The date is the 17^th of October 2016 just little more than ten months after I first graced the hallowed yet thorny grounds of Nelson Mandela University. After a fairly peaceful sleep, we woke up to the blasting sounds of stunt grenades flying through the air in the sweltering weather. The university had just triggered an interdict after rolling mass action under the banner of the #FeesMustFall protests which were sweeping across university campuses with the aggressiveness of an erupted volcano.

What I woke up to that day was not what I had envisioned when I was hallucinating about retiring my black school jersey riddled with stitches to enter into a new world with endless opportunities, as sold to me by the university prospectus.

The genesis of the protests is a highly contested subject matter (as with the ‘faces’ of the protests), that has divided the student populace in half between the suppressed voices from historically black universities who have been inhaling teargas since the turn of the century and the newly minted revolutionaries with vast media coverage.

As much as I would have loved to but the purpose of this piece is not to narrate the events that unravelled but is to give a post-mortem reflection three years on. It is a reflection on the lives of those that went to the picket lines for a just cause only to end up with criminal records, only for the comrades next to them to be rewarded with political careers as gallant ‘FeesMustFall’ activists by the same band of oppressors they fought against. It also meant to invoke a sense consciousness to those that made institutional history in their respective campuses by pushing the wheels of the revolution in favour of insourcing scores of workers only to reverse those gains by wielding the political capital to put themselves at the dinner table.

It would be a fallacy to say there has not been much progress achieved since the first FeesMustFall protests erupted, as it is the protests that ultimately led to the declaration of free education by President Jacob Zuma on the eve of the 2017 ANC Nasrec Conference.

Even though the protests were a necessary precondition to agitate the declaration, it would be naïve to attribute the victory solely behind the hashtag but it should be seen as a product of continued struggle within the terrain of higher education that stretches back many generations of activists. 

As it was when the African National Congress (ANC) won the first democratic elections in 1994, when an elite class of bureaucratic bourgeoisie emerged whilst thousands of Umkhonto Wesizwe combatants who fought among them returned to the country to be welcomed by poverty on their door steps.

The protests have produced many ‘leaders’ who went on to carve political careers for themselves through the collective plight of South African students. The University of Wits the ‘main’ site of struggle of the FeesMustFall movement (as a result of institutional privilege), has seen its former leaders like Nompendulo Mkhatshwa and Fasiha Hassan named on the ruling ANC party list.

The Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) named another FMF leader in their list, Vuyani Pambo and Naledi Chirwa. It is not incorrect for these young leaders to make the list. The only thing that raises questions is the institutional privilege that has seen ‘leaders’ of the protests only coming from one strata of South African universities. If South African political parties were genuine about wanting the voice of South African students to be fully represented at the legislative arm of government there would have been inclusive also of the historically black universities such as Fort Hare and Zululand.

Post the FeesMustFall protests as it was after the Bantu Education Act was extended to ‘black’ universities, what they are producing is still undermined but what is different now is that it is undermined by people who are claiming to be fighting against it. Robert Sobukwe once said ‘Fort Hare must be to black people, what Stellenbosch is to the Afrikaner’. Until total equality is attained in the higher education sector in South Africa, education is not free!

The debate around the ideological integrity, or lack thereof of contesting electoral power in order to have a seat in the institution known as parliament by a revolutionary movements is one that has been raging for centuries and across various societies that have waged struggle against minority rule. As an institution, it has historically served as a regulatory body of the status quo, and as an avenue for wealth accumulation, and the establishment of a political elite. It has been a bureaucratic setup, where legislation is passed on the socio-economic and political affairs of nation states, by a select few, who have been entrusted with electoral power to constitute representative leadership that in theory, should serve in the best interests of a citizenry. This however has largely not been the case.

The centralization of control by smooth tongued politicians, of the resources of a nation state, how they are managed and distributed is marked by corruption and self-enrichment. Periphery nations, namely those of Africa can only be characterized as quasi states, with strong constitutional institutions inherited from colonial regimes, but weak economic and political sovereignty, as they try to restructure a degenerated African society within neo-colonial frameworks and legislative guides dictated by imperialism, which by virtue of who created them, serve the purpose of maintaining Africa as a feeder society to the economic growth of other nations, at the expense of its own populous. Electoral processes are a farce, those who emerge victorious from them, emerging from poverty themselves are overwhelmed by the opportunity to get dividends from an enterprise meant to swindle an unsuspecting populace, and the institution maintains itself as the paragon of regulatory politics across the world, with a capitalist economic outlook.

