SACP leader Solly Mapaila. (Photo by Dirk Kotze/Gallo Images via Getty Images)
There is a video of Science, Technology and Innovation Minister Blade Nzimande arriving later than Karl Marx’s life to an event he was to address.
The video was part of a promotional advert on the news channel eNCA in 2014 during the latter period of Jacob “Nine Wasted Years” Zuma’s first presidential term, which began in June 2009, when Nzimande was the higher education minister.
Flanked by burly bodyguards and wearing a suit that was in desperate need of a Mozambican tailor (they are the best), Blade complained that the gathering began without him, instead of apologising, as reasonable people would, for keeping everyone waiting.
The event at Avalon Cemetery in Soweto commemorated the life of South African Communist Party (SACP) leader Joe Slovo, who died in January 1995.
“Yini yona le? Niqalelani ngingekafiki? (What is this? How do you start before my arrival?)” Nzimande, the then SACP’s head honcho, asked in his trademark voice, as if one of his bodyguards had his crown jewels in a vice grip.
Nothing accentuated the SACP’s slide away from its core tenets of respect and the promotion of an egalitarian society than Nzimande’s arrogance in chastising people for starting an event to honour his organisation’s fallen stalwart sans his presence.
Lately, SACP secretary general Solly Mapaila, who succeeded Nzimande, has been riding on his high horse as if he is Mao Zedong leading the Red Army of the Communist Party of China during the 1930s long march to evade the China Nationalist Party.
You see, Mapaila has been moaning to all and sundry about the “gross error” that the ANC, which is in a decades-long alliance with the SACP, took in forming the government of national unity, which included nine other parties, among the Democratic Alliance (DA).
“There were other possibilities for the ANC not to collaborate with the DA because the DA doesn’t represent an iota of the interest of the majority of our people. It is a party of white interests — of the white minority,” Mapaila contended, adding that the Smurfs inherited “the colonial regime’s interests”.
He cried ad nauseam on Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh’s podcast about the ANC’s “betrayal” when it went with the DA instead of the Economic Freedom Fighters or the uMkhonto weSizwe party, led by Zuma, when no formation received an outright majority in the May 2024 national elections.
What Mapaila failed to mention was that there are four senior leaders of the SACP enjoying the perks of blue lights and beefy bodyguards inside Cyril Ramaphosa’s presidency.
Mapaila’s deputy secretary general, David Masondo, is the finance deputy minister; Buti Manamela and Polly Boshielo are deputy ministers of higher education and police, respectively, while Nzimande, having tasted the sweet nectar of taxpayer-funded luxury, has remained a minister since 2009.
Before that, South Africa was graced by a few more communists in key government posts, such as Rob Davies, the trade and industry minister from 2009 to 2019, and Ebrahim Patel, who was economic development minister from 2009 until 2019, when he succeeded Davies.
Mapaila’s hypocrisy stems from the contradiction in the ideology he claims to subscribe to. For example, one of the key tenets of communism, as espoused by Marx and refined by Vladimir Lenin, was the need for a vanguard party to lead the dictatorship of the proletariat.
In a nutshell, the proletariat dictatorship — as Lenin explained in his theoretical document titled What is to be Done? (1902) — argued for a group of elites, which he was a part of, to lead a revolution towards a working-class takeover of the state.
What that presupposes is that the working class cannot lead its own struggle outside the assistance of a bunch of elites, ironically, from the same ideology that rails against elitism.
With that in mind, it becomes clear that the SACP wants to continue talking left — as Mapaila has been doing since the beginning of the cupcake-in-chief’s second presidential term — while living on the right and enjoying the benefits of the political capitalist class provided by the government’s freebies.
If that were not the case, no SACP leader would dare enter the government.
But the now former communist party continues to live an existence the polar opposite to what it supposedly stands for, rendering it about as useful to society as a Swiss-cheese condom.