It is widely believed by many alliance members that President Thabo Mbeki is the author of an internal African National Congress document entitled Unmandated Reflections or Tasks of the ANC in the New Epoch of Democratic Transformation. This document was recently unearthed and discussed by the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu).
The 1994 document predicts mounting conflict between left and right in the ANC and its allies.
Cosatu sees the document as an expression of insecurity ”about being able to impose perspectives which have not achieved a broad buy-in by the democratic movement”.
Prophetic in much of its analysis, the paper forecasts the splitting of the ANC around the issue of leadership ”with various comrades being set up against one another on the basis that they represent different competing tendencies within the movement”.
The document predicts that ultra-left ”opposition forces” will encourage the SACP to ”publicly project itself as the ‘left conscience’, which would fight for the loyalty of the ANC to the cause of the working people, against an ANC leadership which is inclined to over-compromise with the forces of bourgeois reformism”.
The paper says the left will encourage communists in the ANC to form an organised faction to pursue the same objective, and urge Cosatu and its affiliates ”to project the pursuit of political and socio-economic objectives different from those that the ANC has set itself as a governing party”.
The unions will be encouraged ”to be suspicious of the intentions of the ANC in government, as it is likely to appease the domestic and international business world”.
In some respects, the prophecies have proved to be off-target.
The document predicts that ”opposition forces” will fragment the ANC into three components. One of these, the ANC in Parliament, would present itself as ”the revolutionary watchdog” over the ”treacherous ANC in the executive”. In reality, the ANC in Parliament has rarely challenged the executive.
The paper forecasts that the ANC grassroots outside government will be projected by the left as the ”true representative of the soul of the movement, with a historic task to be the ‘revolution watchdogs’ over the ANC members in the legislatures, who, it will be said, have been co-opted by the new system”.