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The statement is a response occasioned by recent pronouncements of the Economic Freedom Fighters’ (EFF) national command, and in the person of Julius Malema - the organization's CIC. Nonetheless, the OC has since inception been seized with the developments in Zimbabwe which, in the context of escalating economic and political crises, are engulfing the entire Southern African Development Community (SADC). Our perspective on the Zimbabwean and regional political crises are not deducible merely on the fault lines and manipulations of democratic electoral processes per se, neither on the spike in migratory movements of peoples of the region, nor on all the morbid excesses of a deflected social revolution. These are open manifestations of an unresolved social question that the political agency of petty bourgeois national liberation struggles of all African countries continues to elude.

The oscillations, the sideways and zig-zags of the Central Command of the EFF are a clear indication of the ultimate conundrum of the course and politics of national liberation. While on this question, we take the opportunity to express our view on Malema’s recent Freudian slip of a petty bourgeois electoral tangent on Zimbabwe. Malema stated the following at an EFF presser:

“We call on all Zimbabweans who are here in South Africa to go back home and vote. If it means coming back, they can come back, they are more than welcome, but they must do the right thing and go and vote,...No one is going to fight for these Zimbabweans who are loitering the streets here. They are their own liberators. For once, they must take responsibility and get into buses and go home and vote...Zimbabweans are called upon to go home and vote and stop blaming other people for their own misfortunes which they have got solutions to. That solution is August 23, 2023, where they will vote for a government of their choice which will restore peace in that beautiful country.” - Julius Malema.  

We invoke Karl Marx's observation, "the oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them", to respond to Malema's assertion that the August 2023 bourgeois election in Zimbabwe is or shall be the ultimate solution to the capitalist crisis in that country. We all know that the outcome of this election has already been predetermined and, despite the human rights violations that shall prevail, the ZEC as well as AU and SADC observer convoys shall declare the elections free and fair - Emerson Mnangagwa shall remain the ever-repressive president, and the working class shall keep flooding various borders, legally and/or otherwise. But should SA’s Home Affairs have its way, we will have more “illegal” immigrants than documented ones because they will be blocked through the right channels - while staying inside a repressive state will be a non-option. The EFF's call is bordering on complicity to murder, for, the is no reason why Zimbabweans cannot cast their vote from South Africa to ensure their safety in exercising their right to vote?  

In the first place, is Malema unaware (we believe he is) that for Zimbabwean nationals to successfully cast their votes they would have first registered as voters in the National voters roll? What then informs the EFFs sudden blindfold and Trojan-style trickery against the Zimbabwean working class? Apart from the call itself being the sharpest expression of the EFF's bourgeois democratic reformism, it is clear discolouration of the contours of class struggle - a rightward swing riddled with anti-working-class undertones, that see Zimbabweans as just disgraceful vagabonds who loiter around the streets of South Africa. Malema's words are an expression of the EFF politics which is complicit with the ANC government's purge of Zimbabweans, sugarcoated inside some reformist left rhetoric. The OC rejects the murderous undertones of the call by the EFF's command which in effect aids and abet the expulsion of Zimbabweans under the democratic electoral cover and as a populist posture aimed at endearing itself with a growing anti-Zimbabwean social sentiment to secure the EFF a bounty of increased electoral support in the coming 2024 national elections here at home. It is an opportunist political traders’ stunt that goes to demonstrate the correctness of our firm distrust of the petty- bourgeois nationalist leadership of all our countries and our consistent critique against those wishing to trail the working class behind its tailcoats as electoral sheep. It demonstrates what the petty bourgeois nationalist leadership is capable of - using the plight of the working class to bolster its narrow electoral fortunes at all costs. The working class should be able to see through the petty bourgeois nationalist leadership rhetorical posturing, their real and true intentions, capable by one single stroke of flip-flopping, to send the working class to democratic slaughterhouses of the political elites and monarchs governing over the working classes and rural populations in all our countries.    

We note the overdrive consolidation of the neo-liberal agenda by the regime of the second republic under Mnangagwa in Zimbabwe, its complicity in the attacks on labour rights pushed by various extractivist interests of both Eastern and Western imperialism. We also note the Mnangagwa regime’s maneuvers to cull the opposition and to buy labour leaders to its side in support of anti- working class policies and legislation. We further note the role played by Zimbabwe’s Finance ministry to devalue the currency and to undercut the purchasing power of the working class in conditions of up to 90 percent unemployment and a paltry minimum wage of US$50 dollars. 

The OC rejects the reversal and freeze by the ANC government’s Home Affairs Department of the Zimbabweans temporary Exemption permit against their continued stay and residence in South Africa. We call on the South African government to formalise and naturalize their citizenship and to support them with all desirable humanitarian and social needs. It must be further stated that the ANC government is itself complicit in the further deterioration of the situation in Zimbabwe. It cannot by any measure of credibility play a role above the Zimbabwean social situation.  

We have stated consistently in our previous pronouncements that the bourgeoisie and their local political turncoats, the capitalist and neo- liberal economic system they have imposed on our countries are incapable of resolving national and social questions. That all unresolved social questions have since been firmly placed in the hands of the working classes of all our countries. It is in that vein that the OC conceived the MWCA not as a narrow South African but a regional initiative irrespective of the specific territory it evolved from, one aiming at mobilizing and organizing for a regional mass working class organization in which shall belong various components of country-based organized struggles as sections of a broad working class political instrument for a regional working class political power. That, such a political conceptual strategy should equally be extended on both a continental and world scale.    

We believe it is only by such a political strategy that the working classes stretching all our countries will rediscover their common ground and can unite under a common socialist banner guided by a program of working class emancipation for socialism.  

Statement issued by the Organising Committee for a Mass Working Class Assembly