In the past two years, the ANC has had three life-changing shocks. One was at the 4,000 delegate Polokwane conference (December 2007), when Thabo Mbeki was ousted as ANC president (and later as the country's president). Jacob Zuma replaced him.

The second shock was that three players who had been Zuma's main backers moved into ANC territory and began throwing their weight around: Cosatu, the SACP and the ANC Youth League. The more they intruded, the more they undermined the ANC's own identity.

The third shock was the outbreak of hostilities last month in the Tripartite Alliance - leaving a belligerent ANCYL positioned (approximately) on one side and Cosatu and the SACP on the other, and the ANC somewhere in between. The bitterness of past years poured out as SACP/Cosatu leaders described how Mbeki had derided or just ignored them.

As recently as last December, Gwede Mantashe, SACP chairman and also ANC secretary general, found it necessary to recall the situation that prevailed in mid-2007: "Within the (SACP) structures there was a visible body that argued for the SACP standing for elections independently of the ANC...there was a strong drive to break the Alliance. As a result, Communists and Cosatu were pushed to the periphery and their voice almost muzzled...We then resolved to build a campaigning party. The (SACP's) Medium Term Vision was based on the understanding that communists must be in all centres of power."

The arrogance with which Cosatu/SACP claimed "co-governance" with the ANC, and appropriated the voice of the Alliance, appeared at first to cause little reaction in the semi-leaderless ANC; but beneath the surface angry rumblings were audible. The ANC still lacks a clear identity, but unexpectedly it is showing sporadic authority, whose provenance is not known. It is a cautious game.

At first, Cosatu/SACP feared a fierce backlash from Mbeki, but by all accounts he has simply collapsed psychologically and rarely surfaces now, while most of his "loyalists" lie low.

Zuma himself is ambivalent, but that's in his DNA. He attracts almost stifling support from the ANCYL (in return he nominated Julius Malema for the ANC presidency - on some distant day). The ANCYL are the attack dogs, straining to rout the Cosatu/SACP formation.

Zuma is likely to end up on the anti-Cosatu/SACP side, even if (to buy time as he builds his presidency?) he strives to play a neutral role. But as yet the conflict can be defined less as Left vs Right and more as a crude power struggle.

Just what the relationship is between the ANCYL and the parent ANC, and even with Zuma, is still to unfold. Malema for example savaged the SACP's Jeremy Cronin for taking a soft line on nationalisation, calling him a "white messiah." Neither the ANC nor Zuma would condone such an approach, so Malema, as usual, overshot the mark. Taming him and his rent-a-mob is going to be a problem.

One of Mbeki's biggest mistakes was to widen the breach between his government and the Left so that negotiations drifted out of reach, causing Cosatu and the SACP to team up - not to restructure negotiations, but to try to take over a still floundering ANC.

There is so much pent up anger in the Left these days, that there is bound to be a settling of accounts, a washing of the spears, which is where Zuma's mission should lie: to drain off the fury and reset a negotiating course with Cosatu. Along the present collision route, there are no winners, only mutually assured destruction.

The gossip in Cosatu/SACP circles is that the ANC, some BEE millionaires, and assorted white business leaders are guiding the ANCYL into the corporate marquee, treating them to kir royale and canapés, jobs and other patronage, and hoping that the ANCYL will metamorphose from puppeteers into puppets.

So far, the ANC is only part of the way to self-definition. Its periodic declarations of authority have been brief, but at least temporarily effective. Even Zuma is no longer so warlike. It is some time now since he last called for his machine-gun. However, if spears are brandished, he will find that as president he has no choice than to move among his followers and inspire them to victory. A little touch of Jacob in the night, as at Agincourt.

The ANC seems to be trying to ring fence Cosatu/SACP through the authoritarian style of the 97-year-old ANC, whereby a "structure" (say, the present 85-member National Executive Committee), issues an edict and expects obedience. If this no longer works, it is because the style is past its sell-by date.

If the ANC has a developing identity, it is its top six leadership (or most of them), supported by the NEC (or most of them) and by all those others who still have pride in the ANC as a legend and insist on it running itself.

Cosatu/SACP's latest tactical response is to try to calm the infighting, but if this fails they, like Zuma, will have to put on battle gear, accepting that their strategy to capture ANC branches (many of which are in a pitiful condition) will be blocked by the ANC using its constitutional devices. For their part, many in the ANCYL wait impatiently for this scrap.

How do the combatants measure up? Polokwane cost the ANC 33 seats in the 400-member National Assembly (NA). Before the April 22, 2009, general elections, it had 297 seats; after the elections 264. This left it still with a 65.90% vote - on the doorstep of a two-thirds majority.

Considering that Zuma polled 60% of the votes at Polokwane and Mbeki 40%, theoretically in the April 22, 2009, general elections, Zuma should have polled 60% of 66%, namely, 40% of the total vote, leaving the ANC as a minority party in the NA, unable to govern (without bringing in a partner or two).

Things did not work out in this theoretical way. First, with 264 seats in a 400-seat chamber, the ANC was still well ahead.  Second, open warfare had not yet broken out in the Tripartite Alliance. Third, the name ANC still had its magic touch among voters.

