Jaspreet Kindra
African National Congress officials at a top-level meeting last weekend tried to persuade the South African Communist Party to withdraw its support for the Congress of South African Trade Unions’s anti-privatisation campaign.
The ANC pulled out its heavy artillery for the meeting between the two alliance partners on Sunday. Its delegation was led by party president Thabo Mbeki and comprised deputy president Jacob Zuma, national chairperson Mosiuoa Lekota, secretary general Kgalema Motlanthe, the party’s head of policy Jeff Radebe and national executive committee members Sydney Mufamadi, Steve Tshwete, Bridget Mabandla, Peter Mokaba and Smuts Ngonyama.
The SACP delegation consisted of deputy chairperson Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi, general secretary Blade Nzimande, his deputy Jeremy Cronin and other central committee members.
The ANC is believed to have voiced its unhappiness with the SACP stance on Cosatu’s anti-privatisation campaign, SACP sources said. They added that there were long discussions on the respective parties’ positions on “restructuring” the government’s preferred term for privatisation.
The SACP delegation refused to succumb to the ANC’s line that their support for Cosatu’s anti-privatisation strike in August was directed against the ANC government.
ANC representative Nomfanelo Kota said claims that the ANC was attempting to coerce the SACP were “not entirely true”. The discussions had centred on “the state of the alliance” in a bid to resolve some of the differences and the perceptions around the restructuring of the state assets.
Kota said the meeting agreed that the government’s growth, employment and redistribution (Gear) strategy “must go ahead”. SACP sources denied this strongly.
The meeting is the first held pursuant to an ANC national executive committee document that calls for bilaterals with Cosatu and the SACP to “isolate and defeat” ultra-left elements in the alliance. And it was the first face-to-face encounter between the allies since the leaking of the document, which claimed that the SACP had “deviated from the Leninist path”.
The ANC is to hold a special national executive committee meeting today and tomorrow on the alliance. It will consider reports from various national executive committee members who addressed special regional councils across the country on the document.
The SACP’s position at the weekend encounter closely follows on a politbureau discussion document on the national executive committee notes leaked to the Mail & Guardian. This says “there are certainly valid tactical issues that might be raised concerning the wisdom of the strike’s timing, and even, perhaps, about whether it was necessary”.
But it adds: “Cosatu [and the SACP in supporting the strike] were at pains to insist that this was not a strike against government, but against aspects of government policy, and in defence, precisely, of broadening the ANC-controlled democratic public sector.”
The document agrees that a minority ultra-left tendency “may have harboured other aspirations for the strike”, but adds: “It is disappointing that the ANC document gives credence to these aspirations as if the estimated 40 percent of the South African working class that went on strike wanted to remove the ANC government.”
The SACP believes the national executive committee document could discourage debate, through a “fear of being labelled, to a dogmatic closing of ranks in the face of a greatly exaggerated anti-ANC ‘left tendency’, [and] even to witch-hunts”.
The SACP says the executive committee position “side-steps the real issues that have to be confronted”. It concedes a certain degree of restructuring of state assets, privatisation, joint ventures, public private partnerships and concessioning “has to happen but none of us can pretend that all of the restructuring so far has gone well [whether in Sun Air, Umgeni Water, South African Airways or the Post Office]”.
This should have opened the doors for debate and leadership. However the “briefing document disappointingly declines to do this, by evoking the spectre of a left conspiracy”.
The SACP document concedes that Gear has helped the country achieve macro-stability, “but none of us can pretend that Gear has remotely met its own growth and especially employment targets”.
In another development, SACP representative Mazibuko Jara and chairperson of the SACP in Johannesburg Zico Tamela have co-authored a highly critical piece on the national executive committee document and the special regional councils, which appears in the latest edition of the SACP newspaper Umsebenzi.
Calling the regional councils a “squandered opportunity”, Jara and Tamela say labelling can expose leaders to dangers that can be exploited by “real enemies”.