The attacks against the General Secretary are an act of gerrymandering by EFF.

Confucius, the acclaimed Chinese philosopher once said “Don’t complain about the snow on your neighbor’s roof when your doorstep is unclean”

For two weeks the SACP has been under severe attacks from the Economic Freedom Fighters, from the issuance of statements to the penning of articles. This offensive has been directed to the General Secretary of the Party, as a political head and a figure of the Party. As a consequence of this scorch-earthed political assault, social networks have been abuzz with this trending and media excitements in prime slots.

I am not interested in qualifying the credentials of the General Secretary in struggle. On Mandela day, the Chairperson of the ANC in KwaZulu Natal who also spent a lot of time in Natal Midlands in those tough times narrated his traceable history that we all know and that ANC don’t need EFF to force it on its leader’s biographies.

This was later confirmed by the anger shown by a senior ANC leader, comrade Shakes Cele, an ANC MP, who was the first ANC Regional Secretary for the ANC Midlands in 1991 under the Chairmanship of Harry Gwala. That collective leadership included Nzimande.

Dr. Mike Sutcliffe, has gone back to the mid-80s working relationship with Nzimande both in the academia and in the United Democratic Front.

But the point is that, why must we have to prove struggle credentials of our leaders; no less to the two year old party. Why Floyd Shivambu whom I consider as very sane would degenerate to the abyss of intellectual sinkhole?

By his impish article in the Sunday Independent, he has committed what the French called a trahison des Clercs for which an average intellectual persons will forever judge him by this historical lobotomized error. For me, Shivambu’s questioning of Nzimande’s bona fide is similar to a son asking his father whether he was a Casanova before he got his mother in later years. It can only be someone who is a social philistine that can go to these lengths; a jinx in the phalanx.

But in the bigger scheme of things, we have always knew that the agenda to defile and delegitimize the Communist Party as a genuine party of the working class had long been in earnest. There has been consistent trials before from other voices to unleash missiles to the Communist Party. And so, this episode is but one in the series that had came before and some that are to follow. 

The Party has no interest of its own but of the class. Our legitimacy to be the vanguard of the working class cannot be discounted by sectional voices or formations but by the class itself. The motley leitmotif that is perpetuated since 2002 (Josiah Jele and Jabu Moleketi) briefing notes, that, we are no longer an old Party of Kotane has reached its sell-by date.

We don’t exist in order to satisfy the description of the armchairs who are today defining for us what a Party of class today should be doing or not doing. These naysayers are even telling us how the Party should be looking like. For us, all of this is merely melodic devoid of lyrics.

The resurgence of besieging the Party by the bellicose Economic Freedom Fighters is part of weakening the solid political standing of the SACP in society. But also, it is a jibe directed to a Party which has been projected by some opposition parties and FW De Klerk foundation as influential to ANC policy outlook and direction. This is all the more critical in the context of the current policy engagements within the alliance on the shared strategic perspective on the “Second phase of radical transformation” with its locus in the economic transformation.

And so, the strategy from EFF is that of gerrymandering so that they are projected as a new Left that has supplanted the Party. Fortunately, people of South Africa have never been easily misled. To the extent that this youth party is strongly prone to venality, politics of slender and invectives; a party built on foundations of tit for tat to the ANC than solid market gap identification in the political market, to that extent, it cannot sustain its oxygen beyond the next elections. If it succeed, it will be under life support like its fellow travelers, UDM and COPE. The first tests is next year local government elections. We will be walking over causalities and doing the stocktaking.

Our task as the Party is to pay a particular attention to the youth of this country who are in the fringes of economic activities and thereby trapped in deep-seated social malaise. It is this youth that (some are graduates in the oversupplied disciplines in the labour market and cannot find employment) become vulnerable to all political winds that appear, at surface, radical and militant. In reality, this radicalism, beyond the sound and fury, is an act of political subterfuge.

Having said the above, I know that Economic Freedom Fighters would not agree with us. They are in a mode of self-righteousness, spirited brinkmanship with everybody and the unmitigated radical steamrolling like the Jacobins group after the French revolution. And they believe that, for what they stand for, they are right and we are all wrong. For them, the Party has betray its cause. And so, I prefer not to venture in scratching that surface. Frantz Fanon once said:

“Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance. And because it is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that doesn't fit in with the core belief.”

― Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

It's only the virtue of history that will absolve us as the SACP on our correctness.

Khaye Nkwanyana is the member of the SACP Provincial Executive Council for KwaZulu Natal.