It is Karl Marx who said that “philosophers have interpreted the world, the point however is to change it.” As members of the July 26 movement, an organization that prides itself as a Marxist-Leninist and Fanonian organization, ours is not to merely analyze the current conditions that exists in the disjuncture between student activism and mainstream politics but we ought to give clear, coherent and practical direction on how to dislodge it.

Emanating from the previous writing which was about the disjuncture which exists between student activism and mainstream politics, this writing seeks to give direction from a layman point of view on what is to be done to dislodge it.

It is an undisputable fact that most of the time student activism does not translate into mainstream politics. It is scientifically proven that those who were active during their student life years do not necessarily become community activists owing to a lot of issues not limited to dynamics, the space, self-actualization. 

In responding to Vladmir Lenin on What is to be done in the context of dislodging the disjuncture that is there, the fundamental issue is that the EFF should have a rigorous induction on their membership and leadership as adopted by the 2^nd National People’s Assembly. What this essentially means is that the rank and file of the EFF should know Marxism, Leninism and the Fanonian school of thought by heart, they must be inducted on the Constitution and Founding Manifesto of the EFF. This means that EFF members will be able to know that they should extend a living branch to student activists in order to ensure that the 4^th Cardinal Pillar of the EFF being Free quality education, healthcare, houses and sanitation in particular the free quality education part is implemented.

The EFFSC should equally induct its membership to ensure that they adhere to the founding non-negotiable principles of the SC including the rallying of students behind the banner of Economic in our lifetime as encapsulated in the founding manifesto of the EFF and building relations between students and community struggles. This will mean student activist will have a clearer understanding on the community politics to an extent that they will vote for the EFF in as much as they vote for the EFFSC in their respective campuses, subsequently be active in the community as they are in their respective institution of higher learning.

Taking note that the Students Command is a relatively autonomous structure of the EFF, it does however have a constitutional obligation as per the 1^st non-negotiable principle of the EFFSC which is mobilizing the students behind the banner of economic freedom in our lifetime. Members of the Student’s Command should form an integral part of the programs of the EFF and EFF members should form part of the EFFSC programs. In his Book, I Write What I Like, in the chapter Black Campuses and Current Feelings Steve Biko makes an assertion that “. . .  important observation which was the eagerness of the students to wish to relate whatever is done to their situation in the community. There is growing awareness of the role the black students may be called upon to play in the emancipation of their community. The students realize that the isolation of the black intelligentsia from the rest of the black society is a disadvantage to black people as a whole.” In this way student will easily relate with the community and get to fully understand the challenges which they live with. A permanent relation will exist thus dislodge the current disjuncture that exists.

This essentially means that all the programs that the EFF may have, the Students Command should be able to actively participate in it. The Students Command should be treated as a special project, something which the EFF 2^ndNPA resolved wherein a Commissar in the EFF has been appointed to deal with EFFSC matters. In line with such, a proposal will be that EFFSC should be able to have a delegation at Regional and Provincial level of the EFF. When the EFF has a Regional or provincial Program, the SC will be able to actively take part fully without any failure and at the same time the EFF will be able to assist the command. The 4^th Cardinal pillar of the EFF will be realized by any means including assist the command with whatever program not only SRC elections. Accommodation is land is an integral program both the EFF and Students Command hence the need to have complementary programs which will be able to address both the issue of student’s accommodation and land for the dejected masses of our people.

During recess, holidays the students command should be able to have programs which will close the gap between the challenges faced in the institution and those in the community. This essentially means that the EFFSC branches should be in a position to know where their members come from and where are they located during recess and holidays. The branch leadership of Sol Plaatje University, University of Cape Town, Talesto TVET College, Tshwane University of Technology should break down its membership into places where their members come from such as Giyani, Seshego, Bushbuckridge, Matatiele, Mahikeng, Khayelitsha, Umlazi, Bloemfontein.

After such a break down, that particular information should be submitted to both the EFFSC structures and EFF structures thereafter, the Students Command in collaboration with EFF should have programs across the country wherein students from Wits, SPU, UKZN, who are staying in Christiana will be able to meet together with the branch leadership of the EFF where they are in rolling out such a program. This should also happen in other places such as Taung, Kimberly. These programs include going to high schools to assist learners with applications for admission, guiding them with regards to career choices and which streams to choose when going to Grade 10, assist with visibility programs, door to door campaigns, tutoring, Accommodation is and Water is life programs.

The knowledge and experience which you gained while in the Institution of higher learning including being politically active will be transmitted to the community through assisting other learners to have access to such Institutions and tutoring. The community will in return appreciate the efforts you are undertaking in restoring the dignity of an African child is restored.

