The South African Communist Party (SACP) may decide in July to withdraw from the coalition that has ruled since the end of apartheid, threatening to shatter decades of cooperation between leftists and moderate black nationalists.
Spurred by a rise in membership and growing disenchantment with what it sees as the pro-business direction of government, the SACP is considering running its own slate of candidates in elections beginning in 2009.
The party, which has remained a political force due to its history of opposing white minority rule, gets its core support from poor and working class black South Africans, a key constituency for the African National Congress (ANC), which dominates the government.
The SACP has refrained from testing the electoral waters, believing it and the powerful Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) could influence the ANC from within a formal alliance established after the first all-race elections in 1994.
But there are signs that rank-and-file communists have grown tired of ANC dominance and will support a proposal to independently contest elections at a congress in Port Elizabeth in two months time.
The SACP’s provincial council in Gauteng, which is home to Johannesburg and the capital Pretoria, voted overwhelmingly in favour of a go-it-alone approach last week and announced it would lobby activists across the country to back the change.
”In principle, we should have candidates in all provinces, a presidential candidate and candidates for premiers,” Zico Tamela, the SACP’s provincial secretary in Gauteng, told the South African Press Association news agency, after last week’s resolution.
If the branch has its way, communists in the Cabinet, including Safety and Security Minister Charles Nqakula and Intelligence Minister Ronnie Kasrils, could be forced to quit the government or renounce their party affiliations.
Some observers believe the ANC, which consistently wins about two-thirds of the vote in national elections, could fall below the 50% threshold if the SACP and Cosatu contest elections under separate flags or a united leftist banner.
A tilt to the left?
David Masondo, an SACP member and political analyst, predicts the issue will be high on the agenda in Port Elizabeth and that the outcome will depend largely on the prospect of a shift in ANC policy and leadership.
”If you’ve got an ANC that you have today, which is pushing neo-liberal economic policies and marginalising Cosatu and the SACP, you could have a split,” Masondo said. ”Their wish is that the alliance continues, but there could be so much frustration in the SACP that there is a move out of it.”
Communists and trade unionists have blasted South African and ANC President Thabo Mbeki for putting in place policies they say have disproportionately favoured the white business community, foreign investors and a small black elite.
They also have been critical of Mbeki, who himself flirted with Communism during the anti-apartheid era, for sacking the popular former deputy president Jacob Zuma in 2005 during an arms procurement scandal.
The ANC is expected to approve a programme that will form the basis of government policy and choose a new party president at a congress in December. The winner is likely to become South Africa’s president when Mbeki steps down in 2009.
The SACP and Cosatu are pushing for a radically different type of leader, possibly Zuma, who will tilt the nation to the left, embracing nationalisation and greater redistribution of income to fight poverty and unemployment.
The prospect of the small but influential SACP bolting the alliance does not sit well with some party leaders, who argue that the 50 000-member SACP lacks the organisation and resources to thrive in the electoral wilderness.
”I think it would be a huge error for the party to leave the alliance and to contest elections. I don’t think we could achieve huge support,” SACP Deputy General Secretary Jeremy Cronin told Reuters in an interview earlier this year.
”The left must not walk away from the ANC. That would be a grave error,” said Cronin, who sits on the ANC’s National Executive Committee, the party’s top decision-making body. – Reuters