The emergence from colonialism, whether through a revolutionary struggle for independence or the special case of South Africa’s transition from undemocratic neo-colonialism, to democratic neo-colonialism through its 1994 negotiated settlement, does not seem to have altered the structural make up of politics itself in an African context. This is largely due to the lack of definition as to why parliamentary power is contested, which results in co-option into the fundamentally criminal aspects of the purpose of the institution. Frantz Fanon makes a prophetic analysis of post liberation political dynamics on a nation should it fail in understanding the tactic of contesting parliamentary power in a revolutionary sense, and the moral dilemma that arises if a vanguard movement is not ideologically orientated enough to understand the agile and sinister nature of systems of oppression such as capitalism and colonialism. Let’s perhaps begin with unpacking the consequences of not understanding what is to be done post a supposed moment of liberation, before we then delve into the relevance or lack thereof of contesting the parliamentary power in itself. Fanon writes in Wretched of The Earth in Chapter 3 titled the Pitfalls of National Consciousness around the consequences for a post liberation society if its liberation is led by a movement that does not have ideological prowess prior assuming power.

He writes that “For a very long time the native devotes his energies to ending certain definite abuses: forced labour, corporal punishment, inequality of salaries, limitation of political rights, etc. This fight for democracy against the oppression of mankind will slowly leave the confusion of neo-liberal universalism to emerge, sometimes laboriously, as a claim to nationhood. It so happens that the unpreparedness of the educated classes, the lack of practical links between them and the mass of the people, their laziness, and, let it be said, their cowardice at the decisive moment of the struggle will give rise to tragic mishaps. . . The national middle class which takes over power at the end of the colonial regime is an under-developed middle class. It has practically no economic power, and in any case it is in no way commensurate with the bourgeoisie of the mother country which it hopes to replace. In its wilful narcissism, the national middle class is easily convinced that it can advantageously replace the middle class of the mother country. But that same independence which literally drives it into a comer will give rise within its ranks to catastrophic reactions, and will oblige it to send out frenzied appeals for help to the former mother country. . . Seen through its eyes, its mission has nothing to do with transforming the nation; it consists, prosaically, of being the transmission line between the nation and a capitalism, rampant though camouflaged, which today puts on the masque of neo-colonialism. The national bourgeoisie will be quite content with the role of the Western bourgeoisie’s business agent, and it will play its part without any complexes in a most dignified manner. . . In its beginnings, the national bourgeoisie of the colonial countries identifies itself with the decadence of the bourgeoisie of the West. We need not think that it is jumping ahead; it is in fact beginning at the end. It is already senile before it has come to know the petulance, the fearlessness or the will to succeed of youth.”

Here we see the first fallacy of the supposed middle class that emerges from the moment of independence. Its inability to imagine a society constructed on new political and socio-economic terms, leaves it as a vanguard vulnerable to the decadence offered by the former colonial mother nation. The emergence creates a toxic attitude to development that must be nurtured and facilitated by the very oppressor that has been supposedly removed from the body politic of the newly independent nation. This liberation movement then becomes a conveyor belt of capitalist interests, existing solely for its own narrow benefits, and for that of imperialists who continue to have a vested interest in the wealth of their former colonies.

Fanon continues. “Before independence, the leader generally embodies the aspirations of the people for independence, political liberty and national dignity. But as soon as independence is declared, far from embodying in concrete form the needs of the people in what touches bread, land and the restoration of the country to the sacred hands of the people, the leader will reveal his inner purpose: to become the general president of that company of profiteers impatient for their returns which constitutes the national bourgeoisie. . . For years on end after independence has been won, we see him, incapable of urging on the people to a concrete task, unable really to open the future to them or of flinging them into the path of national reconstruction, that is to say, of their own reconstruction; we see him reassessing the history of independence and recalling the sacred unity of the struggle for liberation. The leader, because he refuses to break up the national bourgeoisie, asks the people to fall back into the past and to become drunk on the remembrance of the epoch which led up to independence… he uses every means to put them to sleep, and three or four times a year asks them to remember the colonial period and to look back on the long way they have come since then… the national bourgeoisie of under-developed countries is incapable of carrying out any mission whatever. After a few years, the break-up of the party becomes obvious, and any observer, even the most superficial, can notice that the party, today the skeleton of its former self, only serves to immobilize the people. The party, which during the battle had drawn to itself the whole nation, is falling to pieces. The intellectuals who on the eve of independence rallied to the party, now make it dear by their attitude that they gave their support with no other end in view than to secure their slices of the cake of independence. The party is becoming a means of private advancement.”

