Mudslinging at SACP jamboree

The South African Communist Party’s special national conference in Polokwane this weekend has seen the emergence into the open of long-underlying tensions between ANC nationalists and communists.

This point was driven home on the first day when ANC Youth League president Julius Malema and ANC national executive committee (NEC) members Tony Yengeni and Billy Masetlha were booed by delegates when they appeared on stage.

Yengeni and Masetlha are considered to be anti-communist by some SACP members. In the ensuing drama Malema was seen shouting at Gwede Mantashe, the ANC secretary general and SACP chairperson.

He was believed to be complaining that the ANC was not represented properly at the conference, as the ANC chairperson, Baleka Mbete, and deputy secretary general Thandi Modise were absent.

The spat reflects the tensions that have been brewing among ANC president Jacob Zuma’s disparate supporters for some time.

Malema left the conference in a huff and told reporters he will report the matter to Zuma.

‘I’m leaving. They say they don’t want the agenda of capitalists but they have the wrong idea of who we are. I’m going to raise this with the president of the ANC.”

Yengeni followed Malema out, and was not expected to return.

Malema took issue with Mantashe’s response and the apology offered to him by SACP General secretary Blade Nzimande on behalf of the delegates.

‘The initial response was wishy-washy. The apology was not sufficient,” he told reporters.

Nzimande delivered a political report at the party’s second special national congress in which he hit back at those within the ANC who accuse the ‘left” of wanting to take over the ruling party.

‘The claim that communists want to take over the ANC is merely a rooi gevaar tactic, deliberately being played to try to consolidate the ANC as an organisation for elites and capitalists,” said Nzimande in his report.

He said anti-communists were trying forcefully to assert themselves within the ANC, especially after last April’s elections. The SACP congress should analyse the reasons for the re-emergence of the anti-communist tendency, said Nzimande.

‘Not for us to lock ourselves in a defensive mode, but as part of understanding the terrain upon which we seek to build working-class hegemony in key sites of power and struggle.”

Nzimande said that after the political dislocation of the ‘1996 class project”, the term used to describe the pro-Thabo Mbeki group in the ANC, the new anti-communist tendency has become ‘more desperate, more brazenly Africanist, but without a coherent ideological outlook”.

‘Instead the new tendency is opportunistically using the historical documents and positions of our movement to try to assert its new positions, [such as] an opportunistic use of the clauses of nationalisation in the Freedom Charter and the vulgarisation of the characterisation of our revolution as that seeking to liberate blacks in general and Africans in particular.”

The ANC Youth League has been at the forefront of calling for the nationalisation of mines and other enterprises.

‘What in fact appears as an articulation of the progressive clauses of the Freedom Charter is immediately betrayed by the naked class interests of trying to use the state to bail out dependent BEE capital.”

But Nzimande distanced the ANC from the anti-SACP campaign, instead blaming ‘factions”.

He said the SACP would step up its participation in local government by taking up issues affecting workers and communities as part of strengthening the party. ‘But we also need to win over the middle and upper strata among the black majority …”
Nzimande said the new anti-SACP tendency deliberately sought to isolate communists by resuscitating an old and tired debate of ‘two hats”.

Dual membership and sometimes multiple membership has been one of the hallmarks and strengths of the ANC, he said.

In his opening address Mantashe shared his view of the proposed constitutional amendment to allow Nzimande to continue to hold the general secretary position while also serving as a Cabinet minister.

‘My preference would have been the adoption of a congress resolution and [to] defer the constitutional amendments to the 13th national congress. That view was defeated in the central committee and I can therefore not pursue it,” said Mantashe.

He said the challenge facing the party was not a ‘Blade issue” but one of the party being a victim of its own success in having deployed its cadres to all centres of power. ‘All the national office-bearers are not full-time … The challenge is how to ensure that the party improves its full-time capacity to do party work.”

Nzimande called for the SACP to reflect on its character and strength as it seeks to influence decisions in both the ANC and government.

Mantashe called on SACP members to swell the ranks of the ANC. ‘In the ANC structures we must resist all attempts to relegate us to second-class members who serve at the mercy of other members.”