Farewell to Floyd: EFF's brooding iconoclast defects to MK

The Twitter bio of Floyd Nyiko Shivambu says it all: “Believes in Dialectical Materialism & Labour Theory of Value. Heterodox.”

It doesn’t exactly sell the man as someone you’d want to have a beer with after a hard day’s work, but it captures something fundamental about the politician. Of the EFF’s most prominent troika – Julius Malema, Mbuyiseni Ndlozi and Floyd Shivambu – Shivambu has always been the serious one. 

While Ndlozi clowned around and Malema flashed his mercurial charisma, Shivambu has been the guy writing op-eds on decolonising knowledge systems, or the scientific superiority of Marxism, or why reindustrialisation is the way forward for local municipalities.

It was Shivambu who wrote the EFF’s seven “cardinal pillars”: the party’s ideological lodestone. If other political parties wish to enter coalitions with the EFF, including the ANC, those party leaders have in the past been made to sit exams on the cardinal pillars.

ANC Secretary-General Fikile Mbalula once suggested that Shivambu was the EFF’s true brains trust. Now, that central ideological repository is jumping ship – to join the man Shivambu and Malema worked as hard as anyone to oust as president.

Shivambu has always been the EFF’s dark horse, just a few steps behind Malema at all times; more taciturn, more inscrutable, leagues less charming. 

But a look at Shivambu’s personal history reminds us why you should never bet against him. Raised in a rural village in Limpopo, the son of informal traders, Shivambu’s grit, resilience and intelligence would see him graduate with a master’s in political science from Wits with distinction – after becoming SRC president.

In the ANC Youth League, he met his brother-in-arms, Malema. In an interview with Daily Maverick’s Richard Poplak in 2016, Shivambu spoke of Malema with almost breathless admiration. Malema and Shivambu seemed to ignite something in each other in the manner of all iconic duos. Their platonic union appeared to be the great, unshakeable bromance of South African politics – with Mbuyiseni Ndlozi later joining as a kind of tag-along, or as he would cruelly be dubbed by social media, their “ice-boy”.

Even for those diametrically opposed to EFF politics, there was a spirit of genuine originality, energy and playfulness around the Fighters’ launch in 2013 which was, for a period, captivating to watch.

Yet there is also a seam of rage and nastiness running through Shivambu that has frequently bubbled to the surface throughout the years.

He has one of the thinnest skins in politics, and seemingly a particular problem with (often female) journalists. In 2009 he was taken to the Equality Court for terming journalist Carien du Plessis a “white bitch”; he accused Muslim (teetotaller) editor Kashiefa Ajam of being a “drunkard” in 2010; in 2018 he would be arrested for assaulting photojournalist Adrian de Kock, a charge of which he was later cleared – somewhat inexplicably, given the documentary evidence of the incident.

Of all the EFF leaders, it was Shivambu who most doggedly and offensively pursued one of the party’s most shameful narratives: that of the so-called “Indian cabal”. This was the EFF’s storyline circa 2018: that the government was being puppet-mastered by a kind of Indian Illuminati counting then-Public Enterprises Minister Pravin Gordhan and former Treasury director-general Ismail Monomiat as its key figures.

The timing was not coincidental. The collapse of VBS Mutual Bank meant that the noose was beginning to tighten. Daily Maverick’s Pauli van Wyk would go on to show how Shivambu’s brother Brian became the conduit for almost R5-million to be channelled from the bank to EFF leadership – something Brian would admit in 2021 after Van Wyk had been subjected to years of slander.

This, as has been abundantly noted, is the contradiction of Shivambu: the ardent Marxist-Leninist champion of the poor who helped steal millions from Limpopo gogos; who was photographed on successive State of the Nation red carpets pairing his red worker’s boilersuit with R20k shoes from Ferragamo and Louis Vuitton.

There should now be little doubt that Malema has no intention of handing control of his party to anyone else. Any lingering equivocation on this score should surely have been settled on Thursday, at Shivambu’s resignation press conference, where an apparently wounded Malema intoned: “If it happens one day I die, the EFF will have to live beyond me”.

Was Shivambu, the perpetual 2iC, chafing under Malema’s shadow? There is reason to believe so. Rumours of tensions between the two swirled around the EFF’s 10th anniversary celebrations in July 2023, where Malema said: “I’ve made it clear to Floyd: ‘The day you get tired of me, don’t go and organise against me”.

The context for these comments, Mail & Guardian reported at the time, may have been Malema becoming aware that Shivambu was winning growing support for a leadership bid at the EFF’s next elective conference, scheduled for December 2024.

But at the same anniversary celebrations, Shivambu appeared to fall in line, at least on the surface, paying glowing tribute to Malema’s influence on his life and political consciousness.

To those hoping for a leadership battle between the two, Malema had a message: “No, shame. You will have to slaughter cows for that fight to happen. It will never happen, that is what the enemy is wishing.”

Shivambu has now escaped the shadow without that fight playing out, at least publicly. He will take up his role as the MK Party’s leading intellectual, or at least battle it out with former judge John Hlophe for that title.

But for all the surface-level ideological similarities between the EFF and the MK, largely centred on nationalising key levers of the economy, it is unclear how restful a bed Shivambu will really find in his new home. 

He has left a party of self-styled young revolutionaries for one orbiting around an octogenarian traditionalist, who holds views on social matters ostensibly worlds apart from the EFF doctrine built by Shivambu himself. Zuma’s party is one whose power base is in arguably the most conservative province in the country, KwaZulu-Natal.

University of Johannesburg politics professor Mcebisi Ndletyana noted earlier this year that one likely reason for the stagnation of the EFF’s electoral showing is that older South African voters highly value “imbeko, or civility/respect”: a quality which Shivambu significantly fails to embody. In his new political HQ, will we see a different Floyd? DM