The group that broke away from the ANC, the Congress of the People (Cope - many Mbeki-ites among them), won only 30 seats in the NA (nowhere near a 40% shift), the Democratic Alliance 67, and Inkatha 18. The rest ranged from 4 seats to one or none. The total non-ANC vote was 136 - or 128 less than the ANC. The Zuma-led ANC was O.K.

However, to avoid mutually assured destruction, Zuma knows he has to move quickly. Zwelinzima Vavi of Cosatu and Blade Nzimande of the SACP (each formally in his capacity as general secretary) have since been urging their followers not to walk away from the approaching confrontation with the ANC.

It's an open call to arms: the Left says it cannot let Mbeki's "1996 Project" (orthodox economics and its accompanying political embrace) provoke progressives to "walk out of the Alliance or abandon socialism and liquidate itself." And Vavi asked: "Why should we give up now?" To do so under attack from a "minority" would be "a betrayal of the masses". By minority Vavi means Malema & Co.

Vavi's exhortation was revealing. He warned not only of the pending warfare with the ANC, but in effect acknowledged that Cosatu/SACP were fighting for their joint political life. The ANCYL's (and ANC's?) playing of the "rooi gevaar" (communist danger) card will gather momentum.

Talk of Cosatu/SACP vs the ANC in electoral contests is not just crystal-ball gazing. The next national general elections may not be due until 2014, but local government elections will be held next year (2011), and these could turn into a critical trial run.

The test for the ANC now is just how much "traditional" ground it can recover. Voters in the black townships are increasingly fed up over "non-delivery" of jobs, houses, etc., and who knows how they will vote? Last April, of 23 million who registered to vote in the elections, 7 million failed to register, and 5.4 million registered, but did not vote. How will this indifference affect the emerging struggle for the soul of the ANC?

Who would benefit most from a boycott of the 2014 elections? The ANC or the Left? Probably the Left.

The SACP's weakness is that it has only 96,000 members, although it says it wants to establish 70,000 branches by 2012 (by infiltrating and taking over ANC branches?). Before the April elections, it boasted that it had about 80 members in the National Assembly (not far from one-third of all ANC members). Everyone had piggy-backed into the NA as an ANC member without contesting a single seat in his/her own name, yet owing a first loyalty to the SACP.

How many "ANC" seats the SACP holds in the new NA has not been revealed, nor could they swing debates in it one way or another, because under proportional representation an MP can be dismissed as easily as, say, a casual labourer. As for Cosatu, its limitation is that it is a trade union federation, not a political party, and endless strikes and street demonstrations will not win it victory.

Built into the present parliamentary system are incentives to field even hopeless parties: under the Public Funding of Represented Political Parties Act of 1997, parties are subsidised in proportion to the seats they win. The ANC's loss of 33 seats (it admits) will cost it more than R80 million over the 2009-2014 parliamentary term, although black and white businessmen will help to fund the ANC (while the braver ones fund the DA).

As infighting in the Alliance spreads, so the temperature will rise in what rightly can be called black politics (the 10 million whites, coloureds and Indians will be little more than onlookers as 37 million Africans get caught up in the political struggle). In the April elections, 39 parties registered as contestants, but only four won more than four seats each - the ANC (264 seats), Democratic Alliance (67), Cope (30) and Inkatha (18).

When infighting peters out and, say, the ANC emerges on top under Zuma (my guess), what will be the next stage in South African politics? On the surface, probably, a deceptive calm, but below that - instability. Yet it is in these fissures and factions that new opportunities could open for alignments, pacts, mergers, coalitions. Moments perhaps of hope.

One reason why Zuma's ANC is likely to repel Cosatu/SACP is that "communist danger" propaganda will tap into the African nationalist (Africanist?) ethos introduced by Julius Malema when he objected to "minorities" (whites, Indians, Coloureds) being appointed to top jobs in Zuma's first cabinet. Their positions, he said, should have been occupied by Africans - all South Africans were equal, but Africans were more equal than others.

In this ethnic stratification of the ANC, the SACP has its quota of African members; but they are activists in the hostile bid to take over the ANC, and this excludes them from Malema's African ethos - which to give it its proper name is political xenophobia.

Cosatu's declared strategy is to accept the SACP not only as the country's "vanguard" party, but also as its own proxy party. Vavi even calls the SACP "our" party. By bonding with the SACP like this, Cosatu, too, becomes an outsider. It embraces the SACP as a soul mate, but communists may well turn out to be the Left's Achilles' heel.

In a recent article, Eusebius McKaiser (Centre for Democracy) argues that Only a black-led party has a hope of taking on the ANC. What he implies is that two critical issues lie in wait to ambush Helen Zille's Democratic Alliance.

First, should Zille stand aside for a black leadership or repeat the moment in Afrikaner history when the broken National Party shamefully disappeared into the ANC's hungry maw?

Second, assuming that a political pact of sorts is negotiated, how far should Zille go to accommodate ANC economic priorities and their accompanying political consequences; although of course, there would be other combinations and permutations available to the DA, each loaded with promise or the reverse.

At this point, no one has the answers, nor will they until the permutations have been played out. Then for sure the choices will be spread out across a charred battlefield.

My colleague George Palmer takes a closer look at the dilemma a possible break-up of the ANC-SACP-Cosatu Alliance poses for the leadership of the Democratic Alliance here.

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