Mbuyiseni Quintin Ndlozi is National Spokesperson for the South African group Economic Freedom Fighters. The party was formed in 2013 and won 1.1 million votes (6 percent of the total) in the 2014 national elections, putting it in third place after the ANC and Democratic Alliance (the old National Party).

EFF campaigns for the realisation of the emancipatory ideals of the anti-apartheid struggle: land to the landless, jobs for the unemployed, decent wages for workers, free education, homes for the homeless and shack dwellers and nationalisation of the mining companies and banks.

The party’s vote comes mainly from young, Black South Africans. In provincial elections in Gauteng (Johannesburg region), the country’s working class heartland, it gained 10 percent of the total. It frequently attacks the ANC for its capitulation to imperialism and “white monopoly capital” and condemns the 1994 “elite pact” that transferred parliamentary power to the ANC but kept economic assets in the hands of big business.

It demands that president Jacob Zuma, from the ANC, pay back the public money used in the building of his luxury residential complex, known as Nkandla.

The following is an open polemic against apartheid-era leaders who have sold out the struggle for economic justice and instead have grown comfortable as the new ruling elite.

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Dear “Struggle” Elder

Please stop telling me about respect because you only have oppression, corruption and ageism to give in return.

Do not hide your incapacity, insecurity and unintelligibility with age; it’s stale and it’s embarrassing.

And if you went to Robben Island, even for a week, just say that; I will start a fund to thank you. But please, no amount of going to prison in the world, even for political reasons, ever qualifies you to steal my future and the future of my generation.

If you were in Angola, Morogoro [ANC bases during the struggle years], I will learn your songs; if you were in Lusaka [ANC headquarters in exile] I will even name streets after you; if you were in Kliptown in 1955 [in Soweto where the Freedom Charter was formulated by the ANC and its allies] I will name my child after you! But please, these are not enough to buy my time, to ask me to wait for another 20 years before there is a qualified decent maths teacher in my class.

I heard over and over again that you took a bullet, they tortured you and left you to die. I heard that you missed school, maybe all or half of it trying to fight against unjust laws. I also heard that you had a white girlfriend and they imprisoned you for it.

Lately, at one big funeral I saw you; you looked so good, with the white lady next to you. I saw you walk out of a convoy of black cars and world cameras flashing at you. I heard your speech paying tribute to your comrade who fell. It was moving, tearing and inspiring – then they sang, chanted and danced along with the guns firing salutations. Yes, my soul said, yes and yet another yes!

But a burp of nauseating NOs was building in my chest and a bitter tasting NO finally spewed out of my mouth – because my comrades are in drugs, daily they eat nyaope [a narcotic drug popular in poor areas]. My comrades idle, and idle even in school. When they fall dead, there are no gun salutes in their funerals, there are no cameras. Only sorrow, darkness and pain: everyone is angry, from the preacher to the chorus leader, because my comrades die young, of disease, drugs.

NO, I said, because my comrades kill each other, they fight amongst each other; they fight for each other’s respect. They kill each other to earn the respect of drug addicted, disease ridden and illiterate idle bastardised foes. My comrades also live in gangs; they carry sticks, knives, at times they carry guns – they rob to eat, they rob to dress, they rob, and even rob from their own parents’ homes.

A few of them here and there go to university; they come back though, to visit us from time to time. They remain my comrades, but I can’t pretend that they are advanced and many of us remain here, in this place, in this mud, in this waste land where they frequently visits us … visit their parents: a half of them is here, in the mud!

Some work in those malls you built for us, they work in retail stores, earn peanuts, or work in KFC; but then no amount of chicken cooking finger licking good is turning their bastardisation around.

These are my comrades, there are no gun salutes when they die, there are no history songs sung, only church hymns; people ask them to rest in peace, and in peace they truly go, and are gone for good.

They leave us here in this mud, the slippery mud that everyone slip into, eats up and is buried in; maybe soon we may be eating each other up, in the cooked slippery muds of our mud towns. Their lives have no other meaning, except that they were here; no meaning like the meaninglessness of your past songs, exile, imprisonment, stayaways and ballot boxes.

This is our life, the life we seek to change and have since decided to change. This is the fate, our fate, a fate we have since decided to change. We want freedom, not your freedom, the freedom to reminisce on long days gone by when you were a hero of the people. We do not want your freedom, your place in the past; it belongs to you and it shall always, as it is the past, where you belong. Ours is here, it is now, in our lifetime.

We want our freedom: we have had to call it economic freedom and we want it in our lifetime. It is the freedom to participate in economic production. To produce, innovate and live under the conditions that are, but human.

You will remember that we tried to ask it from you; but every day you demonstrated that you are not prepared to give it, that you do not even know how to give it. So, we are going to take it and please do not tell me about respect; because if we are to listen to you one more day, our future will be lost like all our lost comrades, lost in the mud, swallowed by town slippery mud …

Please, this is our struggle, one that you, with your suffocating demands of respect, will not and shall not stop. This is it, and the sooner you accept that, the better the present; if you will not accept, we will accept on your behalf:

These are the resounding bells of our future and only we can bring it to pass!