There is no greater practical example of this complete failure to conceptualise struggle and consolidate victory post liberation, and then proceed to blackmail a populous on the difficult road travelled towards liberation, than that of the than that of the ANC. The ANC assumed parliamentary power posturing as a revolutionary movement yet it had no theoretical grounding, and once overwhelmed by its own concessions of 1994 and failure to alter the structural conditions of the country, fell back on sentimentality and dwindled into corruption. It exists solely to remind us every five years in our instance, of how bad Apartheid was, so we must all be thankful that we can at least vote, shit in the same toilets with white people, and walk around in their cities and towns. The ANC assumed state power, without a plan or a diagnosis of the fundamental problems of institutions established by colonialism such as parliament. To contest parliamentary power with an understanding of parliament and its theoretical underpinnings as legitimate, is to concede to not want to fundamentally alter the structural reality of South Africa which is by definition, biased towards those who oppressed us.

Now from this diagnosis, one may reach the conclusion that to even attempt to be part and parcel of the process of parliamentary and electoral politics is a treason against the revolution in itself. We must immediately identify other forms of organizing ourselves or we are doomed to the fate of betraying the historical mission of emancipating our people. Unfortunately the moral crisis created by colonialism and capitalism at the level of the material, cultural, governance and with relevance to identity does not simply manifest itself in organized institutions. The very fabric of our society is defined by those who made us what we are, black and subject and cannon fodder for labour. Our morals are Western, our understanding of social relations are Western, and so the root of the problem is within ourselves and our very understanding of how society should function. We do not have a vision of society as a collective outside of how colonialism and imperialism has constructed how societies must function. Calls for other means of organizing society seem ridiculous or impractical, regressive and primitive, because any alternative is placed outside the logic of civilized society, and the consequences thereof are brutal. Socialism is deemed a failed economic system when we know for a fact it has never even been given room to breathe due to various forms of imperial intervention. Africans are deemed unable to govern their own affairs when we know we and our continent have been purposefully underdeveloped so as to maintain dependency. So what then is the role of the vanguard party in usurping power strategically and tactically?

First and foremost, any organization that deems itself worthy of leading our people to the promise land must be grounded ideologically, but also have in place policy perspectives that will undermine the very institutions established to regulate the status quo, the ANC has never been any of this. This means that participation the parliamentary politic is by far the most strategic strategy to flip the establishment against itself. The establishment as sinister as it is places itself in a moral dilemma as it want to place itself favourably in the eyes of the people it governs so as to maintain the very legitimacy of these institutions to the public. It twists itself inward and outward trying to accommodate private interests of wealth accumulation, while also being able to maintain the social contract with its society that allows it to govern, this is in the form of delivering cohesive social welfare programs and maintaining social unity. The crisis it encounters then is that capital in its greed is incredibly stupid. It knows no limits, and thus leaves very little wealth in order to keep the broad populous satisfied in terms of its material needs, and altering unequal distribution of wealth in a nation. The people are subject to abject poverty, dehumanisation and alienation. Their very condition becomes a trigger for general decay, which in turn if not tended to could turn on these very institutions that seek to maintain regulatory authority.

The role of a revolutionary movement in that parliamentary framework is then to exploit those contradictions to their limits. This comes two fold. Firstly by ensuring an intimate relation with the dejected masses of people who are disgruntled with their socio-economic condition. This does not mean leading them in abstract, but actually allowing those who are victims of an exploitative system to forge struggle collectively, and determine the revolutionary agenda. This allows for a revolutionary movement to maintain a solid base that exists as a pressure point to institutions of governance that seek legitimacy from the broader population. If the broader population is under one banner of a revolutionary capacitated movement, the very institutions that are reactionary, are bound to succumb to the will of the revolutionary movement which then itself is the broader populous. Parliament and legislative institutions will seek legitimacy from a populous which fundamentally seeks to undermine its mandate, and it will be in a corner to either implode or change its very character to one determined by the people. Secondly, the revolutionary movement must occupy space within the very institutions such as parliament in order to expose its internal contradictions, and the flimsy political logic it is governed by, which serves none of the interests of the collective of our people.

It is not the role of the revolutionary movement to project its diagnosis of parliament and it relevant institutions, the current means of organizing society as reactionary and therefore useless, as a reality, for that it is not the case. As things stand no matter how we project these institutions, they carry legitimacy amongst the masses of our people. As revolutionaries we must diagnose how the oppressive class has captured the imagination of the people, how do we reverse that process, and with far more critical strategy than the basic rejection of all things Western, while us descend into a cocoon of revolutionaries who agree with each other over beers at a tavern. No revolution will be forged like that.

