Cosatu and the South African Communist Party (SACP) must share 20% of the places on ANC election lists with the ruling party’s youth and women’s wings, ANC secretary general Gwede Mantashe said this week.
And he insisted that the alliance partners should toe the line on ANC policy positions.
This follows SACP calls for any of its members deployed as ANC legislators, to be accountable to the SACP first. The Young Communist League (YCL) has asked for a 30% quota for communists in provincial and national legislatures.
In an interview Mantashe said the party will insist that all Cosatu and SACP legislators act on an ANC mandate.
He added: ”We say 80% [of representation of the list] from branches, 20% from the leagues and the allies in the branches of the ANC.
”We will accommodate them in the branches of the ANC as Cosatu with that 20%. Remember that 90% of the delegates at the ANC conference are from the branches, 10% are from the leagues,” Mantashe said.
In a discussion document released this week SACP general secretary Blade Nzimande whittled down the YCL’s demand to ”a minimum of [SACP] provincial secretaries to legislatures”, instead of a ”mechanically derived national quota”.
Mantashe also put paid to SACP and Cosatu plans for designated slots in major debates in Parliament, during which leftist policy views and laws can be presented.
Mooted by ANC president Jacob Zuma at an SACP congress a few years ago, this idea is widely cited in communist circles.
Mantashe said: ”They [communist and union MPs] will toe the [ANC] line … Once they get into Parliament they will be MPs of the ANC. There will not be a communist or Cosatu faction within that. It has always been like that.”
The same applied to Cabinet posts, which communists should decline if they did not like what they entailed.
”If we give you public enterprises, you must do privatisation and you think you are a communist [and] you can’t add value in that area, decline it.
”ANC ministers will do their work as ANC ministers and MPs.”
The SACP conference, scheduled for September 25 to 28, will discuss the possible scrapping of the public enterprises portfolio to curb government privatisation of public assets.
Mantashe said that SACP and Cosatu members must be members of the ANC to get on to electoral lists and warned that 50% of the names listed would be those of women.
”We will give 50% to women, that’s what we do. The list conference will be generated in the branch processes and those communists and Cosatu members must be members of the ANC to get on that list.”
ANC Youth League president Julius Malema made it clear at the league’s anniversary celebrations this week that the ANC would not allow quotas.
”I am not prepared to enter into a debate about the alliance being the centre of power. The ANC holds the centre of power and there is no Polokwane resolution about the alliance being the centre of power,” Malema said.
”If anybody wants to be in the ANC he or she must earn their place in the ANC rather than through quotas.”
Malema said that the SACP and Cosatu exerted influence at the Polokwane conference without a 30% quota.