The call for the SACP to contest the elections by itself is just an expression of an unhappy party who threatens to file a divorce because the partner is misbehaving, says the writer.
Image: Itumeleng English / Independent Newspapers
By Sankara Bizela
The special conference of the South African Communist Party is under way and there are interesting utterances in the public by its general secretary, Solly Mapaila. Among other things Mapaila is communicating is the suggested coalition of ANC and the EFF and the conviction that SACP will contest the election. These two utterances are by no means divorced from the discomfort of SACP by the so-called GNU, indeed a DA-ANC coalition. He makes it unequivocally clear that they prefer the EFF in the imagined coalition with the EFF and not with the MK Party if the DA-ANC coalition collapses.
Mapaila desires for this coalition to be unravelled because a week earlier Mapaila expressed his obnoxious feelings against this neoliberal coalition and rightly argued that the DA is their class enemy. Seemingly, for Mapaila the ANC had no business in entering an alliance with the DA, a political party that was anti-social welfare, anti-unionization of the workers, inherently anti-poor and the working class, and ultimately anti-black. The general secretary does not necessarily say these exact words, but they are loaded in his phrase, "our class enemy", angle generally the ideological character of the Democratic Alliance. So convincing is the posture of the SACP against the so-called GNU, or what Floyd Shivambu succinctly characterizes as a “Government of Neo-liberal Unity”.
However, I don't think the SACP is genuine about the call to contest the elections outside the tripartite alliance. This call has been a scare tactic to fix the ways of the ANC. It rhymes with the often-expressed view of reconfiguring the Alliance with ANC almost every time the SACP feels disregarded by the leader of the tripartite Alliance, the ANC. It's an open secret that the SACP is ambivalent about its position on the ANC because it is torn between its unwavering support for Ramaphosa and its disapproval of the DA coalition. This enacts the politico-ideological awkwardness in which the SACP finds itself as an ally of the ANC.
What now characterises the SACP is precisely cognitive dissonance because no one can fault its ideological clarity, particularly the analysis of the post-apartheid South Africa in South African Road to Socialism. Still, one is left dismayed and disillusioned by their outright support of Ramaphosa who is a tout for white capital. This precisely instantiates a left talk and right walk that ultimately presents the SACP as an ideological scarecrow. For this reason, the SACP cannot believe in its assertion that it will contest the ANC; it just wants to persuade the ANC out of the coalition with the DA.
The other possible reason for this scarecrow approach is the existence of the MK which has the potential to render the SACP redundant. The MK Party comes out as Marxist-Lennist and directly resonant with the global balance of forces through its leader, President Jacob Zuma, and his association with Brics leadership. This is evident in the opportunistic recognition of the EFF by the SACP which has never done since the inception of EFF.
Conveniently, the SACP prefers that the ANC get into a coalition with the EFF rather than the MK Party. This suggests that even the call for the SACP to contest the elections by itself is just an expression of an unhappy party who threatens to file a divorce because the partner is misbehaving. The SACP is indeed a scarecrow entrapped in the ANC's garden to scare off anyone who dares to challenge the ANC. The question that arises is, can the SACP have another identity besides a scarecrow that is useful to the ANC? What is left of the SACP when its leaders form part of the government of neoliberal policies and austerity? We will be required to look hard enough into the history of this country; perhaps, in the death of Chris Hani, we were so overwhelmed with grief and missed the death of the SACP at that moment.
* Sankara Bizela is a former SRC member at UWC, Fees Must Fall activist, and provincial spokesperson of the MK Party. He holds an MA in English Literary Studies.
** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.