Renewal lessons for the ANC in current degeneration of the Sandinista National Liberation Front

13 July 2023

“The FSLN no longer exists. It’s just an electoral party to put Ortega in power again.” These words from the legendary Nicaraguan poet and liberation theologian Ernesto Cardenal should really cut deep for those of the left who grew up inspired by the Nicaraguan Revolution led by Daniel Ortega and the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) in the late seventies and throughout the eighties.

In the 1980s, Nicaragua, with its Sandinista revolutionaries who had taken over power from the US-backed Somoza family dictatorship, was a country that drew strong solidarity and support from leftists the world over, from both the developed and the developing world, with people mobilising to bring resources to this leftist project so that the massive literacy campaign would be a success and health centres as well as schools would be built.

The Nicaraguan Revolution had such a romance to it that many young western leftists even moved to the country to contribute towards ensuring its success, many even moved just to pick coffee beans (one of Nicaragua’s best exports) in order to support the revolution in its progressive aims.

But alas, as we approach the annual Sandinista Revolution Day on July 19, Nicaragua’s current plight and the state of the revolutionary party, the FSLN, reminds one of the exceptional literary work titled, The Autumn of the Patriarch, by renowned Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez, where those who rose up against a dictatorship ended up becoming like the very thing they stood up against, or as so succinctly put by Albert Camus, the 20th century existentialist author and philosopher, “every revolutionary ends up either by becoming an oppressor or a heretic.”

This is because Daniel Ortega, the revolutionary leader and hero, has undergone a “Damascus Road” type conversion (in the opposite manner in this instance) from being an uncompromising revolutionary to an oppressive tyrant, ala Karl Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, where Marx described the return to Napoleonic dictatorship in the coup of 1851 as, “first as tragedy, then as farce.”

Most of the Sandinista companeros who led the revolution alongside Daniel Ortega have now been ostracised, jailed, tortured, brutalised and forced into exile by the government led by Ortega and his wife, Vice President Victoria Murillo, who are busy turning the country into a family dynasty in the same manner as the Somoza family dictatorship that the Sandinistas toppled in 1979 used to run Nicaragua. In the poignant words of Italian author Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, “everything must change so that everything can stay the same.”

Legendary revolutionary leaders such as Dora Maria Tellez, a famed former guerilla leader and Health Minister during the Sandinista administration in the 1980s; Sergio Ramírez Mercado, former Vice President of Nicaragua in the 1980s and esteemed writer; poet and novelist Gioconda Belli who joined the struggle in the 1970s and became the International Press Liaison Officer of the FSLN in the 1980s; the renowned guerrilla commander Hugo Torres who tragically died whilst being imprisoned by Ortega and the Sandinistas in 2022; Luiz Felipe Perez Caldera; Luis Carrion and Leonor Arguello, just to name a few, long ago gave up on the party and in fact ended up forming the Sandinista Renovation Movement, which was meant to be an alternative that revived the revolutionary project, as opposed to the degeneration and decay that they had been witnessing in the FSLN.

The decay of the FSLN did not happen overnight however, as the party began to create a capitalist elite during its time in power in the 1980s, which used the party to accumulate resources and entrench itself within the comprador elites of Nicaragua, moving the party away from its mass-based political programme, despite maintaining the revolutionary rhetoric. To borrow from Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, the degeneration of the FSLN in Nicaragua happened, “gradually, then suddenly.”

With the party losing power in 1990, leadership squabbles and personality politics became the order of the day, so that, by the time the party eventually came back to power under Ortega in 2007, which it retains until today, the revolutionary fervour that had existed within the party was no more. In fact Ortega and the party had been so captured by the interests of the traditional oligarchy and co-opted into its agenda that they made a series of compromises and pacts with conservatives and those on the right in order to come back to power, that one could say that the FSLN was no longer a party of the left in reality, even though the revolutionary lingo and propaganda remained. What remained, very sadly, was the philosophy of a revolutionary party without the revolutionary ethos and conviction.

All that was left by then was a party that exists to promote and further sectional interests and from that position, the move by Ortega and his wife towards autocracy and a familial dictatorship was a logical leap. Mexican poet Efrain Huerta put it well, “As for my old teachers of Marxism I don’t understand them: some are in prison others are in power.”

