When Billy Masetlha launches the kind of vitriolic attack he did on Blade Nzimande and the South African Communist Party last week, you can sit up in the anticipation that a new chapter of an old battle between nationalists and communists has erupted again in the ANC.
Or you can, like my friend Andile Mngxitama, take a much more cynical view of these issues and ask: who is the nationalist here and who is the communist? What does a communist look like in 2009?
My immediate reaction as one who makes a living from poking my nose into other people’s affairs is to follow up and investigate the extent of the dissatisfaction in the ANC about Cosatu and the SACP and determine whether it is a continuation of the battle for the soul of the ANC. This is because, although many in the alliance say Masetlha’s view represents a minuscule opinion, we have also received calls from those who share his opinion.
In a classically irreverent note to me, Mngxitama asks what makes us go on and on about communists and capitalists within the ANC alliance. ”I just think it’s lazy journalism. What you have is the class of 2009 post-Polokwane displacing the 1996 class project.
They all pray at the same altar of capitalist accumulation.
”So when you guys in the media talk about the left and nationalists you are being duped and going along with it. What makes the SACP communist? A congress resolution? Please guys … the SACP is the most weird bunch of capitalists.”
Mngxitama’s dismissal of the SACP becomes relevant in the context of the party’s response to Masetlha. Lazy personal attacks on Masetlha aside, some SACP members are really taking issues to heart and feel that his comments once again raise the discussion about the path to power — a discussion that periodically crops up but is never concluded satisfactorily in the party.
Young Communist League (YCL) national secretary and politburo member Buti Manamela says that at the SACP’s special conference in December members will again discuss earnestly the option of the party contesting for power separately, because some in the SACP have always warned about the party imposing itself on the ANC.
Although the YCL was the first to raise the matter in the early 2000s, it later retreated from its position and joined those who opted for using ANC president Jacob Zuma as the Trojan Horse to power. This strategy painted Zuma as a Trojan Horse in which the left would hide until he came into power and would then take over.
I remember the last SACP conference in Port Elizabeth was billed as the one to pronounce finally on a clear path to power, but what a walkover it was for those who decided to throw all their eggs in Zuma’s basket.
In that Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University hall Gauteng SACP chairperson Nkosiphendule Kholisile and his ragtag army of supporters from Khutsong, who were angry at the ANC leadership, were comprehensively defeated when they tried to push for the SACP to go it alone.
And the question has to be: having tasted power and all its perks, do we really expect all the ministers, MECs, mayors, chief whips and committee chairs deployed by the SACP to relinquish their posts, detach themselves from the ANC and go back to their trenches to try on their own?
The answer is an obvious no. The tide has turned too far towards the other side. It is no longer that cold June day in 2007 at the ANC policy conference when Thabo Mbeki was in charge and received wild applause when he took to the podium and, in more or less the same language used by Masetlha today, embarrassed Nzimande.
”Recognising and respecting the independence of our ally, the SACP, and understanding its role as the leader of the socialist revolution, the ANC has never sought to prescribe to the SACP the policies it should adopt, the programmes of action it should implement and the leaders it should elect,” Mbeki said.
”It has never obstructed the SACP in its socialist objectives and therefore joined the reactionary anti-communist forces. You comrades may very well ask why I show disrespect for you and this important policy conference by repeating what to you constitutes the ABC of your political education and understanding, as well as my own,” he said to even louder cheers.
So I am afraid for Billy: there will be no applause, no cameras and no hugging — only tears, name-calling and marginalisation. I reckon we have entered a new phase of the battle for the soul of the ANC post Mbeki-Zuma in which the nationalists feel they have to reclaim their party. Fasten your seatbelt.