This will also assist in ensuring that learners in High School become active in politics. For when they see a Student from a University or a TVET College assisting them, they too will develop an interest to assist others and for obvious reasons that they are not at the Institution of Higher learning, they will become community activist and start attending meetings of the EFF to get a clearer idea on what is EFF actually about, they will then take part in addressing challenges which exists in the community. A University is microcosm of a society so it will be easier for these learners to relate to those challenges in the University such as need for Accommodation, lack of proper infrastructure in the TVETs as they have went through them in the society in a form of land and lack of infrastructure. Activism becomes easier in this regard. Through this program, students will relate and be able to be active in mainstream politics because already there is a relation between students and community members. Mainstream politics will not be foreign to students even when they vote during National General Elections or Local Government Elections, they will be able to vote for the EFF for they will be able to easily relate with it.

We must be in a position to emulate Steve Biko in a sense that he was not only a student activist but he also played a very crucial role in changing the discourse of our people. He did not confine the struggle of emancipating our people into a campus but he went on to also lend his hand in assisting the dejected masses of our people in the community through building a clinic and other progressive programs. He understood that University is indeed a microcosm of a society, that the real struggle is rooted in the community

Unity as captured in the Speeches and Writings of Amical Cabral, is a fundamental issue in ensuring that we dislodge the current existing disjuncture. Yes we do come from different backgrounds, with different ideas, we are of different ages and different goals however what has brought us together is the struggle for the realization of Economic Freedom in our lifetime and we can only attain such through unity and our unity should not be cosmetic but it should indeed be unity of purpose as guided by documents of EFF.

A plan of action is what will ensure that the science of logic becomes the order of the day. Revolutionary theory will be able to guide us into a revolutionary program action in dislodging the disjuncture between student activism and mainstream politics.

Justice Dabampe is the Regional Secretary of the EFF in North West, Dr Ruth Segomotsi Mompati Region

I have to admit I am not a card-carrying member of the ANC. Like more than 10 Million persons I am a supporter suffice to say I am an aspiring cadre who wishes to participate in the politics of liberation through the ANC. Unlike lots who are card-carrying members, many times ago I had a thinking that I needed not to be a member besides the difficulty of acquiring memebership, I however thought my philosophical and political construction of reality needed not to be mixed by guidelines of party position. At this time my participation in the ANC will be through voting and attending political programmes excluding cadre’s forum (a forum of clapping hands) which are not pedagogical. I have a view to date that different circumstances may compel people to signing up for membership of political organisations, lately the desire and hunger to become a cadre for a revolution is little part of this process of membership signing. Critical questions about the ANC are very important, the ANC governs us, the ANC runs our lives, it has been long enough, and many occurrences have happened, many questions should have been answered and many questions should have been asked. Habitually any critical thought about the ANC has been not without reciting Oliver Tambo’s quotes or Nelson Mandela. In fact, Tambo has been the most abused person in quotation not in thought-meditation, see how many Oliver Tambo lectures are delivered when a congress is due to be held. I want not to do that, but I may revisit the archive to justify the points or questions I want to think about in this piece and surely invite others to expand or ask other questions which are critical for the now and the future in the ANC. 

The National Democratic Revolution as the theory of struggle is very important but must not be treated as untouchable doctrine beyond interrogation as argued by Raymond Suttner (July 2011). In other words, the NDR must be in motion of interrogation at all time by members of the ANC, the absence of such will result to the transgression and degeneration of the highest order. Those forces composed for the realisation of the ‘end goal’ must be schooled in theory of struggle – the NDR, without such schooling there will be no need for the ANC. The ANC of today I want to believe is composed of many people representing many different views of society, views of themselves. Few are imagining a national democratic society, they begin with self than society, these are people who have seen the financial and material benefits of joining the ANC. They are not wrong in fact the ANC has rewarded individuals more than it has rewarded society. I want not to engage the failures of the ANC in transforming society because those are obvious, rather I want to rely on the reader for this foundation so as to raise critical questions in order to ask questions about the future. 

I think a clear understanding of the National Democratic Revolution is critical to cure the plague in the ANC. An ANC within an ANC is growing, unlike before factions are opposed to each other and ready to do whatever possible to finish each other. No person realises it is the ANC that suffers. Others have bestowed lord-ism to themselves, in staged interviews, on the other hand others are accused of being bought by White Monopoly Capital. We forget that the relationship of the ANC and capital is that of ‘Unity and Struggle’ meaning the ANC see capital as social partners within which the kind of society they aspire can be achieved. Perhaps this is the reason why the ANC cannot pursue one ideological framework. 

