SACP Gauteng chairperson Nkosiphendule Kolisile has stepped down from his administrative post as assistant organiser, throwing the SACP into a fresh controversy.
Kolisile’s resignation came in a week when SACP leaders tried to fend off allegations by its national treasurer, Phillip Dexter, of ”Stalinist” tendencies in the party. Dexter is expected to be severely reprimanded at the party’s politburo meeting on Friday.
Kolisile had been suspended for three months, but was recently given a final warning after being found guilty of poor performance. He has resigned from his full-time job, but continues in his political post as provincial chairperson.
The outspoken Kolisile would not disclose the reasons for his resignation, but is understood to believe that certain individuals at the SACP’s head office have been working to ”destroy” him.
His suspension, weeks before the Gauteng congress in March, where he was contesting leadership positions, clearly scarred him.
The Gauteng party under Kolisile has openly criticised the leadership of general secretary Blade Nzimande for elevating support for ANC deputy president Jacob Zuma over a focus on party programmes. Like Dexter, the Gauteng SACP has warned that the party is becoming Stalinist.
This week two provincial structures — the Young Communist League and the national SACP office — which were supportive of Nzimande came down hard on Dexter over a paper he wrote criticising poor leadership which, he said, had resulted in the party’s qualitative decline. He blasted the party for spending most of its time blaming its failures on the ANC, instead of examining itself.
He said responsibility for the current crisis should be placed at the door of the SACP leaders, whom he described as rigid, doctrinaire and quasi-Stalinist. He also claimed that power had been centralised with Nzimande and a few individuals close to him.
The SACP’s Western Cape office said Dexter had not been active in the party for the past three or four years, hence his ”ignorance”. It accused him of surfacing weeks before the SACP’s July congress in a bid to sow internal division and confusion.
Said provincial secretary Khaya Magaxa: ”It is clear from the entire article he wrote that he relied on newspaper clippings and not concrete working class struggles on the ground.It is also very clear … that he is very aggrieved for reasons we are not aware of, but wants to rally people behind his personal political bereavement under the pretext of giving the SACP direction.”
In the process Dexter had manufactured allegations and created a caricature ”of the largest socialist party in South Africa”.
Mpumalanga provincial secretary Bobakele Majuba rejected ”with contempt” what he described as the suggestion that ”our branches and provinces, and the Young Communist League, are just collectives of non-thinking imbeciles and zombies that are manipulated by the head office”.
”We want to say to him that we are aware of all the programmes that we have engaged upon and some of them have been initiated by us or other provinces and, of course, others by head office.”
The SACP national office suggested Dexter’s paper was part of an attempt to discredit its leaders and programmes ahead of the July congress.
Spokesperson Malesela Maleka said Dexter had been forced earlier this year to retract the same allegations when he made them at the politburo meeting. ”He retracted all of them at that politburo, apologised and undertook not to repeat this style of behaviour.”
Maleka appealed to the SACP’s central committee and structures ”not to become overly diverted by views of a single individual at a time when party structures are involved in intense discussions and workshops” related to the congress’s draft programme, ”the South African Road to Socialism”.
”We should be well aware that parts of the media spring these kinds of diversionary assaults on the eve of SACP congresses,” he said.