In the latest salvo in the war within the ruling alliance, the South African Communist Party has revealed that the African National Congress, while in exile, had called for ”continuing revolution that would lead to a socialist order”.
The SACP was hitting back at a controversial document by Gauteng MEC for Finance Jabu Moleketi and former diplomat Josiah Jele, who recently accused the party of trying to force the ANC down a proletarian and socialist path.
In a response this week to Moleketi and Jele, the SACP political bureau quotes a confidential 1979 report of the politico-military strategy commission of the ANC’s national executive committee. The document, The Green Book, called for continuing revolution aimed at socialism in South Africa.
The SACP intends circulating its response at meetings of ANC provincial general councils this weekend to ”expose sectarianism” that seeks to ”deepen divisions within the alliance”.
The communists said the 1979 commission was headed by then ANC president Oliver Tambo and included Thabo Mbeki, communist stalwart Joe Slovo and former defence minister Joe Modise. Sarcastically, it suggests the members were ”unanimously ultra-leftist, but chose, tactically, to remain publicly discreet about it”.
The Moleketi-Jele document, released through ANC structures last month, describes SACP members as ”wolves dressed in sheep’s skin” and ”ultra-leftists”. The authors claimed the ultra-left sought to ”transform the ANC into a ‘proletarian organisation”’.
In its response the SACP accused the authors of ”not only attacking the SACP in a highly sectarian way”, but of ”abusing the resources of the ANC” to distribute the document.
In an apparent reference to ANC national spokesperson Smuts Ngonyama, it says a leading official in the ANC’s communications department was personally involved in distributing the document to ”key newspapers”.