The testimonies before the Madlanga Commission should force South Africans, zealots included, to confront an uncomfortable question of what happens when the language of revolution becomes the camouflage of accumulation.
For years, Julius Malema, the leader of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), has presented himself as the authentic voice of the dispossessed, the commander of the unemployed, the messiah of economic freedom. He has mastered the grammar of black pain. He can recite, with righteous anger, the statistics of landlessness, joblessness and exclusion. Furthermore, he can summon the ghosts of colonialism and apartheid with a fluency unmatched in contemporary politics.
But the question is, where does the revolution end, and where does the tender begin?
The allegations emerging from the Commission are not findings of guilt. They must still be tested and weighed. Yet they arrive carrying the familiar scent of a politics South Africans know all too well, that is to say, the politics of power, influence over contracts and access to the public purse. It is the politics that has transformed liberation into a business opportunity and converted political credentials into balance sheets.
This is why the story of On-Point Engineering remains politically significant. No matter how you elect to look at it, this is about the emergence of a black political class that has discovered that the shortest route to wealth is not production but political connectivity. It is about a generation that speaks the language of Fanon while studying the arithmetic of tenders.
South Africans are told that the EFF is a revolutionary movement. Yet revolutionaries do not usually become associated with mansions before they have built factories. They do not usually preside over lifestyles that seem disconnected from the economic reality of the masses they claim to represent.
One recalls the spectacle of the economic freedom march in 2011 when young people walked 60km from Johannesburg to Pretoria. Thousands of young black people filled the streets. They came from Alexandra, from Diepsloot, from Tembisa, from the sprawling settlements where hope is rationed, and dignity is negotiated daily. They marched because they believed. They marched because they were desperate. They marched because they wanted a future.
The symbolism was devastating. The marchers returned to overcrowded shacks, unemployment and collapsing public services. The leadership moved in different circles. The poor supplied the numbers; others enjoyed the dividends. The same day of the March, Julius boarded a flight to attend an exclusive wedding in Mauritius. Imagine thousands of supporters marching under the banner of denouncing inequality and elite privilege, and their leader departs for a luxury island destination frequented by the global affluent.
This is the tragedy of South African politics: the foot soldiers of revolution are often left carrying the banner while the generals board the aircraft. Such is the recurring story of post-apartheid politics.
History is not short of such characters. Again and again, movements born in the name of the oppressed produce elites who master the art of speaking left while living right. They wrap themselves in the flag of liberation while pursuing the privileges once monopolised by those they condemned. The revolutionary slogan became a business model.
This is the deeper significance of the revelations and allegations now circulating in the Madlanga Commission. They are not about one politician but about a political culture. They are about the commodification of black suffering. They are about the conversion of popular anger into private accumulation.
The masses do not need another messiah. They do not need another eloquent tribune capable of producing thunderous speeches against white monopoly capital in the afternoon and cultivating relationships with capital of another kind by night. They need honesty. Furthermore, they need consistency. They need leaders whose material interests are inseparable from their own.
The greatest danger to the struggle for economic freedom has never been the enemy who openly opposes it. The greatest danger is always those who wear the mask of the revolutionary while treating the revolution as a career path.
That is the question hanging over South Africa today. Not whether a politician can speak the language of economic freedom. Many can. The question is whether he lives it when the microphones are switched off.
*Tshediso Mangope moonlights as a social and political commentator in his spare time
** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of this publication (Journal News Network).
