Floyd Shivambu's Thursday announcement that he was leaving his post as deputy leader of the Economic Freedom Fighters is the biggest shake-up since the EFF's launch 11 years ago. How well will he adapt to his new party of Zulu traditionalists?

Twitter bio of Floyd Nyiko Shivambu says it all: "Believes in Dialectical Materialism & Labour Theory of Value. Heterodox."

It doesn't exactly sell the man as someone you'd want to have a beer with after a hard day's work, but it captures something fundamental about the politician. Of the EFF's most prominent troika - Julius Malema, Mbuyiseni Ndlozi and Floyd Shivambu - Shivambu has always been the serious one.

While Ndlozi clowned around and Malema flashed his mercurial charisma, Shivambu has been the guy writing op-eds on decolonising knowledge systems, or the scientific superiority of Marxism, or why reindustrialisation is the way forward for local municipalities.

It was Shivambu who wrote the EFF's seven "cardinal pillars": the party's ideological lodestone. If other political parties wish to enter coalitions with the EFF, including the ANC, those party leaders have in the past been made to sit exams on the cardinal pillars.

ANC Secretary-General Fikile Mbalula once suggested that Shivambu was the EFF's true brains trust. Now, that central ideological repository is jumping ship - to join the man Shivambu and Malema worked as hard as...