The challenges in the ANC seems to be enduring and the task ahead to be fulfilled seems like a pipe dream, there is little in change of behaviour. The questions for the asking of other questions therefore arise from this realisation. I want to consider the following questions;

• Should the people discard the ANC?
• Can the ANC be renewed in its current state?

Considering the first question, for a long time the ANC was considered an instrument in which a revolution can be achieved. The answer to the question should be asking whether the ANC is still an agent of which the revolution can be achieved. Preliminary, is the current ANC capable of nationalising the land, banks and monopoly industries in order to benefit the people? I do not ask these questions based on factional lines of the so-called RET forces and Thuma Mina. Will the ANC lead us to the promise land? Why must the people continue voting the ANC?

These are questions which arises from a question. There is however, a difficulty I foresee here, many people joined the ANC simple because the yellow T-shirt seemed nice when worn in a group and the struggle songs invites one on an imaginary struggle situation and angers the hell out of you that you realise the need to partake in the ANC politics to further the revolution. For others the ANC is the popular organisation of Mandela and it gave them grants, for they lack ideological clarity they hold on to the ANC because it is what they know. Do not get me wrong I do not contend that members of the ANC lack ideological clarity, but some do in relation to what the movement represents, this might be true for both its members and supports. 

To some extent the ANC is viewed as a wall between the people and capital and the toppling of the wall will result to the true emancipation socially and economically of the people. If we discard the ANC there surely will be a revolution, a true emancipation, an eye opener. We will realise that poverty is not a result of lack of resources but the cowardice of leadership. We will realise that the systematic exclusion of black people is orchestrated by white capital aided by one of our own for they fear the overhaul of the system which will tremble their crumbs which are token of appreciation from the capitalist from preventing a revolution against them. Again, I ask, should the people discard the ANC?

Although the second question is diametrically opposed to the first questions, the renewal question is mutually dependent on the first question. Surely if we need not to discard the ANC we must renew it. A heavy question is whether this is possible, I want to be a cynic to this and suggest perhaps the best way to renew is to discard. I think also of post conventional understanding of discard in order to renew to include building cadres for the revolution, in this sense the ANC ought to determine without compromise and beyond the politics of numbers who and how (beyond signing a form) a person must be allowed to be a member of the ANC. For instance, thinkers, society development centered, disciplined and politically educated individuals must be members of the ANC and others must be left to be supporters until such a time they are ready and have outgrown parasitism, factionalism, hunger to loot, and the love of money over people can they then be allowed to form part of the cadres of the ANC. I put forward these suggestions to cure the enigma of numbers (quantitative and qualitative). 

In 1976 the Central Committee of the SACP issued a statement titled ‘The enemy hidden under the same colour’ in this statement the party dealt with what it thought to be Anti-Communist, and anti-ANC propaganda masquerading as revolutionary rhetoric from within the movement. I want to believe there are many enemies within the ANC today wearing the same colours as everyone, but these are not enemies of the bourgeoisie, in fact these are aspiring bourgeoisies who use the plight of the poor in order to access political proximity privilege. They ordain themselves as revolutionaries but eat alone, they mistaken Radical Economic Transformation for ‘our time to eat’. These are people who advocate for the transfer of wealth from white monopoly capital to a few blacks and want to call this economic freedom. Obviously, within the like-minded people there will be reductionist talking of race and class the former used as a dismissive tool in order to access privilege and the latter rejected out-and-out. In an introduction to the 30^th anniversary publication of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the oppressed Donaldo Macedo warns about reductionist postulate, it is important that analysis of oppression be approached through “a convergent theoretical framework where the object of oppression is cut across by such factors as race, class, gender, culture, language, and ethnicity”. 

We must reminisce, the people’s patience is not endless, society is evolving, and time is against any lazy thinking and actioning. Suttner (2011) argues, 

“Concepts are considered dynamically, contextualised in history and the present, consciously aiming to develop emancipatory meanings and theories. This enables a critique of essentialist, hierarchical, binary, static and singular meanings attached to words where they are capable of bearing a range of connotations and unfolding into a series of potential outcomes.  Cumulatively such conceptual usage enables the building and elaboration (and where necessary discarding) of theory.  It also facilitates the criticism of many existing ways of understanding, hopefully stimulating debate rather than encouraging closure.” 

Like Suttner I want to stimulate debate about the two questions which I consider fundamental for the ANC members its supporters and society at large, these questions must be given thought in relation to the NDR as the theory of struggle. 

Sbonelo Radebe holds a Master of Social Science Degree from UKZN on the Pietermaritzburg Campus