The South African Communist Party (SACP) on Tuesday said it was upset at the African National Congress’s response to its critique of the state of the tripartite alliance.
The response, titled Does the Alliance Share Common Objectives?, was given at a bilateral ANC national working committee/SACP politburo meeting on Monday.
The SACP formally tabled and presented its central committee discussion document on its relationship to state power and possible future electoral options at the meeting.
According to news reports the ANC, in a document prepared by party strategist Joel Netshitenzhe, had called the SACP’s bluff and asked whether it was not time for the alliance to end.
”Is there a strategic rupture between the ANC and the SACP on the approach to the NDR [national democratic revolution], and as such, should the SACP pursue its own course?”, the document asked.
The response also accused the communists of misreading history, questioned the integrity of the party’s leadership and called the SACP document subjective.
”We are rather disturbed by the tone and thrust of the ANC response to our document,” the SACP said in response on Tuesday.
”We had long agreed to a certain set of protocols in the alliance for purposes of engagement, including the fact that in our engagements we should not question each other’s bona fides. The calling into question of the credibility and intentions of the SACP leadership is completely unacceptable and unwarranted,” the party said in a statement.
”We wish to reiterate the importance of conducting debates in a manner that respects the integrity of all our organisations and their leaderships. This in fact serves to confirm what our discussion document points to — the emergence of a dominant project within our movement, whose style of engagement seeks to delegitimise critical debates and relies on labelling rather than substantive and comradely engagement.”
The SACP discussion document asserts President Thabo Mbeki has overly centralised both the ANC and the state, in effect creating an imperial presidency — an epithet last attached to apartheid-era ruler PW Botha.
The party and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) also said that the current leadership of the ANC had marginalised the SACP and Cosatu and turned its back on the working class in favour of technocrats and big business.
Both have made it clear they intend taking back the party from the latter and returning control to the former.
The SACP statement added that the ANC response also ”tended to focus on the intentions of our discussion document in a conspiratorial fashion rather than engaging the substantive issues raised therein”.
”We also emphatically reject the unfounded and untruthful allegations about mysterious ‘donor agencies’ funding the campaigns of our Young Communist League [YCL]. The campaigns of the YCL are funded from the same pool of funds raised by the SACP, principally through its membership levies and our collective fundraising campaigns. The YCL is not funded by any donor agency.
”The tone of the document seems to be a reflection of the mindset of the author of the document [rather] than a substantive engagement with its contents,” the SACP said. — Sapa