Staff Photographer
‘An unreconstructed political bigot,” was Kader Asmal’s blunt assessment of Blade Nzimande two weeks ago.
Asmal articulated what many have come to feel about the South African Communist Party (SACP) general secretary. Increasingly, one senses he is the most worrying member of ANC president Jacob Zuma’s inner circle and that no good will come of his likely move into government under a Zuma presidency.
He may lead a minuscule movement with fewer paid-up members countrywide than the DA in the Western Cape. But as the ideologue who lends intellectual coherence to the diverse interests that have coalesced around the ANC president, he wields disproportionate influence.
Cosatu’s Zwelinzima Vavi supplies the numbers and the platform, Nzimande the line. He was tirelessly on the stump at union congresses in the build-up to the ANC’s Polokwane conference, cementing Zuma’s fan base.
Last year’s SACP congress is said to have left him unchallenged in the party’s central committee, with the Zuma fanatics of the Young Communist League (YCL) his organisational mainstay.
Nzimande’s reaction to Asmal was instructive: having started the fight, he whined that the ANC veteran had personalised it.
He evidently has a delicate ego — and a rough way with critics. One SACP insider underscored the whittling away of the collective leadership he inherited in 1998, in large part by the stifling of independent voices and the axing of executive committees in deviant provinces.
Free spirit Mazibuko Jara, for example, was ousted from the YCL, apparently for querying Zuma’s credentials as a worker champion and suggesting his backers were driven by a desire “to share in the spoils of power”.
Philip Dexter told the Mail & Guardian this week Nzimande had threatened to purge him after he refused an instruction to choose between Zuma and Thabo Mbeki.
Equally suggestive is the former treasurer’s account of a fight over membership numbers to be tabled at last year’s congress.
Nzimande insisted the figure was 50 000 — despite Dexter’s objection that just 14 000 members had paid their dues.
In the end, Dexter alleges, he was stripped of the membership accounting function and the report was tabled according to Nzimande’s wishes.
“Stalinism” is not confined to the SACP — indeed, it is a pervasive mental reflex on all sides of the ruling alliance. But its historical undertones and old-fashioned ring are particularly suited to one of the world’s last communist parties.
It implies the ideological straitjacketing of an allegedly democratic organisation by one man (Stalinists are invariably men) who cannot be challenged.
It is also a political method, based on the belief that the end justifies the means and that there is neither objective truth nor law, only power.
Both ideas have been on display in Nzimande’s attacks on the Constitutional Court and the judiciary, which he has treated as just another obstacle to the Zuma cause, to be discredited and weakened.
Significantly, he gave no detailed critique of the court’s ruling on the Zuma raids, offering only the rabble-rousing generalities that it had “set itself above the law”, was precipitating a constitutional crisis and taking South Africa towards a banana republic.
Most would see the undermining of the courts for political advantage, à la Zimbabwe, as the essence of the “banana republic”. And quite which legal principles were subverted by the carefully reasoned judgement, with 10 of 11 judges of our top court assenting, remains unclear.
Another rival power centre to be reined in — partly in Zuma’s cause and partly, one suspects, out of personal pique — is what Nzimande describes as the “mainstream bourgeois” media and its “political soothsayers and hired charlatans”.
He has publicly called for media restrictions, and is seen as a key proponent of the ANC conference resolution calling for a statutory media tribunal.
Last year he was not above writing a letter to the “bourgeois” proprietors of Media24, urging them to crack down on the editor of City Press.
Although a former university lecturer, Nzimande is no theorist; his writings and public statements are notable for their staleness of thought and expression. But he is a shrewd demagogue and agitator who knows which buttons to press.
He would doubtless argue that his assertion last week that the Zuma graft case is “pushing the country to the brink”, and that the solution is to drop charges, was a mere observation. But it had the distinct flavour of a threat.
Challenged by Asmal, whom he cannot discipline, Nzimande’s ploy was to seize the revolutionary high ground. Asmal lacked “the consistency of revolutionary morality” because as a member of Mbeki’s Cabinet he failed to defend Zuma or speak out on issues such as HIV/Aids, he said.
There is some truth in this: journalists will remember the former education minister ducking and weaving on the causes of Aids at a parliamentary briefing in the early 2000s.
But as an ordinary MP he has become the ANC’s most vocal public defender of the Constitution. He has rediscovered his conscience; Nzimande, with the scent of power in his nostrils, appears to have lost contact with his.
In any event, the SACP boss has not always been the knight errant fearlessly tilting at the dragon of (Mbeki’s) “1996 class project”. In 2001, with Mbeki at the height of his power, he gave a rather cringing interview to the Mail & Guardian in which he declared: “No, I would really not like to criticise the president, in that the ANC is committed to the alliance he leads.” Revolutionary consistency?
What exactly is the “revolution” Nzimande constantly bangs on about? One assumes it is not the revolution of Mbeki’s rhetoric. And can he explain how one can be both a “revolutionary” and a respecter of South Africa’s constitutional order?
At one level, it may be pure wind, directed at youth and workers “ardent for some desperate glory”. But Nzimande also seems to suffer from the “phantom limb” syndrome of many old communists: their world was amputated by the fall of the Soviet system, but in their mental habits, it lives on.
How else is one to explain his enthusiasm for communist China, a stance questioned by another SACP purge victim, Gauteng leader Vishwas Satgar?
On one of his “fraternal” visits to the one-party state which jails oppositionists and keeps trade unions under strict rein, Nzimande told his Chinese communist party hosts the SACP “was willing to learn” from their experience of statehood —
Given his revolutionary socialist posturing, Nzimande’s diehard campaign for Zuma — an instinctive conservative with a weak and vacillating grasp of policy — is equally contradictory.
The SACP leader is said to have been bitterly disappointed by his exclusion from Mbeki’s Cabinet in 1999. George Orwell’s observation, that nine times out of 10 the revolutionary is “a climber with a bomb in his pocket”, comes to mind.
A further question needs be asked. Why, in the face of Nzimande’s antics, are the more high-minded elements of the SACP leadership so inert? One cannot believe that Jeremy Cronin and Yunus Carrim share his white-hot passion for Zuma or endorse his attacks on the judiciary.
Is this a case of “organisational discipline”, of the kind that prevented communist parties from condemning the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia?
Or is it something more humdrum — prudent career-mindedness?