The statement earlier this month made by the ANC National Executive Committee member, Billy Masetlha, that the South African Communist Party - a body that has never stood for election under its own name - is driving to place a ‘socialist agenda' on the country through wholesale nationalisation of the economy and unionisation (i.e., factional political control) of the South African National Defence Force is an urgent wake-up call to members of the ANC and to the country.

The coordinated criticism of Masetlha from the SACP, COSATU, the ANC Youth League and the national spokesperson of the ANC, which followed immediately, was as certain as the state choreographed adulation of President Kim Jong-Il in North Korea.

Related to this is extreme concern among non-Communist members of the ANC that South Africa was within a heartbeat of having a leader of the Communist Party as Deputy President of the country - and thus within a heartbeat of the presidency itself - when a chartered jet carrying Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe made a forced landing in the Democratic Republic of Congo on 31 August.

The statement by Billy Masetlha came less than a fortnight after Deputy President Motlanthe's forced landing.

A friend of the murdered Steve Biko and national secretary of the South African Students Movement which launched the 1976 student revolt in Soweto , Masetlha was sacked by his former political comrade and friend, ex-President Thabo Mbeki, from his post as director general of the National Intelligence Agency in a factional purge in March 2006. His humiliating dismissal was a significant moment in the coalescence of the broad anti-Mbeki coalition which led to Mbeki's own humiliating defeat at the ANC national conference at Polokwane in December 2007.

Masetlha's comment about the illegitimate, unelected role of the SACP in South African political life was made with his authority as an imprisoned leader of the 1976 generation, and subsequently as former spy chief of the state.

He made specific criticism of the SACP general secretary, Dr Blade Nzimande, a member of the Cabinet as Minister of Higher Education and Training, whom the SACP had caucused to have appointed as Deputy President, rather than Motlanthe.

Masetlha stated: ‘The ANC was not founded on a socialist agenda. Socialism has no space within the ANC. The cause for our struggle has always been about national liberation. The day the ANC sings to the socialist agenda, it would be signing its death warrant.'

Calling for an inquiry into the forced landing in the DRC, the deputy defence spokesman of the Democratic Alliance, James Lorimer, stated: ‘The circumstances surrounding this flight seem very strange. It is clear the Deputy President of South Africa was put in harm's way. There is information showing he was sent on the wrong plane, on the wrong route. Those who planned this flight should be held accountable.'

There is speculation among ANC members that the forced landing of the jet - an old chartered plane not properly equipped for the long journey from Libya to South Africa - might in fact have been the outcome of an assassination attempt.

The concerns raised by Mr Masetlha draw attention again to issues discussed in an article a year ago on Politicsweb, of which a shortened version follows below (see here for the original.) The argument developed there is even more relevant today.

Mr Masetlha's concerns suggest the need for a broad alliance in defence of the constitution - a real alliance, made out in the open between independent political groupings, and with a limited and specific remit - in opposition to the fraud in which an unelected, secretive political party with a totalitarian ideology seeks to impose a programme that would bankrupt the state, cause worsening poverty and institutionalise a regime of brutal repression of dissent, as in every Communist state in history.

The murderous suppression by local ANC political structures in Durban last month of what they perceived as a rival organiser of the poor - the shackdwellers' movement, Abahlali baseMjondolo - in which a pogrom gang with apparent police toleration announced its xenophobic aim to drive out the amaPondo, gives further urgency to this.

On this issue, the Christian churches - represented by Bishop Rubin Phillip (the Anglican bishop of Natal), Archbishop Thabo Makgoba of Cape Town, the Catholic Bishops' Conference and the South African Council of Churches - have given clarion moral leadership.

A shortened version of an article on Politicsweb from one year ago, making a similar point to the argument by Billy Masetlha earlier this month

Questioning the ANC 'alliance'

Paul Trewhela

01 October 2008

There is a serious and legitimate question as to whether the African National Congress should continue to permit the South African Communist Party to exist as a separate political entity within itself.

There are very strong arguments that this was valid and indispensable in the fight to overthrow such a tough, ruthless and well positioned regime as the old apartheid order, and during the infancy of ANC government. But this is not the same as to argue that this relationship should continue indefinitely.

Members of the ANC refer to the relationship between the ANC, the SACP and COSATU as an Alliance, the ‘Tripartite Alliance'. But this is a misnomer. An alliance, or friendship, exists between formally and actually equal partners, each acting freely and independently. In this way, the war against Nazi domination of Europe and its threat of world domination between December 1941 and the overthrow of the Hitler regime in 1945 was described as having been fought between ‘the Allies', which comprised Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States. This was a real alliance.

It existed for a specific, short-term, highly focused but limited purpose. The separate political and military integrity of each of the partners to this real alliance was open and transparent at every stage in the alliance, up to its dissolution. It received open expression at conferences at Tehran and Yalta attended by the most senior political leader of each party to the alliance.

