A few days ago, I read with distraught an article in one of the country’s leading newspapers titled: “Consider the implications’: ANC officials warn SACP against contesting elections”.
The opening sequence of the article goes further proclaiming the following: “The ANC’s national officials have warned the SACP it could suffer the same fate as former President Jacob Zuma, should it choose to contest the elections”.
It is unfortunate that the national leadership of the ANC has chosen to be simplistic on this issue, if this statement is true. These utterances are worrisome particularly as the entire Mass Democratic Movement is traversing a very difficult epoch, confronted with a myriad of socio-political and economic challenges.
Firstly, the former President Jacob Zuma formed the MKP in his own accord, founded outside the conventions of what defines the historical mission of the Alliance. I need to out rightly remind comrades and the general populace of South Africa that, the formation of the SACP which dates as far as 1921, was among centred on freeing the working class from the onslaught of capitalist exploitation and racial inequality through National Liberation.
The latter would later find expression through working in close proximity with the African National Congress (ANC). It is to be noted that this relationship started on a boisterous footing with senior comrades of the ANC rejecting the SACP, its ideals and objectives. It was however through the efforts of struggle veterans like Moses Kotane who fostered a strong working relationship between the two organisations to achieve national liberation.
Kotane, a revered leader of the mass democratic movement, remains the longest serving General Secretary of the SACP and served as Treasurer General of the ANC for a decade.
He understood both the endogenous and exogenous existence of both organisations through what can be defined as Unity of the Opposite. Kotane understood that whilst the ANC is pursuing a liberation struggle, its
constituents where poor, disenfranchised and excluded from the commanding heights of the economy, comprising largely African people. He thus embarked on a tedious and often lonely-some journey in mobilising resources for the ANC’s underground machinery, training of its combatants, mass mobilisation and international solidarity to ensure that our country is liberated.
His efforts laid a firm foundation that would later culminate in the country’s first democratic elections in 1994, with the adoption of the Constitution in 1996, centered on the creation of a non-racial, non-sexist, democratic and prosperous country, a society envisioned by our forebears through the adoption of the Freedom Charter in
1955.
Using Kotane as a point of reference is unfathomable for some in the high echelons of the ANC, to now want to dictate to comrades who hold dual membership to choose between the two organisations. Unlike the formation of MK, these comrades have not gone outside the Alliance to form an organisation in collision course with the ANC.
In such an instance as it is the case with Zuma and those who followed him to the MK, the Constitution of the ANC succinctly calls for their automatic expulsion. It should be emphasised that the decision by the SACP to contest elections is not centred on wrestling power from the ANC. The SACP has its own historical mission which is to achieve an egalitarian society, while the ANC in its Strategy and Tactics defines its relationship with capital as Complimentary and Contradictory. Simply put, these two ends pursue the National Democratic Revolution through different yet unitary routes.
The SACP has overtime maintained the sacrosanct nature of the alliance to ensure the total liberation of our masses from the shackles of poverty, unemployment and inequalities through policies biased to the working class. However, since the advent of our democracy a Comprador Bourgeois trajectory filtered through our liberation discourse, derailing and frustrating every little effort aimed at seeing to the success and full implementation of the National Democratic Revolution.
During this period, it was the SACP which exposed the tender-preneurship phenomenon for what it is-a political trajectory which the Party defined as having entrenched and amplified corruption, mal-administration and oligarch tendencies. Similarly, during Zuma’s reign of terror, a new culture occupied centre stage, where
SACP comrades whilst holding ANC membership were purged after raising the alarm on the looting of state coffers through what would later came to be known as State Capture. Another diabolical phenomenon exposed by the SACP.
The beneficiaries of this malice, who at the time concocted “Voodoo Economic” concepts such as Radical Economic Transformation and White Monopoly Capital, through Bell Potinger, a British Propaganda Machinery, have now invented a diatribe of insults targeted at the SACP and the position it has taken to contest elections.
It is therefore inconceivable that some of these Comrades who are likening the SACP contestation of local government elections to MK, a party founded on ethnic mobilisation and chauvinism have now developed a moral high ground centered on what defines the historical mission of the alliance and the subsequent position of the SACP to contest elections.
As the SACP we fully commit to the unity of the Alliance and its reconfiguration as well the renewal of the ANC. The National Political Council of both organisations as well its National Officials are hard at work in finding a common ground on matters of mutual interest. Clearly, this has antagonised the Mabahamabe Brigade.
The assertion by President Cyril Ramaphosa during the Joe Slovo Commemoration that “the ANC needs the SACP and the SACP needs the ANC” is given credence by the SACP Special National Congress where the party resolved to contest elections without leaving the Alliance and not breaking the dual membership principle.
I am the Provincial Secretary of the SACP, whose equally an MPL of the ANC deployed through its organisational processes. Therefore, it’s wrong for some in the ANC to want to impose to us who is SACP and ANC amongst SACP members. People like me and others are refusing to be forced to choose loyalty or declare anger against either SACP or ANC.
