Overcoming The Sgameka Tendency by Chumani Matiwane

Introduction

The life of an organisation depends on a culture which develops along the behaviours or conduct of its membership. It is merely not enough to have a revolutionary founding manifesto without vigorous training of the membership on the party line. The mistakes that arise from a lack of cadre development have led to the collapse of many revolutionary movements. 

On Infiltration & Bourgeois Co-option

One of the major challenges of building a revolutionary movement within a bourgeois political system is the high possibility of infiltration that can lead to the co-option of the leadership. The trappings of this system first present themselves when the party has to deploy members to the various Legislatures. We have to bear in mind that our democracy is a product of secret dealings between the white billionaire class and leaders of the former liberation movement. Essentially this means that at the base of our political system is the creation of a comprador class by big business to protect its hold on the economy. Thus, the economic relations of Apartheid South Africa were never dismantled in our negotiated settlement. One would argue that as a nation we have never attained national liberation which would allow us to conduct our own affairs with the outside interference of big business and imperialist forces. This is the context within which the EFF exists, therefore it has to grapple with these forces which at every moment will want to turn it into another reformist movement or broad church without ideological conviction.

A tendency develops within a movement as a result of planned activities by agent provocateurs or through sheer ignorance on the part of the membership. It can become cancerous and with time it can entrench itself as a culture within the movement. This can rapidly dislodge a relatively young movement like the EFF if the membership is not capacitated with the correct tools of analysis. As we have alluded to before, it is not enough to declare on paper that the party adheres to the Marxism-Leninist-Fanonian tools of analysis without a clear program to train membership on how to correctly apply these tools in the analysis of the party itself. A party should be able to match theory and practice. What we have learnt from the former liberation movement is an attempt to suspend practice to the day of revolution. By this we mean, the revolution is turned into a destination sometime in the future that we will magically arrive in and only then will we be able to practice theory. The attainment of political power is set as a precondition for the full exercise of the party's founding manifesto. This is taking a defeatist approach to struggle. When one member calls for a boycott of products of a certain Billionaire, a Leader will claim that it is practically impossible with questions like 'what will we eat if we boycott his businesses?"

Understanding the Sgameka Tendency?

The Sgameka Tendency comes as a result of the trappings of power that come with deployment of members to legislatures. It creeps in first by reducing elected Leadership into administrators of the revolution. This results in the creation of a social distance within the movement and the development of a "Baaskap" relationship between elected Leadership and Ground forces. The challenge then lies in the fact that participation in the movement is voluntary. Therefore, when a member gets discouraged, they withdraw their active participation in the life of the organisation. This means that we end up having less feet on the ground as the moral of Ground forces is killed by this tendency. As a practical demonstration of this tendency is when members are called to a door-to-door campaign. On arrival the leadership will sit in their vehicles and not participate in the physical program. At the end of the day when a meeting is called to account on the day's work, the same person who was sitting in a vehicle the whole day will deride Ground forces for being useless as targets have not been met. If we had 10 Ground forces on the day, the next day the numbers would be reduced as the moral was crushed by this "Baaskap" approach to Leadership. 

What is to be done?

To combat this tendency, we need to advocate for the establishment of a political school that will continuously train Leadership on the correct party line. This will translate to branch level as capacitated Leadership will have a grasp of the strategy and tactics needed to keep the organisation grounded. If we fail to do so, we will become another failed project because when theory fails to match practice it creates a gap for opportunism as manifested by careerism as opposed to a membership grounded within community struggles. The Commander-in-Chief has expressed that there can be no Activists where there is no activity. The permanent factions established act as gatekeepers thus reducing branches only to machinery for advancing the needs of a cabal. The state of branches is dire as BCTs only meet on the day they are elected after that no induction is conducted to capacitate the new leadership. This means that our branches are not visible in the communities but only exist on paper. The CCT has attempted to arrest this tendency by introducing the 10% threshold. This needs further interventions by introducing a digitised membership system that will only confirm membership through a system of OTPs or QR Codes that can only be generated by one device linked to a RICAd cell number for an example.

 As we move onto the next decade of our struggle it is vital that we tighten our controls in order to counter counter-revolutionary forces who seek to hijack or derail our movement from fulfilling its generational mission.