “scientific and sound ideas”.” He goes on to say that Trump is obsessive about his intellect and informs his readers that Trump “enrolled at Fordham University in New York in 1964, then transferred to the University of Pennsylvania’s prestigious Wharton School, where he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Economics in 1968”. It is clear that Lagardien is struggling to draw a parallel with Mr Malema which doesn’t exist and so he has to make a reference to Malema’s often stated comment of the EFF’s adherence to scientific socialism as some kind of vain appeal to Malema’s intellect. Having failed to make a convincing similitude in that area, Lagardien addresses the issue of insults and vulgarity. He says, “Trump and Malema share a habit of insulting people with whom they disagree, and generally being crude and vulgar”. He goes on to cite a litany of examples of Trump’s well known insults and then attempts to draw a flimsy parallel to Mr Malema by saying “Malema has dismissed political opponents and court officials (notably Chief Justice Raymond Zondo) as “factionalists” in the employ of President Cyril Ramaphosa”. This sheer desperation utilizing childish comparisons to make Mr Malema into a Trumpian figure is transparent and falls flat on its face. The rest of the October article is spent vilifying Trump as Lagardien, having no meaningful critique of Malema, appears to be more in his element lampooning the clownish former President of the United States.
“EFF promotes revenge and hatred and have given their followers a license to hate”
In his 5 December 2023 article, Lagardien does away with tinkering around the corners and launches into a full on “nuclear option”. The Hitler and Mussolini bogeymen that is the trump card of western liberal class is pulled out. Just as President Putin has been likened to Hitler, Lagardien sees no issue with rolling the tired label to slap upon Mr Malema.
Lagardien starts off informing his readers that he has closely watched the EFF for the last three years. He then promises that over the coming months, writing in the Soros funded Daily Maverick, he will “lay out the parallels, the continuities, the echoes and homologies between the EFF and three phases of fascism of the past 100 years or so”. He acknowledges that his past publications have been sporadic and incoherent, which is refreshingly honest, and promises to make his future attacks more coherent the better to stop what he views as Africa’s Hitler in waiting.
Lagardien starts out by delineating fascist trends from the “organic fascists of the inter-war years (Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini)”, through the “post-war fascists (like Generalissimo Franco of Spain)…”, and onto the “thinly veiled fascism of Juan Peron of Argentina; the early 21st century fascism of Viktor Orban (Hungary); Narendra Modi of India; Donald Trump of the United States; Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, and the brutality of Rodrigo Duterte of Philippines”. Lagardien refrains from including Russia (Putin?) in his makeshift classifications of forms of fascism passing it off as an oligarchy. He also gives Iran a pass, claiming it is a Theocracy. In this way, Lagardien possibly seeks to differentiate his brand of liberal obtuseness from that which obtains in the collective west. Nevertheless, by lumping the other enemies of the western liberal class such as Duterte, Viktor Orban of Hungary, and even President Trump of the USA into the same mold of fascism, Lagardien betrays his deep-rooted liberal foundation, despite Lagardien’s vain attempt to brandish his socialist leanings by frivolously referencing Marx and Gramsci.
Having delineated the various incarnations of fascism according to his personal philosophy, Lagardien then begins the arduous task of drawing the parallels between the “organic fascist” Mussolini and Mr Malema. He reminds us that Mussolini was romanticised by the US press. This can hardly be a parallel as Mr Malema is not romanticised by any liberal or western press, never mind the right-wing western press for which Malema is as much a bogeyman as Lagardien is attempting to make him out as. This non-parallel notwithstanding, Lagardien goes on to say that “[I]t would be remiss if we ignored the way that the press, notably the US press, helped pave the way for the rise of fascism in Europe”. While this gives undue influence of the fascist and reactionary press in the US (Hearst, Scripps-Howard, McCormick-Patterson, Reader’s Digest, etc.) in the rise to power of the NAZI Party in Germany, it correctly identifies the cosiness between the liberal bourgeois centres of power in the US and the western imperial powers– which includes the media establishment -, and European fascism in general and Hitler’s rise in particular. Indeed, it was the same white monopoly capital, which Mr Malema rails against, that funded Mussolini’s National Fascist Party and the NAZI party in Italy and Germany respectively. It is well established that Hitler received his first big funding from Fritz Thyssen of Vereinigte Stahlwerke (United Steel Works), and subsequently came to power following a deal with Hindenburg and the big Prussian landlords (the Junkers). Indeed, the thousand biggest industrialists and bankers of Germany who financed Hitler made millions and billions on their investments. As for the first modern fascist regime, that of Mussolini’s Partito Nazionale Fascista, the funders of were Lega Industriale of Turin, Confederazione Generale dell’Industria, Associazione fra Industriali Metallurgici Mecannici ed Affini, Fiat Automobile Works, Landowners Association (which consisted of feudal landlords, the super wealthy of the nation), Banca Commerciale of Milan, Banca Italiana di Sconto, and other leading banks in Italy.
