ActionSA’s Trollip says EFF wants Shivambu as finance minister so they can ‘steal’:
ActionSA Eastern Cape chairperson Athol Trollip has said the only reason the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) would consider going into coalition with the ANC and demanding Floyd Shivambu be made finance minister was because they wanted to steal from the country’s coffers.
Trollip made the remarks while responding to a question about coalitions during the national election debate hosted by the Mail & Guardian and the University of Fort Hare on Wednesday night.
Senior representatives from the ANC, EFF, ActionSA, Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) and Democratic Alliance (DA) took part in the debate.
EFF president Julius Malema earlier this month told JJ Tabane on the Frank Dialogue show that the party would consider going into coalition with the ANC if EFF deputy president Shivambu was given the position of finance minister.
“I am prepared to give the EFF vote to the ANC nationally if it doesn’t get 50%. I don’t need the glory of being a deputy president or president. I will make one demand: make Floyd Shivambu minister of finance. That’s all,” Malema said.
At the debate on Wednesday, Trollip questioned why the EFF wanted control of the finance ministry.
“There are other political parties which have said like the EFF that if they don’t get a majority they will give their vote to the ANC on condition they make this man [Floyd Shivambu] a minister of treasury. Why do they want the ministry of finance? They want to steal.
“There is another political party which is a member of our multi-party coalition which says they will consider a coalition with the worst [available] option. We are not going in and out of coalitions, we are with the MPC and we are not going into coalition with the ANC or EFF,” he said.
Trollip said some political parties had made coalitions into a transactional deal for “politics of the stomach”. Some parties liked chaos because it allowed them to be corrupt, he said.
He said the days of one-party dominance and hegemony in South Africa were over and the ANC needed to get used to it. Coalitions would be around for a long time.
He admitted that the track record of South African coalitions had not been good, but was improving. “You can only get experience by doing things. The one thing about experience is you learn about who you can trust and who you can’t trust.”
IFP deputy president Mzamo Buthelezi said his party had been involved in coalitions for a long time, and there was stability in every municipality where the IFP was co-governing. Those coalitions would not survive without the IFP, he said.
“Even when we were in charge in the province of KwaZulu-Natal, we invited other parties, even the ANC, to come and govern with us. So we are not newcomers in this game.”
Buthelezi said some parties were in coalitions so that individuals could gain personally.
He said there must be clear legislation so that political parties who want to embezzle money through coalitions would not be able to do so.
“We need to eliminate such parties and make sure that when you form coalitions, you are forming with like-minded parties who are in this to deliver services and make sure we do not allow this thing of kingmaker. Some parties will come in the morning — having agreed we are going to co-govern — saying ‘this is what we demand, failing which we pull out’.”
ANC NEC member Parks Tau said the reality was that coalitions have not worked, have proven to be difficult to manage and that they had thrown people into the governance system which has collapsed municipalities.
He said coalitions have not worked because of opportunism.
“You can go into Tshwane today and the reality of the people of the capital city is a very difficult reality and that reality is what the people feel daily.”
DA chief whip Siviwe Gwarube said it was rich coming from Tau that coalitions were not working because it was good when the ANC was “eating” but was no good now because they were no longer eating.
Gwarube said coalitions were here to stay but what was needed was mature political leadership, and legislation that would ensure that coalitions were regularised.
“The ANC is being relegated to an opposition day in and day out, coalitions are part and parcel of South Africa’s democracy. This is where we are now and voters are giving us this kind of mandate so we have got to ask ourselves how we are being politically mature as political parties and how we are putting the residents and citizens in the work that we do.”
Economic Freedom Fighters deputy president Floyd Shivambu said there was no instability in the municipalities in which the EFF was governing.
“We are responsible for key critical departments in Nelson Mandela [Bay metro] — electricity plus infrastructure. In Johannesburg, we are responsible for community health and social development and we are responsible for public safety.”
“If you want to know, there is no unstable government in Johannesburg, go and skip a robot and you will see the police that are under the guidance of the EFF will take you to prison. In the city of Ekurhuleni, we have been leading a stable government.”
