The outspoken SACP general secretary, Solly Mapaila, says he stumbled upon credible intelligence way before the May 29 elections, exposing that the ANC secretly had a predetermined agenda to go into bed with the DA.
Mapaila said during a wide-ranging interview with Sunday World Engage last week that he subsequently warned the SACP central committee, at least two months before the polls, about the “coalition secret talks” between the ANC and DA.
The information forms the basis of the SACP’s rejection of President Cyril Ramaphosa’s government of national unity (GNU).
The warning about the “secret talks” is recorded in Mapaila’s handwritten notepad, which we have seen, on his notes of his input to the SACP central committee meeting on March 25.
Neo-liberal economic policy
In the notes, Mapaila told his SACP colleagues that the party’s alliance partner, the ANC, was talking with the DA secretly with a view to formulating a coalition government to deeply entrench the neo-liberal economic policy trajectory.
Mapaila warned on March 25: “Whatever I said, I will not go back, but I said: this has exposed South African liberals who have also sought to remove the liberation movement from political power after they used it to continue their profiteering on the carcass of the dying working class, reeling from the effects of failing new liberalism and capitalism in general.
“These challenges are now affecting the movement that is our liberation movement, seeking to keep political power.
“The secret talks between the ANC and the DA are nothing about our people but to save face for the ANC as it guarantees a neoliberal economic trajectory and profitability of capital while the DA has managed to get the support of the European counterparts and the Americans to collate a formidable opposition to the ANC, with both now uniting against the ANC.”
Coalition set-up was predetermined
It was for this reason that the SACP refused to be “hoodwinked” into the narrative that the “coalition between the ANC and DA” was also conceived after the embarrassing election outcomes for the party of OR (Oliver Reginald) Tambo.
In Mapaila’s view, the whole coalition set-up was predetermined; hence, the SACP’s attempts to discourage the ANC from going into bed with the DA were rejected.
The SACP, Mapaila went on, will never change its stance that the ANC took a “sellout position” by choosing the DA over other “better options” such as the EFF.
“The GNU establishment was a political choice of the ANC; it was an ideological choice; it was not forced, so the ANC had no obligation to go on with this GNU concept in the manner that it did,” said Mapaila.
“In any case, it was taken as a decision from where we stand to hoodwink the working people to hide the actual coalition between the ANC and the DA.
“Therefore, there is no GNU; if you like, there is a coalition between the ANC and the DA.
“And this matter is not much from our own observations; it is a confirmation by Miss Hellen Zille of the DA, who addressed the Fredrick Norman Foundation, and, in that foundation, she said so, and the ANC has never refuted this in public to her, that there is a coalition between the ANC and the DA.”
Mapaila said the ANC-DA coalition was preplanned, and anyone who pointed it out, as he did, was being dealt with harshly.
“So, this is premeditated; it is preplanned. That is why later in the process of these negotiations going on we saw the statement of intent that we were not part of draughting as the alliance.
“It was draughted by the ANC. Anyone who says it was not premeditated has himself been hoodwinked by the process. They do not know what has been happening.”
Elite pact of the liberal forces
He charged that the GNU was an elite pact of the “liberal forces” within the ANC and the DA that was formulated without proper consultation within the ANC-led tripartite alliance and the branches at large.
It was disheartening, said Mapaila, to see “ANC taking charge of this particular process of minimisation of our historic struggle against colonialism, which is against imperialism, British, American, and European domination as a whole”.
The SACP was particularly aggrieved that the ANC had effectively become the puppet of the DA in the GNU, where the latter appears to enjoy more power than it deserves.
“At the same time, we need leadership with guts, and I don’t think we have at the moment that we cannot subject a 20% party [DA] to behave as if it has got 80% and a party with 40% [ANC] behaving like it has got 20%.
“This is shocking, and of course, no justification whatsoever can make us reconsider our position until the ANC recognises the strategic error it has just committed.”
