Let's be honest: Very few political parties in South Africa, bar the ANC, would succeed in filling up the 94 000-seater FNB Stadium in Soweto.
A fully occupied FNB Stadium is quite a sight. The stadium pumps with energy, and only a few pop stars and soccer matches have managed to secure full capacity.
On Saturday, a political pop star in the form of EFF leader Julius Malema, who even performed a mic drop from an elevated platform at the end of his rousing speech, succeeded in doing that. The demagogue warned his critics and pundits ahead of the watershed 2024 elections: Don't write the EFF off yet.
Despite the party's numerous troubles – and there are many – Malema didn't have to say a word to show the country the EFF is still a very popular and well-supported political home for thousands of South Africans.
Despite suffering electoral decline in the 2021 municipal elections (the party achieved 8.3% of the national vote compared to 10.8% in 2019) and a flopped so-called "national shutdown" event in March, the EFF pulled out all the stops on the weekend.
For democrats and constitutionalists, this is a hard pill to swallow. Malema has never hidden his fascist political beliefs and reiterated over the weekend that democracy would die under an EFF-led government.
He would shatter the independence of the criminal justice system (he said he would arrest President Cyril Ramaphosa for the Phala Phala scandal) and illegally take the land "from white minority rule and give it to all the people of South Africa".
This comes after the Constitutional Court ruled in March that Malema could not encourage his supporters from invading unoccupied land.
Malema has consistently failed in the courts and is now aggressively pursuing political power to fulfil his dream of a dictatorial regime where the state owns all the land and political opponents are arrested and jailed by decree.
Let's be clear: An EFF-led government would be the end of democracy in South Africa and would likely wipe out large parts of the economy overnight. Malema will ultimately alienate the democratic world and hand over the country's sovereignty to his political hero, Russian president Vladimir Putin.
He makes no secret of his admiration for the warlord who invaded the independent state of Ukraine in February last year. "We are Putin, and Putin is us", Malema proudly declared on Saturday at an event that must have cost the EFF millions of rands.
It will remain a secret who funds the EFF (disturbing rumours abound) until the IEC can enforce its political party funding legislation properly, which the EFF has largely ignored since implementation two years ago.
Malema's biggest known funder is a confessed cigarette smuggler, Adriano Mazzotti and Carnilinx, who was proudly acknowledged by Malema at the EFF's fundraising dinner on Thursday, disturbingly attended by the number two at Crime Intelligence, Major-General Feroz Khan.
When Malema says on stage he would arrest Ramaphosa for Phala Phala, he doesn't mean that he opposes crime or corruption, but only those who challenge him politically. Malema still faces criminal charges in several courts, including firing live ammunition at an EFF rally and encouraging supporters to occupy land illegally.
Despite Malema claiming on Saturday that the media falsely abused the VBS case to implicate EFF leaders in the bank's collapse, this is far from the truth. The VBS investigation is very much alive and I understand that the EFF is still on investigators' radar.
The National Prosecuting Authority has promised to institute charges in the On Point Engineering scandal that implicates Malema's family trust in receiving money from Limpopo tenders.
There are 99 reasons why nobody in their right mind should consider supporting him to become president of South Africa, but at least 94 000 people (assuming they all turn up to vote for the EFF) do.
Why did 1.8 million people in 2019 and 1.2 million in 2021 vote for the EFF?
Common sense tells me there are at least three significant reasons.
I have just finished reading Justice Malala's excellent book, The Plot to Save South Africa, about the days following the assassination of SACP leader Chris Hani in 1993. Malala explains in detail how ANC leaders like Mondli Gungubele, Peter Mokaba, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and Tony Yengeni understood the real, visceral anger of black people in the wake of Hani's death and had to find ways to give an expression of that anger without burning down the country.
Nelson Mandela understood and allowed this.
Malema and his generation of ANC Youth League leaders were cut from the same cloth, albeit many years after democracy, and it seems to me that the ANC never replaced them after kicking them out of the party in 2012. Malema capitalised on the fact that he was now the only prominent black leader still speaking about apartheid and expressing the anger about white suppression, still felt by thousands of black people almost 30 years after apartheid had formally ended.
Secondly, and linked to the first point, the ANC had failed abjectly in creating the life and country it promised its supporters in 1994, 30 years later. The percentage of unemployed black people has not changed significantly in 30 years; inequality has worsened; white people still hold the majority of top management positions in the private sector, and our public education system has failed the majority of the country.
I don't find it surprising that traditional ANC voters, or the children of parents who voted for Mandela, would search for a new political home and be attracted to Malema's promises of free education and no corruption (although we know he is only opposed to the corruption allegedly committed by his political opponents).
Lastly, the rest of the opposition parties have failed to grip the imagination of aggrieved black voters who would traditionally have voted for the ANC. Cope, another ANC breakaway, came closest to forming a significant black-led alternative when it won 1.3 million votes in 2009, but the party imploded due to infighting and leadership squabbles.
On the other hand, Malema is a dictator in the EFF and doesn't tolerate any internal dissent.
With a declining ANC, the challenge for other black-led parties like ActionSA, the IFP, Rise Mzansi, and Build One South Africa is to ensure the votes of former or disillusioned ANC voters don't go to the EFF but to them. They have about nine months to go.
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