South Africans agree with global consensus that single-use plastics should be banned:
An average of 85% of people who were polled across 32 countries, including South Africa, believe that a soon-to-be finalised global plastic pollution treaty should outlaw single-use plastics.
These are the findings from a survey by market-research company Ipsos of more than 24 000 people, which was commissioned by WWF and the Plastic Free Foundation.
From 23 April to 29 April, United Nations member states will meet in Ottawa, Canada, to hammer out the details of the new international agreement in the penultimate plastic pollution treaty negotiations. The aim is to conclude negotiations on a final treaty text by the end of this year.
According to WWF South Africa, local participants in the survey were aligned with the global averages when looking at the overall importance of the issue and had significantly stronger feelings when considering the implementation of specific bans.
“They were also significantly more likely than the global average to agree with introducing consequences and accountability for governments and plastic producers and more likely to support ensuring all participating countries have access to funding, technology and other resources to comply with the rules.”
The survey noted how one of the “major fault lines” among countries negotiating the new treaty is whether or not it should include global rules that are binding and applicable to all parties to the treaty, instead of just voluntary national measures.
“Our latest research shows robust and consistent support for such rules. This is broadly consistent with previous surveys undertaken as part of this three-year global research initiative and with other national polling,” it said.
The results revealed, among others, that nine in 10 South African participants believe it is important that global rules require global plastic production to be reduced.
Similarly, more than nine in 10 South African survey participants believe it is important that global rules require a ban on chemicals used in plastic that are hazardous to human health, wildlife and the environment, while more than four in 10 local survey participants believe this is essential.
Nearly nine in 10 South African survey participants believe it is important that global rules require a ban on unnecessary single-use plastic products most likely to become plastic pollution.
More than nine in 10 South African survey participants believe it is important that global rules require manufacturers and retailers to provide reuse and refill systems.
The survey noted that the samples in Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Indonesia, Ireland, Malaysia, Mexico, Morocco, Nigeria, Peru, Singapore, South Africa, Thailand, Turkey, and Uganda were “more urban, more educated, and/or more affluent” than the general population. “The survey results for these countries should be viewed as reflecting the views of the more ‘connected’ segment of these populations.”
WWF South Africa said that with more than 430 million tonnes of virgin plastic produced each year – 60% of which is single-use – and only 9% of that plastic recycled worldwide, a global ban on single-use plastics, “deemed unnecessary, avoidable, and harmful, is one of several in a suite of urgent measures the public wants to see in the treaty”. Single-use plastics account for more than 70% of ocean plastic pollution.
Other highly favoured bans include those on harmful chemicals used in plastic (which 90% supported) and plastic products that cannot be easily and safely recycled in the countries where they are used (87%). In addition, the results reveal a widespread understanding that bans alone are not enough to end the plastic pollution crisis, it said.
Citizens polled worldwide also strongly support redesigning the plastics system to ensure remaining plastics can be safely reused and recycled. “In particular, measures such as mandating manufacturers to invest in and provide reuse and refill systems polled 87% support while 72% support ensuring all countries have access to funding, technology and resources to enable a just transition.”
These measures provide a “clear pathway” for reducing global plastic production, an outcome 87% of those polled worldwide in this study, as well as 82% of people polled in a recent study by Greenpeace International, “would like to see the global plastic pollution treaty achieve”.
The Greenpeace survey, too, demonstrated that there was 80% support for protecting biodiversity and the climate by cutting plastics production. “As many as nine out of 10 people (90%) support a transition away from single-use plastic packaging to reusable and refillable packaging, while 75% support a ban on single-use plastic. Likewise, 80% of people are concerned about the impacts of plastic on the health of their loved ones and 84% of parents are concerned about these impacts on the health of their children.”
Last week, Barbara Creecy, the minister of forestry, fisheries and the environment, said South Africa remains resolute in supporting global efforts to end plastic pollution.
“Plastic pollution affects the terrestrial and aquatic including marine environments. South Africa boasts a coastline that covers over 3 000 kilometres, and it is in the interest of environmental sustainability that South Africa is actively engaged in the INC [Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee on Plastic Pollution] process,” she said.
Creecy recognised the threat plastic pollution poses to human health, ecosystem functioning, and the marine environment and said it keeps the South African members of the INC hard at work.
