Johannesburg – The knives are out for long-serving general secretary of the SA Communist Party (SACP) Blade Nzimande as the battle for the soul of the party begins to explode behind the scenes.
Sunday World can reveal that a strong grouping within the SACP, a member of the governing ANC’s tripartite alliance, wants to see Nzimande’s back when the party holds an elective conference next year.
Nzimande, who is also Minister of Higher Education, Science and Innovation, faced a palace revolt last week when the party held a meeting of its central committee (CC), the organisation’s highest decision-making body between conferences.
Some senior party leaders wanted Nzimande to step aside from his position for his handling of the feud between him and the department’s suspended head, Gwebs Qonde, who is also a senior and influential CC member.
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The war of attrition between Nzimande and Qonde has torn the party apart and become a proxy in a campaign to ensure that Nzimande does not retain the party’s helm in 2022.
Nzimande, who was first elected general secretary in 1998, has headed the organisation for 23 years.
Qonde has become the rallying point for senior leaders who are opposed to Nzimande’s continued leadership.
Blood was on the floor at last week’s CC meeting, which, once again, discussed the fierce fight between Nzimande and Qonde.
The two senior party leaders have been at loggerheads for some time now, with their tussle reaching a boiling point in July after Nzimande asked President Cyril Ramaphosa to suspend Qonde.
Nzimande told Ramaphosa that the National Skills Fund (NSF) – which falls under Qonde as the accounting officer of the department – had recorded some of the worst audit outcomes and that R2-billion expenditure could not be accounted for.
Qonde, for his part, tried to alert Ramaphosa that Nzimande allegedly told him to break the law.
Things came to a head when some senior leaders of the party last week pushed that both Nzimande and Qonde should step aside pending the finalisation of their disputes.
But the target, according to CC members who spoke to Sunday World, is Nzimande. SACP Western Cape secretary Khaya Magaxa and the party’s Eastern Cape secretary Xolile Nqatha were among those who are pushing for Nzimande to step aside.
Magaxa, Nqatha and the party’s North West secretary, Madoda Sambatha, were believed to be behind the plot to ensure that Nzimande does not lead the party for another term.
“The issue is that Nzimande has taken the party to Cyril’s pockets,” a senior CC member said.
“There are people who say Blade thinks SACP is his personal fiefdom,” the leader said, noting that Nzimande and his grouping had used the party to score cabinet posts.
Minister of Employment and Labour Thulas Nxesi and the party’s KwaZulu-Natal secretary, Themba Mthembu, were among those who defended Nzimande at the meeting.
Nxesi is said to have argued against Nzimande stepping aside, saying his feud with Qonde was an employment matter.
Party insiders said at the heart of the tug of war between Nzimande and Qonde were appointments to boards of Sector Education and Training Authorities and the allocation of resources by the NSF. Mthembu told Sunday World that there was an agenda behind the “persistent” attacks on Nzimande.
He said they were “left with no other reason than to conclude that there’s an agenda behind attacks”.
At the last congress of the party in 2017, Nzimande told journalists that he wished to relinquish the position but stayed on because of the volatile situation in the ANC at the time. Another CC member warned against the tribalism rearing its ugly head in the party.
“This is tribal mobilisation at its best because people who are attacking the GS all have origins in the Eastern Cape. We also know that they have been having secret meetings.
This is very worrying because there seems to be this competition between the people of the Eastern Cape and those from KwaZulu- Natal. Nobody wants to be led by another,” he said, adding that “it is part of a concerted campaign by the Eastern Cape to reclaim key positions of power in the state”.
Nqatha would not be drawn on the matter while Magaxa and Sambatha could not be reached for comment.
SACP spokesperson Alex Mashilo said there was no way the party could decide to have its leaders step aside because of the exercise of their workplace or labour relations rights.
“The SACP has clear decisions against the weaponization of allegations and governing step aside conditions and cannot allow information peddlers and faceless, cowardly elements to bring about any confusion in this regard,” he said. Mashilo said it was a wellknown fact that Nzimande had to be persuaded in 2017 to return to his post.
“The SACP is opposed to backwardness, including tribalism and ethnicity as examples. The party has the capacity to block such tendencies from seeking entry into its ranks and to continue its scientific socialist mobilisation to deal with and dismantle such tendencies in our society,” he said responding to allegations of tribalism in the organisation.
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