An article in one of the country’s leading newspapers titled “Consider the implications: ANC officials warn SACP not to contest elections” distressed me.
According to the article’s opening, “The ANC’s national officials have warned the SACP it could suffer the same fate as former President Jacob Zuma.”
It is unfortunate – if this statement is true, that the national leadership of the ANC has chosen to oversimplify this issue.
These utterances are worrisome, particularly as the entire Mass Democratic Movement is traversing a very difficult epoch, confronted with a myriad of socio-political and economic challenges.
SACP is not MKP
Firstly, Jacob Zuma founded the MKP on his own accord, outside the conventions of the Alliance’s historical mission.
In fact, the formation of the SACP, which dates back to 1921, was focused on liberating the working class from capitalist exploitation and racial inequality.
The latter would later find expression through working in close proximity with the African National Congress.
There was a boisterous beginning to this relationship, with ANC comrades rejecting SACP ideals and objectives.
Moses Kotane, however, played a key role in fostering a strong working relationship between the two organisations.
Kotane, the longest-serving SACP General Secretary and ANC Treasurer General for a decade, was a revered movement leader.
He understood both the endogenous and exogenous existence of both organisations through what can be defined as the unity of the opposite.
Kotane understood that whilst the ANC is pursuing a liberation struggle, its constituents are poor, disenfranchised, and excluded from the commanding heights of the economy, comprising largely African people.
So he set out on a lonesome journey to mobilise resources for ANC’s underground machinery, train its combatants, mobilise mass support and build international solidarity.
Through his efforts, the country’s first democratic elections were held in 1994 and the Constitution was adopted in 1996. Our forebears envisioned a society that would be non-racial, non-sexist, democratic, and prosperous through the adoption of the Freedom Charter in 1955.
Dual membership not an issue
In light of Kotane, it is unthinkable for some in the ANC high echelons to make dual members choose between the two organizations. In contrast to MKP, these comrades have not formed a rival organisation outside the Alliance.
In such an instance, as is the case with Zuma and those who followed him to MKP, the Constitution of the ANC succinctly calls for their automatic expulsion. But, in contesting elections, the SACP is not seeking to wrestle power from the ANC.
The SACP has its own historical mission, which is to achieve an egalitarian society, while the ANC, in its strategy and tactics, defines its relationship with capital as complementary and contradictory. Simply put, these two ends pursue the National Democratic Revolution through different yet unitary routes.
The SACP has overtime maintained the sacrosanct nature of the alliance to ensure the total liberation of our masses from the shackles of poverty, unemployment, and inequality through policies biased in favour of the working class.
However, since the advent of our democracy, a comprador bourgeois trajectory has filtered through our liberation discourse, derailing and frustrating every little effort aimed at seeing to the success and full implementation of the National Democratic Revolution.
SACP exposed the rot
During this period, it was the SACP that exposed the tenderpreneurship phenomenon for what it is—a political trajectory that the party defined as having entrenched and amplified corruption, maladministration and oligarch tendencies.
Similarly, during Zuma’s reign of terror, a new culture occupied centre stage, where SACP comrades, while holding ANC membership, were purged after raising the alarm about the looting of state coffers through what would later come to be known as state capture. Another diabolical phenomenon exposed by the SACP.
The beneficiaries of this malice, who at the time concocted “Voodoo Economic” concepts such as Radical Economic Transformation and White Monopoly Capital, through Bell Pottinger, a British propaganda machine, have now invented a diatribe of insults targeted at the SACP and the position it has taken to contest elections.
It is therefore inconceivable that some of these comrades who are likening the SACP contestation of local government elections to MKP, a party founded on ethnic mobilisation and chauvinism, have now developed a moral high ground centred on what defines the historical mission of the alliance and the subsequent position of the SACP to contest elections. As the SACP, we are committed to the Alliance’s unity and reconfiguration and the ANC’s renewal.
Mutual benefit
Both organisations’ National Political Councils and their respective National Officials are diligently striving to establish a shared understanding on issues of mutual concern. Clearly, this has antagonised the Mabahamabe Brigade.
The assertion by President Cyril Ramaphosa during the Joe Slovo Commemoration that “the ANC needs the SACP, and the SACP needs the ANC” is given credence by the SACP Special National Congress, where the party resolved to contest elections without leaving the Alliance and not breaking the dual membership principle.
I am the Provincial Secretary of the SACP, and an MPL of the ANC. Therefore, it’s wrong for some in the ANC to try to dictate who is SACP and ANC. We refuse to choose loyalty or declare anger against either SACP or ANC.
Madoda Sambatha is the Provincial Secretary of the SACP in Moses Kotane Province/North West.
