In the final days before South Africans cast their ballots in the local government elections, one phrase has returned again and again in our gatherings, on our street corners and in the quiet resolve of those who have walked the length and breadth of this country: Верной дорогой идете, товарищи! You are going the right way, comrades!
The slogan did not originate as a casual remark. In 1961, as the Communist Party of the Soviet Union prepared for its 22nd Congress, the Soviet artist Nikolai Ivanovich Tereshchenko created a poster that would become one of the most recognisable images of its era. Against a field of vigorous red brushstrokes, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin appears in his familiar cap, hand raised in affirmation, with the words Верной дорогой идете, товарищи! beneath him. The phrase itself was drawn from Lenin’s address to the Ninth All-Russian Congress of Soviets on 23 December 1921. Defending the New Economic Policy, he told the assembled delegates: “Our path is the right one… Along this right path we have begun to go.” What Tereshchenko captured, and what later generations carried forward, was not merely a historical quotation but a living encouragement: the work is hard and the terrain uneven, yet the direction is correct. That same spirit has animated the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) throughout this year’s local government campaign.
From the first months of the year, under the clear leadership of our Commander-in-Chief and President, Julius Malema, the organisation took a principled position that left no ambiguity. There would be no no-go zones. Whatever the hostility, the logistical difficulty or the political climate of a particular ward, the EFF would register candidates in every ward across the country. We would also ensure that the required number of VVDC coordinators stood at every voting station. This was not rhetoric. It was an organisational decision that forced the movement to stretch itself, to train people and to establish a presence where none had existed before. The consequence has been a campaign of unusual breadth and depth.
Central to that reach has been the deliberate engagement of those who had never registered. Our ground forces moved door to door, market to market and taxi rank to taxi rank, not only to speak with people but to walk them through the registration process itself. The purpose was clear: to get the unregistered onto the voters’ roll and, at the same time, to secure their commitment to vote for the EFF. Across provinces, from dense urban townships to remote rural villages, every conversation was recorded on a purpose-built portal that allowed us to capture who had been spoken to, what concerns they raised and, where agreement was reached, their commitment to the EFF. The system was simple, but it was used with discipline. Limited resources were applied where they mattered most: to the contact between fighter and potential voter. The result is a database not of abstract numbers but of named people who have been met, registered and invited into a generational mission of economic freedom in our lifetime.
This work has not been conducted in a vacuum. White monopoly capital, the broader economic elite and their black comprador allies understand with perfect clarity who their real enemy is. They recognise the only force that possesses genuine ideological clarity, that refuses to be co-opted and that is prepared to end their reign through fundamental economic transformation. That force is the EFF. No other party has shown the same consistency of purpose or the same unwavering conviction. For this reason the EFF has been declared enemy number one, and the vicious attacks that have followed are the logical consequence of that declaration.
Many of those attacks have been deeply personal, directed at our leadership and specifically at Commander-in-Chief Malema. Recently revealed evidence has laid bare a treacherous State Security Agency operation and infiltration programme whose explicit purpose was to destroy the EFF. That operation began during the Jacob Zuma administration and was overseen by the then Minister of State Security, David Mahlobo. These were not ordinary political contests. They were coordinated attempts to weaken, divide and ultimately eliminate a movement that refused to be contained.
Despite every such assault, we have kept our conviction and held our heads high. Our most immediate and effective answer has been to organise, and to organise again, and to organise still further. The registration of candidates in every ward, the training of coordinators, the door-to-door work that brought the unregistered onto the roll and the disciplined use of the portal are themselves acts of defiance. In time, we will also respond more directly. Charges will be brought against those responsible for the betrayal of democracy in general and for the specific, treacherous attacks on the EFF. We will not rest until they are brought to book and held fully accountable. Yet the most powerful answer remains the refusal to lie down. In this election we will demonstrate that the EFF is a growing political force in this country, one that will ultimately determine the socioeconomic future of our society. We have not, for one moment, wavered in our generational mission of economic freedom in our lifetime.
Opinion polls have already registered the weight of this groundwork. The patient labour of registration, engagement and organisation is counting; it is accumulating; and it will be shown at the ballot box. What matters is the brick-by-brick foundation that has been laid. A new generation of voters has been brought into the electoral process, many of them young people who have never before cast a ballot. They have encountered the EFF not as a distant parliamentary formation but as a movement that arrives in their street, explains its manifesto and leaves behind a red T-shirt and a clear ask. That is the foundation on which any electoral advance rests.
The campaign has also been marked by moments of concentrated visibility. On 16 June, at the Union Buildings, the organisation held a rally that recalled the courage of the 1976 generation while insisting that the unfinished business of economic freedom remains the central task of the present. More recently, at Orlando Stadium, the Tshela Thupa rally filled the venue to capacity on the same afternoon that a Kaizer Chiefs–Orlando Pirates derby was taking place elsewhere in the city. The message was unmistakable: the EFF is here, and it is here to stay. It will play a determining role in the political and economic future of this country.
Some have treated the slogan “Victory or Death” as mere theatrical flourish. Others have tried to weaponise it against us by claiming that we are threatening violence. That charge is poppycock. The racist, white supremacist AfriForum has been among those who have sought to distort our slogan in this way. Its proper meaning is rooted in the daily conditions of millions of South Africans. Death is the child in a township who walks to school past sewage running in the street and does not know where the next meal will come from. Death is the household in a gang-infested area of the Cape Flats, where gunshots mark both the night and the morning. Death is the parent who has been unemployed for years and can offer no credible answer when a child asks what tomorrow holds.
Victory, by contrast, is the concrete reordering of economic power. It is the creation of jobs through the deliberate insourcing of municipal services. It is the direction of at least 80% of municipal purchasing to black African small and medium-sized enterprises. It is the insistence that 50% of those who receive municipal work are women. It is the systematic confrontation of gender-based violence in all its forms, so that women can move through their communities without fear. These are not abstract aspirations; they are the undertakings contained in the EFF’s local government manifesto, and they have been carried into every ward where our candidates have been registered.
In the hours that remain, the visibility will not diminish. Volunteers in red T-shirts will continue their work around the clock. At every voting station, EFF voting agents will be present to protect the ballots that have been painstakingly brought out. The late nights, the long distances and the modest resources that were carefully stewarded must now translate into votes. The portal entries, the registered candidates, the trained coordinators and the new voters who have been walked into the process are the material from which an electoral outcome will be made.
Верной дорогой идете, товарищи! The path has been hard. It has required the refusal of no-go zones, the patient registration of those who had never been reached, the disciplined use of scarce resources and the refusal to be broken by betrayal or state-sponsored attacks. Yet the direction remains correct. To those who met our volunteers on street corners, in villages and in the cities; to those who registered for the first time because an EFF fighter explained why it mattered; to those who have lived with the daily death of disempowerment, hunger, unemployment and poverty: the moment has arrived to bring out your vote. That vote is the practical expression of the liberation you have been waiting for. It is the step that turns the promise of economic empowerment into the beginning of its realisation.
You are going the right way, comrades! Come out and vote!
Ambassador Carl Niehaus is an EFF member of parliament. For this local government election campaign, he was deployed by the EFF in the Western Cape, specifically the Cape Town metro.