The present ANC Alliance is a misnomer, because despite South Africa being a constitutional state in which government goes to the party with the largest number of members of Parliament elected in a general election, one of the political parties to this alliance hides itself at election time. The SACP has never presented itself to the electors in South Africa as itself. It lacks independent political integrity, since voters are not permitted to see clearly in what ways the programmes of the ANC and the SACP are the same and in what ways they differ.

If these programmes were the same, why then does the SACP not dissolve itself into the ANC, or the ANC dissolve itself into the SACP? Why the need for two parties, unless there are real differences? And since there clearly are real differences between these two parties, why should these not be made plain to voters in the most important democratic event in the political life of a country, a general election? If the struggle of the ANC against the apartheid regime was not for democracy, and for properly democratic elections, then what was it for?

As it is, in a general election the SACP remains concealed to the bulk of ANC voters. This lack of candour and transparency obscures real differences and serves to treat the electorate as unworthy of plain speaking and clear thinking. Voters are not permitted to know exactly who or what they are voting for. Both the ANC and the SACP present themselves to voters, instead, as parties with a double agenda.

The voters vote ANC and they get SACP. This is to treat the voters of South Africa , and especially its black voters, with almost as much contempt as the apartheid regime. It is to suggest that the century-long struggle for the vote is not yet over, and that a real problem preventing the vote from being a real vote lies in the misnomer of the ANC-SACP ‘Alliance'.

In its reluctance to present itself to voters as a separate Party, the SACP treats the ANC as a successful ‘brand' which it promotes, but in which it conceals itself, a matter with which the ANC colludes by concealing the concealment. This is not strictly a political alliance at all, and it involves a significant degree of political manipulation of the electorate. Words and deeds do not correspond. The electorate is not told the truth. Bad faith reigns, and with bad faith... political thuggery and the threat of violence.

A very significant change of terminology took place in the ANC during the course of its existence as a banned and illegal political organisation, in the three decades between 1960 and 1990.

Up to the time of the banning of the ANC in 1960, the term ‘the Congress Alliance' referred principally to the alliance between four racially separate bodies: the ANC (representing black Africans only) as the most senior party, allied to the South African Indian Congress (formed out of the Natal and Transvaal Indian Congresses), the small Coloured People's Congress and the Congress of Democrats, a small all-white organisation providing a legal means of political activity until it was banned in 1962 mainly to white members of the then illegal and banned SACP. This was a real alliance, in which the separate organisations openly represented themselves and collaborated on common matters, acting together on a common standpoint.

There was an implied relation of the illegal SACP to all four legal bodies, since its members - who could not legally represent themselves as members of the Party - carried on open political work as members of the four wings of the still legal Alliance, just as they did in the legal South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU, the forerunner of COSATU).

Since between 1950 and 1960 the SACP was banned while the four wings of the Congress Alliance were not, the political relationships at that time between all parties concerned were comprehensible. It is a completely different affair when both the SACP and the ANC have been legal since 1990, but the SACP chooses not to represent itself independently before the voters during elections. We have here a relationship bearing comparison with the former Central African Federation (formed out of the former British colonies of Northern and Southern Rhodesia and Nyasaland, now Zambia, Zimbabwe and Malawi), which was accurately described at the time as being like a partnership between the rider and the horse. The white-ruled state of Southern Rhodesia was clearly the master in this illegitimate and unstable relationship.

As Lenin shrewdly asked about this kind of political relationship: who, whom? Who is driving whom?

In the same way, a Lenin could ask of the SACP and the ANC today: who, whom? Who is driving whom? ....

The ANC remains the indispensable political forum in South Africa in which the interests of different tribal ethnic groupings among black Africans can be peacefully mediated. The ANC has carried out this function successfully for almost a century, since its foundation as the Native National Congress in 1912. As things stand, and as things have stood for the past century, no other political organisation in the country is or has been able to carry out this prime essential task as successfully as the ANC.

True, there have often been ethnic tensions within the ANC, but these have never before reached the point of an open breach between members of different ethnic groupings within the ANC, or of leading to anything approaching substantial ethnic rioting or, still worse, a low intensity civil war. In the light of events in other African countries even as close as Zimbabwe, this has been no mean achievement.

This heritage of a century is now severely under threat, presenting a tremendous danger....

The urgent need is for clarification of South Africa 's constitutional and political relationships. A new electoral law is needed that will permit the accountability of individual MPs to voters, through the setting in place of a constituency-based electoral system for a majority of seats.

Simultaneously with this, the SACP should be required by the ANC to conduct itself as a normal political party seeking political support from the electorate in an open and not in a hidden, covert manner. Any alliance taking place between the ANC and the SACP on this basis would be a true alliance and not a fraud practised by both on the electorate.

The moment of truth for the ANC, and for South Africa, has arrived.  

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