“Given the versatility of the plastic product, the lifecycle approach requires a multi-stakeholder focus, and thus the government is considering views of interested and affected parties in the negotiations of this internationally legally binding instrument on curbing plastics pollution.”
What it means to be a Jewish anti-Zionist in an anti-Semitic world:
I grew up in England in the 1960s.
My mother was born in London’s East End, a Jewish ghetto at the time; she was four when the new mass anti-Semitic party, the British Union Fascists, organised a march to intimidate East End Jews in Whitechapel in 1936.
Allied with socialists and communists, the Jewish anti-Fascists took the lead and beat back the Fascists in the battle of Cable Street. After the Jewish war veterans returned to the East End, and seeing that the “enemy had not gone away”, they created a now celebrated underground organisation to stop the Fascists meeting.
Racism and anti-Semitism are at the core of British civilisation. The national hero, Winston Churchill, had little disagreement with Mussolini or with the Hitler’s anti-Semitism. As a kid, I knew nothing of the expulsion of Jews from England in the 13th century nor the forced conversion of Jews in Spain even before the brutal Spanish Inquisition. All that information, including the systematic anti-Semitism and pogroms in Russia, would come later.
I didn’t have a particularly religious upbringing. My father had converted to marry my mother, and some family members objected to her marrying an outsider. As a child I knew Yiddish, spending much time in my early years with my mother’s parents. While my grandmother’s family came from the Pale of Settlement, she was born in London and had no connection to the old country.
My grandfather had left Poland (then Russia) when he was 13, and then, remarkably, was interned by the British for a few months in 1940 as an alien. After the war distant relatives visited to tell him what had happened to his family, almost all having been exterminated.
Being Jewish was an experience for me rather than an identity. At a young age I met people visiting my grandparents who had numbers tattooed on their arms. They explained to me how those numbers got there. This had a lasting effect. At the same time, at six or so, I came home to tell my mother that the parent of a friend had asked what religion I was and I told them I was Jewish. My mother reacted sharply, “Don’t tell anyone.” I took that seriously. These two events had a profound effect on me and my ambiguous identity. I would silently pass.
My mother was an automatic Zionist. I remember her saying in 1973 that Israel was surrounded by hostile states and had to be supported. I knew little about geopolitics. I had escaped Zionist indoctrination, although I did not escape normalised anti-Semitic tropes and threats of violence.
That violence became more threatening with a new rise in fascism in the midst of the economic crisis in the 1970s. It was this crisis that facilitated the creation of the Anti-Nazi League and Rock against Racism. Youth on the street, including me, were proudly wearing Anti-Nazi League badges as anti-fascism became a new mass movement, embracing reggae and punk, putting on free Rock against Racism concerts while at the same time actively opposing racism and fascism around the country.
At about the same time, after the 1976 Soweto Uprising against apartheid education in South Africa, I became an anti-apartheid activist. I remember being disgusted by white South Africans speaking in similar dehumanising racist terms Zionists use to speak about Palestinians, about the necessity of apartheid and violence to control black people (or in the terms of the day, non-whites).
The International Court of Justice case brought by South Africa comes out of that anti-apartheid struggle. In other words, although at home South Africa is increasingly neoliberal, corrupt and reactionary, its willingness to accuse Israel of genocide is underscored by a Constitution born out of the struggle that was also reflected in the commitment to end apartheid, which included the activism of young anti-apartheid South African Jews who also identified with the Palestinian liberation struggle.
This historical connections to genocide was not lost on Namibia’s first lady, Monica Geingos, who spoke out against Germany’s defence of Israel in opposition to South Africa’s charge of genocide. What she said was instructive. “The absurdity of Germany, on 12 January 2024, rejecting genocide charges against Israel and warning about the ‘political instrumentalisation of the charge’ is not lost on us,” reminding us of the 1904 Herero-Nama genocide by the German military, which killed 100,000 Herero and 10,000 Nama in then German South West Africa.
This connection between genocide and colonialism continues to be very real. As the great Martiniquan poet, Aimé Césaire, put it in his 1950 Discourse on Colonialism, Europe practiced colonial genocide in Africa before carrying out the genocide of Jews in the Holocaust in the heart of Europe. It raises a question: how can any genocided people be unmoved by the death and starvation of others or experience a separation from the decomposing bodies under the rubble and not wish them a proper burial?