In reflecting on all of this, I was reminded of the words uttered by Dora Maria Tellez in 1985, when the Sandinistas were at their revolutionary peak, “elected office is not more important than what one can contribute” and I started going back to an interview that she once gave in 1991, just after the Sandinistas had lost power, in order to see if there could be any lessons drawn from the decay of the FSLN, for the ANC in its current malaise, even as it seeks renewal for itself.

In this interview, Dora Maria Tellez makes a few very thought-provoking and challenging observations, about the state of the FSLN after it had lost power in 1990 and what she felt needed to be done going forward, which the FSLN clearly did not heed and as a result, despite coming back to power in 2007 and still being in power today, there is nothing revolutionary about what the party stands for.

Decay of a revolutionary party is a process, it happens over time and not just overnight, so my position is that there are some things that we can take from Dora Maria Tellez’s 1991 interview that can help the ANC in its quest for renewal, so that it does not end up as a party still in power, like the FSLN, but having lost its revolutionary essence and thrust.

- The first observation I found quite interesting, was her perspective on vanguardism and the vanguard revolutionary party, which becomes the leader and know-it-all visionary of society, once it comes to power, something which she seemed to suggest had been a necessity when the FSLN was fighting to bring down an immoral dictatorship, but actually became a handicap once they took over power. In her own words:

“You know what the problem with revolutions is? The vanguard concept assumes it is always correct and has the right interpretation of reality, that actions it takes are reasonable and fair in and of themselves. And since it is assumed that a leader occupies a given position due to a process of natural selection, by some nearly magical process this vanguard model takes the leaders to be the keepers of absolute truth. But nobody owns truth; that's the first problem…

That's the other problem. It was one thing to be the vanguard during the struggle against the dictatorship. But whether or not the concept of a vanguard in power is useful is an entirely separate issue—that's the debate. Is a vanguard party still applicable once state power has been taken? I don't have the answer, but at this stage I think not, because being a vanguard presumes that society is in full agreement with what you're doing, and I don't know if that state of affairs exists.”

I really wonder what my ANC comrades, who view the party as the strategic centre and leader of society would have to say about this perspective from a seasoned, credible, tried, tested and proven revolutionary? To close off on this first point by quoting her again, “after the triumph, vanguardism became a problem and the serious thing is that it continues to this day.”

- On negative electoral outcomes for the party, this is what she had to say:

“When we lost the elections—a phenomenon that was perceived as a defeat—the initial tendency people had was to look back on the FSLN's "happy times," like marriages that have problems and dream of the courting period. The only way to save a marriage is to completely renew the relationship, looking forward. Longing for the brilliant days of Sandinismo carries with it a nostalgia for vanguardism which, as I've said, played its role and was indispensable during the dictatorship. But its history after 1979 has to be looked at very carefully.

All of this arises from the same confusion. We had hegemony, but we subordinated party objectives to the interests of the state institutions. Moreover, these state institutions even came to manage the interests of the mass-based and party organisations. The institutional agenda ended up imposing itself over party and popular interests.”

The party was too stuck in the past, she seemed to be saying. The obsession with the glory days and its majestic history was actually holding the party back from actually renewing itself. Forward-looking and forward-thinking is what is required to renew the party, as opposed to eloquent reminiscing about the glorious past.

Also, the party had become so consumed with the state and governance, that in the end, state institutions and agendas ended up superseding and overriding the party political programme and mass interests. She talked about a hegemony of statist thought rather than party-based thought, being one of the major problems. Negative electoral outcomes should actually force the party to look forward and stop taking itself back to its glorious past, she seemed to be implying.

- On the problem of linking being part of elected political leadership with deployment into state institutions and senior state positions, this is what she had to say (I know many of my comrades will not like this much, but here goes):

“The FSLN was para-statist and people ended up linking political leadership with state posts; that's why nobody could understand why a member of the National Directorate might not have a state post. But political leadership is political leadership; for example, Ricardo Morales Avilés was a university professor and a member of the National Directorate. But given this equation [political leadership equals government post], it was and continues to be unimaginable to think of a member of the National Directorate without a post. They had to be in some ministry, to have something! If that wasn't the case, there was real anguish: they needed something—a trinket to control, some institution, no matter what size.”

