An article in an African National Congress publication implies that the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) and the South African Communist Party should have walked out of the alliance, as Anti-Privatisation Forum (APF) leader Trevor Ngwane did, over their differences with the government’s economic policy.
The article entitled The Principles of Internal Party Democracy of the ANC: Are They Suspect? Who is a Dempsey? authored by PS Liholo, an ANC member from the Soweto suburb of Protea Glen, appears in the current edition of Umbrabulo.
The magazine, which devotes two articles to Ngwane, a former ANC member and a Soweto councillor, demonstrates that the party regards the APF leader as a force to contend with in next year’s elections.
The second article, authored by a Comrade Tankiso from Pimville, the ward that Ngwane represented while with the ANC, is tellingly titled: Beyond Dreadlocks and Demagogy. Ngwane has dreadlocks.
In his article Liholo deals at length with Ngwane’s opposition to Johannesburg Metro Council’s Igoli 2000, a plan which called for the privat- isation of services provided by the municipality.
Ngwane was turfed out of the ANC after he publicly attacked the plan and the government’s growth, employment and redistribution policy. He stood against the ANC as an independent candidate in the 2000 local government elections.
Liholo asserts that there had been consultation on both policies. He adds he does not ”understand the rationale behind the opposition” to the policy ”especially from Cosatu and the SACP, if they were democratically agreed upon”.
”If Cosatu and the SACP were totally against the policies from the onset, they should not have deployed their respective members into government who are, quite ironically, presently implementing the very same policies. Equally important, they should not have rallied behind the ‘capitalist’ ANC during the elections. I suppose Ngwane did the correct thing by leaving the organisation when he felt he was forced to do what was morally and ideologically against his conscience and principles.”
Liholo draws an analogy between Ngwane and Charles Dempsey, who defied his Oceana federation’s mandate to vote for South Africa thus costing the country the 2006 soccer world cup.
He writes: ”The Dempseys with their personal agendas or ulterior motives, among others, to destroy and tarnish the image of the organisations they claim to be representing would infiltrate any group that operates without internally developed procedures.”
Ngwane, suggests Liholo, had acted in a similar manner by publicly criticising the ANC, the organisation he belonged to at the time, only to be hailed as a ”true voice of the poorest of the poor by having the tenacity to speak out against the majority”.
The author also raps the ”academic intellectual”, Professor Sipho Seepe, for his ”famous observations” that ANC president Thabo Mbeki ”is becoming too powerful and therefore intolerant to criticism”.
Liholo says if that was the case, he would have left the ANC. ”There is a disturbing tendency developing among some ANC members at different levels to censor themselves … We are scared to question the silence, inaction or belated responses of the leadership at a political level to deal with comrades who bring the name of the organisation to disrepute or who have contravened or compromised the principles of the ANC.”
On the ”threat” posed by Ngwane and the APF, Tankiso writes: ”The dreadlocks are in reality an epitome of an octopus, a fish with many legs linking its body to strategic structural networks in the country.” This is a reference to the APF’s alliances with other anti-ANC leftist bodies.
Tankiso blames the lack of political leadership in several ANC branches, which he claims has provided ”fertile ground for alternative ideas to gain ground”.
The issue was also raised by the ANC secretary general Kgalema Motlanthe’s report to the party’s national conference last year. Tankiso’s paper calls on ANC members in Diepkloof, Orlando, Dobsonville and Pimville — Ngwane’s home ground — to use the rise of APF as a ”wake up” call: ”For now the revolution cannot afford the venture of retreat and reversal.”