Perhaps to cement my point I will take us to Comrade President Vladimir Lenin, one of the ideological pillars of the very EFF we claim membership to, in his writing “Should We Participate In Bourgeois Parliaments?” Here Lenin reflects on a question that was plaguing leftists in both Germany and Russia in the 17^th century, on the obsoleteness of parliaments and where the vanguard party should locate itself in that regard with regards to participation and the national consciousness of the working class at the time.

He writes that “Parliamentarianism is of course “politically obsolete” to the Communists in Germany; but—and that is the whole point—we must not regard what is obsolete to us as something obsolete to a class, to the masses. Here again we find that the “Lefts” do not know how to reason, do not know how to act as the party of a class, as the party of the masses. You must not sink to the level of the masses, to the level of the backward strata of the class. That is incontestable. You must tell them the bitter truth. You are in duty bound to call their bourgeois-democratic and parliamentary prejudices what they are—prejudices. But at the same time you must soberly follow the actual state of the class-consciousness and preparedness of the entire class (not only of its communist vanguard), and of all the working people (not only of their advanced elements). . . participation in parliamentary elections and in the struggle on the parliamentary rostrum is obligatory on the party of the revolutionary proletariat specifically for the purpose of educating the backward strata of its own class, and for the purpose of awakening and enlightening the undeveloped, downtrodden and ignorant rural masses. Whilst you lack the strength to do away with bourgeois parliaments and every other type of reactionary institution, you must work within them because it is there that you will still find workers who are duped by the priests and stultified by the conditions of rural life; otherwise you risk turning into nothing but windbags.”

Lenin continues while noting in his reflection of the progression of the Russian revolution in different periods due to the tact of the Bolsheviks to locate themselves within parliament to reduce it to absurdity, while organizing Soviets for the very overthrow of parliaments that were initially deemed the paragon of democratic practice. He says that “there is great usefulness, during a revolution, of a combination of mass action outside a reactionary parliament with an opposition sympathetic to (or, better still, directly supporting) the revolution within it.” The mass action comes in the form of strikes in demand for various socio-economic changes that a bourgeois parliament simply cannot meet. While inside the very same parliament, there are legal or according to the moral codes of society parliamentarians who make the same demands. This is the most tactful way of forging a revolutionary program.

There is then of course, no better contemporary example of this level of tact than that of the EFF in the South African political terrain. Coupled with the diagnoses of Fanon on the failure of liberation movements post liberation, and the tactics and strategy of Lenin, the EFF has armed itself with strong ideological tools to be a vanguard party of liberation to its truest form in South Africa.

In parliament and various legislative institutions that have been lethargic and useless, the EFF has in five years been able to successfully pressurise for the collective aspirations of the masses of our people legislatively by unravelling the neo-colonial logic that informs the policy perspectives of South Africa, and through tactfully capturing the imagination of the very masses that a state seeks legitimacy from and attempts to represent.

It is a Marxist-Leninist Fanonian organization that has a theoretical blue print in the form of the seven non-negotiable cardinal pillars, and most recently an almost 200 page manifesto to alter the structural reality of South Africa. Step by step it seeks to implement the following using the two pronged approach of parliamentary participation to reveal the inherent contradictions of the institution and use it to achieve objectives it was not created to achieve, and having a mass character that is guided by its ideological perspectives to capture, militarize and organize the masses of our people to forge revolution.

These are:

1. Expropriation of land without compensation for equitable redistribution
2. Nationalisation of mines, banks and other strategic sectors of the economy.
3. Building state and government capacity.
4. Free quality education, healthcare, houses, and sanitation.
5. Massive protected industrial development to create millions of sustainable jobs, including the introduction of minimum wages in order to close the wage gap between the rich and the poor.
6. Massive investment in the development of the African economy.
7. Open, accountable, corrupt-free government and society without fear of victimisation by state agencies.

The militant character of the EFF, its ability to embody the frustrations and impatience of our people has allowed it to assume the role of a revolutionary party within the parliamentary framework, and one that maintains an intimate relationship with the people whose aspirations it embodies by its consistent interaction with our people at a grassroots level. At a legislative level, numerous bills and motions have disrupted the very fabric of what defines not on South Africa’s parliamentary ethos but the fabric on which post 1994 South Africa is founded upon.

In all honesty there not been any movement or organization that has shown the possibility of parliamentarianism being part of the axis of revolution, and as a means to an end and not an end itself. It is the perfect case study of contemporary means of organized revolt to the status quo in Africa.