Shivambu’s predatory politics

On 24 June, Zohran Mamdani won the New York City Democratic mayoral primary. Three days later Floyd Shivambu launched his Mayibuye consultation process, introducing what he called a national consultation team as the first step toward forming a new political party.

Mamdani’s victory was the result of an impressive grassroots mobilisation — more than 50,000 volunteers knocked on more than 1.5 million doors. Neighbourhood assemblies and local coalitions — including tenant unions, transport justice groups, migrant groups and faith-based networks — were organised in working-class and migrant areas.

Mamdani’s platform emerged directly from these encounters and included proposals for city-run grocery stores stocked with affordable healthy food, free, safe and efficient buses, universal childcare supported by unionised care work, a rent freeze on one million homes and the construction of 200,000 affordable homes. His success reminds us of something that was well understood in South Africa in the 1980s: that careful bottom-up organising rooted in respectful dialogue with people can build an insurgent left political project..

Mamdani is a gifted young man but, as John French shows in his book on Lula da Silva, political charisma is developed in the ongoing relationship between a leader and the led. It is co-constructed through shared effort, recognition and building trust over time. Mamdani’s authority was not simply declared. It was built through long, patient work among people struggling with rent, transport, food, and the structural denial of their dignity.

This is very different from the way in which Shivambu, along with Julius Malema, built his charisma through social media and carefully staged rallies, both often inviting dispossessed people to compensate for their suffering by identifying with an assertion of masculinist power.

Online expression that finds a sufficiently resonant note in a moment of political intensity can pull people into stadiums or the streets but it doesn’t build the kind of sustained movements that can achieve deep structural change. That requires many things, including the development of leaders with the kind of charisma built in vast numbers of meetings over many years, meetings in which leaders listen as much or more than they speak. At their best these kinds of meetings generate a transformative sense of shared participation in the construction of an ethic and vision of the common good.

For Frantz Fanon, evidently carrying vestiges of the Catholicism with which he was raised: “The branch meeting and the committee meeting are liturgical acts. They are privileged occasions given to a human being to listen and to speak … the eye discovers a landscape more and more in keeping with human dignity.”

Like Fanon, Amílcar Cabral understood that leaders in national liberation movements are often initially blind to the political capacities of the most oppressed — and come to recognise them through shared participation in struggle. In a 1970 speech, he said that “The leaders realise, not without a certain astonishment, the richness of spirit, the capacity for reasoned discussion and clear exposition of ideas, the facility for understanding and assimilating concepts on the part of population groups who yesterday were forgotten, if not despised, and who were considered incompetent by the colonisers and even by some nationals …”

Shivambu quoted Cabral at the announcement of his new political project, but his political style is far removed from the kind of patient political labour affirmed by Cabral. He adopts the strongman posture typical of the politics of the Economic Freedom Fighters and uMkhonto (MK) weSizwe party — claiming the role of a leader who will direct his people from the front.

There is, though, a fundamental difference between a politics mobilised to enable an aspirant counter-elite to smash its way into power and wealth and a politics that, affirming the equal humanity and dignity of all people as a starting point for action, seeks to build towards collective advancement. Both speak in the name of the people but one seeks to redistribute power and wealth among elites; the other to redistribute power and wealth and build institutions — public housing, healthcare, education, transport — in ways that enable the material and social advancement of the people as a whole. When the redistribution of power and wealth among elites is achieved at the direct expense of the public good it is well described as a predatory project.

In contemporary South Africa, it has long been common for the kind of aspirant counter-elites that rallied round the ‘Radical Economic Transformation’ project to present the rules established to ensure the integrity of the management of public funds, institutions and services as a barrier to transformation. Efforts to bypass or undo these rules are often legitimated as a continuation of the national liberation struggle via new means on a new terrain.

This is the politics of the synecdoche: a part is taken for the whole, the enrichment of the few as progress for everyone. But the appropriation of public funds for private gain can only compound the crisis of impoverishment and institutional dysfunction.

Shivambu carries the wreckage of the VBS Mutual Bank scandal into his new project. There is a noble tradition of robbing banks to fund revolutions but looting a bank that holds the life savings of pensioners, the funds of burial societies, and money from small municipalities for personal enrichment is not just repulsive, it is also plainly predatory.

Shivambu also comes out of Zuma’s MK party, a chaotic, paranoid mess of a party organised around the cult of a deeply corrupt and authoritarian man, imbricated in all kinds of chauvinism and functioning as a pole of attraction for a set of deeply compromised people.

Shivambu’s announcement that he was working towards a new party included the announcement of his collaborators. One is Vusi Khoza. Khoza, in the manner typical of political opportunists, has moved through several political formations over the years, one starkly ideologically incompatible with the others. He began his political career as an ANC ward councillor in Durban, later joining the National Freedom Party (NFP), from which he resigned in 2012 after being convicted for his leading role in a xenophobic attack.

In 2009, a crowd of about 100 people, many armed, stormed a building in Albert Park in Durban. Two people, one a Zimbabwean and the other a Tanzanian, jumped to their deaths while trying to escape the mob. A Mozambican survived the jump but was seriously injured. Khoza resigned from the NFP after his conviction and then joined the EFF, rising to become the party’s provincial chairperson in KwaZulu-Natal and later an MP. He was expelled from the EFF in 2023.

Patrick Sindane has been announced as another leading figure in Shivambu’s project. He was expelled from the Anti-Privatisation Forum in 2009 after a credible internal disciplinary process found him and two others guilty of involvement in the gang rape of a sex worker. He was arrested but the criminal case did not proceed because the complainant disappeared. In 2013 Sindane was accused of rape again.

The other well-known figure in Shivambu’s team is Steven Zondo, a Pentecostal leader who, following an all-too-familiar script, has misused religion to sanctify exploitation and abuse. Zondo is currently standing trial for seven counts of rape. In March Judge Mokhine Mosopa dismissed Zondo’s attempt to have the case thrown out, ruling that the witnesses, who have been subject to extensive cross-examination, were “credible, reliable and trustworthy.” Testimony given before the Commission for the Promotion and Protection of the Rights of Cultural, Religious and Linguistic Communities has included allegations of child rape.

Shivambu has, of course, also enthusiastically associated himself with Shepherd Bushiri, who faces an avalanche of serious criminal charges — among them eight counts of rape, including the rape of minors, and massive fraud.

Aimé Césaire, the great anti-colonial intellectual and one of the great poets of the last century, wrote that “When the world shall be a tower of silence … we shall be the prey and the vulture.” Shivambu and the people he has sought to build his new party with are predatory men preying off a traumatised and often desperate society in the name of religion and national liberation. 

Cabral would hold Shivambu and his project in nothing but contempt. Mamdani’s success is a timely reminder — one that resonates with the best of our own political history — that genuine left politics builds popular participation in the work of constructing new forms of power directed toward the common good.

Richard Pithouse is distinguished research fellow at the Global Centre for Advanced Studies, an international research scholar at the University of Connecticut and professor at large at the University of the Western Cape.