The Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) commemorates the life, political thought, and revolutionary contribution of Steve Biko, who died on 12 September 1977 in the hands of the apartheid security police.

Steve Biko was one of the most formidable political thinkers and organisers produced by the struggle for liberation in South Africa. Through the philosophy of Black Consciousness, Biko challenged the political, economic, and psychological foundations of white supremacy and taught Black people to reject the inferiority imposed upon them by apartheid.

Biko understood that apartheid was more than a collection of discriminatory laws. It was a system of white power that controlled land, wealth, education, institutions, political authority and the definition of who was considered fully human. His response was therefore not merely to demand reforms to apartheid, but to develop the consciousness and organisation necessary to overthrow the system itself.

His political work helped create a generation of young people who refused to accept humiliation as their permanent condition. The ideas of Black Consciousness contributed to the political climate that produced the Soweto Uprising of 1976, when Black students rose against an education system designed to reproduce their subordination.

Biko was subsequently arrested by the apartheid security forces, tortured and left with severe injuries. He was transported, naked and shackled, over a thousand kilometres to Pretoria, where he died on 12 September 1977, aged only 30. The original apartheid-era inquest assigned no criminal responsibility to the police officers involved. Decades later, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission refused amnesty to officers implicated in his death. In 2025, the South African authorities reopened the inquest into his death, demonstrating once again that the crimes of apartheid remain incompletely addressed. While the reopening is long overdue, it also exposes the profound failure of the democratic state to deliver justice to Biko and his family.

The fact that Biko’s family and the South African people have had to wait almost 50 years for the possibility of a proper judicial reckoning is a damning indictment of successive governments and the institutions of the democratic state. Even now, the reopened inquest has been subjected to multiple delays, including postponements for case management, and the finalisation of legal funding for persons of interest.

The end of apartheid did not automatically end white economic power, racialised spatial planning, landlessness, poverty or the concentration of wealth. It is therefore profoundly disturbing that, almost five decades after Biko’s death, figures associated with the machinery of apartheid can still receive platforms in democratic South Africa.

Wouter Basson, who headed the apartheid regime’s secret chemical and biological warfare programme, Project Coast, remains a particularly disturbing example. His work was connected to a programme involving the development and weaponisation of chemical and biological agents. In 2026, he continues to face professional disciplinary proceedings relating to alleged activities connected to that programme.

That such a figure can be presented in public spaces as a motivational speaker or treated as an ordinary public personality is an insult to the victims of apartheid and to the memory of those who fought against the system that empowered him. We cannot simultaneously claim to honour Steve Biko while normalising the men and institutions that represented everything he fought against.

For the EFF, the greatest tribute to Biko is to organise society according to the principles of Black liberation, dignity and economic justice. Biko and the Black Consciousness Movement understood the importance of community-based development, education, healthcare and practical projects that restored dignity and built the capacity of oppressed communities. This is precisely why the EFF’s programme for Local Government must be understood as part of the continuing struggle for economic freedom. Municipal government is where apartheid’s spatial and economic legacy is experienced every day.

It is experienced by the family that lives far from economic opportunities because Black people were deliberately pushed to the periphery. It is experienced by the unemployed young person who has no access to meaningful economic opportunities.

It is experienced by communities without adequate housing, sanitation, electricity, public transport, recreational facilities and functioning public institutions. It is experienced when municipalities spend public money on politicians and tenders while working-class communities remain without basic services.

The EFF’s local government programme seeks to transform these conditions. We will fight for municipalities that put Black and working-class communities first in the allocation of land, infrastructure and municipal investment; accelerate the provision of decent housing and basic services; create municipal economic opportunities through local procurement, cooperatives, small enterprises and community-based production; and invest in public schools, libraries, clinics, sports and recreational facilities, particularly in historically neglected communities.

The EFF will also end corruption, tenderpreneurship, and political patronage that divert resources away from the people; and create clean, capable and accountable municipalities where public representatives are servants of communities rather than beneficiaries of public office. This is the practical meaning of taking Biko’s legacy forward.

May the soul of Steve Biko continue to rest in revolutionary peace.