As I became an anti-apartheid activist, I found out about the reality of life in the remains of Britain’s first colony. The north of Ireland was under the rule of the British army, the police and the special courts of internment, not unlike the administrative detention of Palestinians in Israeli jails, which allows for arrest, on secret evidence, and indefinite imprisonment without a charge or a trial. I didn’t particularly like the politics of the Irish Republican Army or the ANC, and was much more interested in Steve Biko and the Black Consciousness Movement, which led me to Frantz Fanon.
By 1980, I began working with a group of Marxist-humanists around Raya Dunayevskaya, Trotsky’s former Russian secretary and founder of Marxist humanism in the United States. Dunayevskaya was a Ukrainian Jew who had left Russia with her family after surviving the 1919 pogrom. And in the US, I became introduced to the Freedom Seders’ emphasis on the struggle for human liberation.
It was the Sabra and Shatila massacre in 1982 that focused my attention on Palestine. In a piece written at the time, Dunayevskaya pointed out that she had met German refugees in 1947 “who had originally escaped to Palestine only to find it impossible to work for a new society of Arabs and Jews. The main ‘obstacle’ was Irgun headed by [Menachem] Begin.”
This great contradiction was therefore “already present in the fight for a Jewish homeland”. This dialectic was not unique to Israel but there, by 1982, it had “become a full-fledged imperialist state whose birth included terrorism, the presence of Irgun [a Zionist right-wing underground movement] and of course others”. Begin was described by the British government at the time as the “leader of the notorious terrorist organisation,” and was one of many former “terrorists” involved in mass murders of Palestinians. Albert Einstein called Begin a fascist.
After the Nakba of 1948, Irgun was incorporated into the Israel Defence Forces and its political leaders soon became foundational to the settler state. The betrayal of the principle of national self-determination, of not oppressing another state or people was there right from Israel’s birth when it expelled Palestinians from the land.
Now, with its “empty talk in 1982 of the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organisation] as ‘terrorists’” Begin and Ariel Sharon’s Israel was committing the atrocities and invoking the Nazi Holocaust for reactionary and genocidal purposes. The 1982 massacres in Lebanon were connected with its articulated Zionist objective of a so-called “Eretz Israel,” as the Bible expressed it (“a realm extending from the Nile to the Euphrates”).
The problem with Zionism, argues the philosopher, Zahi Zalloua (who had fled Lebanon with his Palestinian-born parents in 1976), was not that it was a national liberation ideology for many Jews fleeing the reality of anti-Semitism in Europe, but its chauvinistic, colonist and racist “premise that one’s attachment must be based on exclusivity, on the eradication and/or subjugation” of the Palestinian population.
Let’s not forget that South Africa was, at the same time, rigorously supported by the US and Britain as well as Israel. Begin had been the chairperson of the Israel-South Africa Friendship League, which helped give legitimacy to South Africa’s nominal Bantustans and homelands that were not recognised by other states.
And Britain and the US would continue to support apartheid South Africa, making sure that a serious reckoning with colonialism and apartheid would not take place. (But let’s not forget that activists immediately pointed out that the map of Palestine proposed by the Oslo accords looked very much like apartheid Bantustans).
While Israel supported apartheid, the revolt against apartheid inside South Africa continued and the anti-apartheid movement became international as students around the world demanded their colleges and universities divest from apartheid.
Such calls are developing again on campuses around the world bolstered now by a new generation of Palestine activists, among them anti-Zionist Jews willing to stand up against Israel, who are also committed to think about ways to live together in historic Palestine where everyone is free from the river to the sea.
This article stems from discussions at Emerson College in the US about being anti-Zionist and Jewish and anti-Semitism. Nigel C Gibson is a professor in the Marlboro Institute for Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary studies at Emerson College. He is the author of Fanonian Practices in South Africa (UKZN) and with Roberto Beneduce, Frantz Fanon, Psychiatry and Politics (Wits UP). His latest book, Frantz Fanon: Combat Breathing will be published later this year with Wits UP.
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