The Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) notes with disgust the decision by AfriForum to host Wouter Basson for a sold-out event dedicated to his “personal account” of Project Coast. We are not surprised, if anything, AfriForum has simply become more honest about the politics that sit beneath its constructed image as a civic organisation.

Wouter Basson was the central figure in Project Coast, the apartheid regime’s clandestine chemical and biological warfare programme, established in 1981 and operated under conditions of extreme secrecy. The programme that focused substantially on the development of poisons and chemical substances intended for the assassination of people identified as “enemies” of the apartheid state.

This is the history AfriForum has chosen to place on a theatre stage. Basson became known as “Dr Death” because of the extraordinary nature of his work for the apartheid security establishment. He operated at the intersection of medicine, military intelligence and biological and chemical warfare, waging a systematic war against liberation movements and the Black majority. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) itself investigated Project Coast as part of the apartheid state’s chemical and biological warfare activities. Yet Basson was never held criminally accountable for the full historical consequences of this machinery. He was prosecuted on 67 charges, including murder, conspiracy to murder, fraud and drug-related offences, but was acquitted in 2005. That acquittal did not establish that Project Coast did not exist, nor did it erase the historical record of the programme. Indeed, Basson has continued to face professional disciplinary proceedings, with the Health Professions Council of South Africa finding him guilty of unethical conduct relating to his work in the apartheid chemical and biological warfare programme.

The failure to achieve meaningful accountability is precisely what makes the present moment so disturbing. For more than three decades, the post-apartheid government has failed to dismantle the material foundations of apartheid. Land remains concentrated, wealth remains concentrated, the economy remains deeply racialised. And those who benefited from apartheid have been allowed to retain enormous economic power while the majority continues to bear the consequences of dispossession.

It is within this unfinished apartheid that AfriForum’s politics have flourished. The organisation can present itself as a defender of civic rights, but the politics of white minority grievance cannot be separated from the historical privileges produced by colonialism and apartheid. When the history of that system is not decisively confronted, its beneficiaries acquire the confidence to rehabilitate its symbols, its narratives, and eventually the people who operated its machinery.

That is why the EFF remains such a fundamental threat to this politics. AfriForum’s hostility towards the EFF and the Commander-in-Chief, President Julius Malema, must therefore be understood within this broader political struggle. The EFF represents the demand that political liberation must culminate in economic emancipation, and that the beneficiaries of colonialism and apartheid cannot be permitted to permanently determine the limits of South Africa’s transformation.

AfriForum’s Basson event is consequently more revealing than its public relations campaigns. It tells us that there are forces that wish to rehabilitate its narrative, sanitise its machinery, and preserve the privileges it created. And the ANC is allowing it despite being home to the very victims of this man, and despite failure to prosecute him. He is roaming free just like the killer of Chris Hani who has also found the sinister courage to speak publicly after his release from prison, both emboldened by a lack of remorse.

We have been utterly failed as a nation by the ANC in this regard, and with the rise of fascism occurring across the world and inhabiting our country through racism and Afrophobia, it is clear we are no longer being governed, and that our hard won freedom hangs in the balance as a result. The ANC should hang their heads in shame if they allow Dr Death a platform to speak anywhere in this country.