So, it is clear that what Mr Malema highlights about white monopoly capital’s control of apartheid South Africa and democratic South Africa perfectly aligns with how big money wielded power behind the fascist counterrevolutionary and reactionary regimes in Europe.
Lagardien claims in his 5 December article that no people ever recognise their dictator in advance by quoting Dorothy Thompson. Only an uninformed socialist, which Lagardien apparently poses as, would make such a comment. To the antifascist scientific Marxist, it was clear who the forces of reaction were and the threat to democracy they posed. Mr Malema has properly identified the powers behind the forces of reaction in South Africa and Lagardien’s pitiful attempt to conflate him with fascist forces is laughable at best.
Lagardien makes the claim that in “Malema’s ethno-nationalist imagination, non-Africans are a people without a history, a people to whom things must happen, and on which war (revenge, recrimination and biblical punishment) must be made”. He of course provides no evidence for this fantastical assertion and depends on his earlier framing of Malema in the likeness of Hitler and Mussolini to pull of this baseless claim. He ignores the core of Mr Malema’s argument, that South Africa having established political democracy in 1994, did not however complete the task of establishing true independence, which in Marxist materialist theory, is the economic independence which underpins true democracy and independence.
“The EFF started with a grudge, presented a promise — then morphed into fascists”
Writing again in his 17 December 2023 publication in the Daily Maverick, Lagardien, in his reckless attempt to vilify Mr Malema, goes after him for the EFF’s support for the Palestinians in Gaza who are currently undergoing a genocide. Obviously in a panic mode given the EFF’s wildly popular motion proposed in the Parliament on the “Closure of the Israel Embassy in South Africa and suspension of all diplomatic relations with Israel”. Lagardien attempts to spin this principled position of the EFF as EFF’s pandering to the Muslim vote in the Cape. Lagardien then reminds us that “Mussolini was mildly tolerated by almost all Italians until he openly expressed his racism and anti-Semitism in 1938”. His referencing of Mussolini is to continue with his procrustean task of framing Mr Malema into a fascist ogre. In fact, Mussolini was not mildly tolerated by almost all Italians. And despite what the uninformed Lagardien contends, Mussolini was not expelled from the Partito Socialista Italiano (Italian Socialist Party or PSI) “for his drift from orthodox Marxism with its insistence of nonviolence, to the revolutionary authoritarianism of fascism..”. This is ahistorical. The PSI, in line with the 1914 Brussels resolution of the Second International, maintained neutrality for World War I. This had nothing to do with non-violence, which was never a Marxist position. It had everything to do with anti-imperialism and the desire to prevent the proletariat fighting and dying for bourgeois imperialist wars. Mussolini, an opportunist and social chauvinist, had advocated for militaristic intervention by Italy in the World War. He was immediately expelled for the PSI. The PSI would subsequently sign up to the Communist International founded by Lenin in 1919 which terms of admission included militant non-pacifist requirements such as the third, fourth, sixth and eight terms for admission.
Nothing in the above should suggest that the EFF has adopted violent revolution in the party’s class struggle, far from it. The EFF has advocated peaceful democratic means through which to assume power and pursue the democratic working class struggle. Yet, reading Lagardien one would never be aware of this.
Lagardien then attempts his most ridiculous parallel yet by saying that “Hitler and Mussolini were resentful of the Treaty of Versailles (ostensibly an agreement on peace after World War 1). Somewhat similarly, Malema was vehemently opposed to the peaceful settlement of the 1990s, especially the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (Codesa). All three promoted violence against opponents, especially people and/or media houses they considered to be “puppets” of liberal capitalists”. The Blackshirts gangs of Mussolini and the Sturmanbteilung Brownshirts of the Nazi Party are well known for their violent attacks on communists, social democrats, Jews, and other minorities in Italy and Germany. Lagardien provides no examples of EFF’s goon squads that have attacked any minorities in South Africa. Indeed, it was the major capitalist, industrialists and landlords who sponsored Mussolini’s Fascist Party and Hitler’s Nazi Party. Malema’s EFF on the other hand is on record as saying that they days of white monopoly capital’s dominance of South Africa’s economy will be numbered when the EFF comes to power. No where has either Malema or the EFF espoused violence against minorities in South Africa.
The fact that Lagardien would stoop so low to fabricate a spectre of a racist dystopia for South Africa should the EFF attain power, basing this on the EFF’s just call for economic equity in a country that still bears the scars of one of the most grotesque forms of racial inequities, says more about Lagardien’s intellectual absurdity and highlights the bourgeois impotence in the face of a disciplined scientific socialist movement which is threatening to upend white monopoly capital’s foothold on the African continent, even as western imperialism suffers debilitating defeats on the international stage, from Ukraine to Asia. The centuries long grip that white monopoly capital has maintained around the necks of the global south is finally loosening and dubious defenders of this pernicious system of exploitation, such as Lagardien, are giving vent to their panic.