Here she seemed to be hammering home the point that being elected into senior political positions within the organisation (the National Directorate was the FSLN’s equivalent of the ANCs NEC), does not mean one needs to necessarily be deployed into the state or given senior responsibilities within the state, one can stay exactly where they were before being elected and still contribute significantly and meaningfully to political leadership within the party.

One can be elected into senior leadership of the party and not even be in the state, she seemed to be saying. Wow, wouldn’t that radically alter leadership within the ANC? I know many comrades are not happy with me right now, but a party authentically seeking renewal, really ought to take some of these thought-provoking suggestions seriously into account.

- On the quest for state power at all costs, in seeking to advance the revolution, this is what she had to say, “Power? What's power? Power is the correlation of forces. Who says that now the revolution can't continue going forward? What happens is that the journey of revolution in Nicaragua is extremely complex. It's feasible that this revolution will continue to go forward, as long as we set aside the obsession for power as a fetish and understand it as a means, not as an end in itself.

Personally, the Nicaraguan peasantry's struggle has gone beyond my expectations; although it was counterrevolutionary, it took on the FSLN's political program. It's a revolutionary program, strategic for Nicaragua: the democratisation of land tenure and ownership; get rid of the oligarchy, of landowners, of unproductive big estates. FSLN's no longer in power? But that's revolution!! And if you don't get that, you're lost, you go on with the obsession for power as a fetish, an end in itself. Who says that revolution can't make advances under these new conditions? I firmly believe it can.”

Controversially, for many who believe that the ANC should do everything it can to retain state power in order to advance the revolution, even entering into compromising coalitions with non-aligned political formations, she seems to be saying that in fact, revolution can be carried forward outside of state power, even when the revolutionary party has been losing the electoral majority or seen it dwindling.

Basically, for her, revolution is not whether the revolutionary party is in power or not, but whether what it has put in place in terms of its political programmes and actions can outlive its stint in power and actually become entrenched within society. It is whether the political party has managed to fundamentally shift the balance of forces in terms of power and economic relations, which determines if there is revolution or not, not whether the revolutionary party is in power or not. Hmmm, food for thought I hear you say? Fundamental change in economic and power relations determines whether there is a revolution or not, whether the revolutionary party is still in power or not.

- On the drive for democratisation of society, whilst maintaining a top-down, Stalinist internal party culture, here are her views:

“It's true that we had a pluralistic vision, but our concept of a party in power didn't correspond to it. We organised two elections, but still maintained the logic of one single party, with the conception of eternal power. We wanted to democratise the country, but we functioned internally in an eminently military style. It was all so contradictory!”

Hmmm, what of concepts like democratic centralism and ideas of the ANC “governing till Jesus comes”, I wonder, in light of her thinking? Should the internal party culture not change, in light of the democratisation objectives? I was just wondering?

- Finally, there is so much more to write about on this particular topic but I daresay that this will have to suffice for now, what of the idea of the ANC needing to lead and direct every segment and sector of society? Here are some of her thoughts: “Modernisation means going beyond vanguardism, becoming a party with a democratic vision and practice that accepts, understands and is thankful for the existence of an organised civil society, considering it an indispensable factor for its own life.”

True freedom for society would mean being free even from dependency on the revolutionary party, as long as the levels of consciousness within that society have been adequately raised, because as she herself said, “The revolution is a phenomenon of consciousness, not of the state. Revolution is strictly a phenomenon of consciousness, and that's what makes it different from capitalism. If there's consciousness, it functions; if not, it doesn't.”

One would hope that this contribution, looking at the Sandinistas to try and identify potholes for the ANC to avoid in its quest towards renewal, would stimulate even more discussion and debate, not just within the ANC, but within SA society at large. The lessons of the decay of the FSLN in Nicaragua are that, even after it has lost power, the revolutionary party can still make a comeback and take over state power again, but in the instance where it has been decaying without any recourse over a period of time, it can easily take the nation down with it.

Basically, a healthy ANC is in the interests of all South Africans folks, mark my words!!!

Mugabe Ratshikuni works for the Gauteng provincial government; He is an activist with a passion for social justice and transformation. He is branch Treasurer of the ANC Ward 115, Florence Mophosho branch, Greater Johannesburg Region. He writes here in his personal capacity.