With the SACP having (semi-) broken from the nationalist cover of the ANC, the question is ‘why’ and what are its implications? Part One in a two-part series.
Fundamental questions have been lost in the considerable media attention given to the South African Communist Party’s (SACP) unexpected decision to break from the cover of the ANC by independently contesting the 2026 national local government elections.
Apart from whether the SACP has the boldness to fulfil its pledge, little — if any — attention has been given to the most important question of all: Why has it taken them so long to move outside the shadow of the ANC?
What makes 2024 so special for them? How, indeed, does 2024 differ from what was already known 32 years earlier, in 1992?
Beyond academic interest, a better understanding of these issues could have important practical applications that could reshape South Africa’s political landscape in ways that take us beyond the SACP itself.
Getting to this understanding, however, unavoidably means a closer look at the SACP since 1994.
Battered partner syndrome
The evidence suggests that the leadership of the Communist Party was prepared to accept the humiliations of the Government of National Unity (GNU), along with the ANC’s public acknowledgement of their irrelevance. What forced the SACP to remember their historic purpose with its need for their independent political status will be addressed in due course.
Following our May National Election of 2024, I wrote a 4-part article for Daily Maverick and AIDC’s Amandla, which attempted to make sense of what had just happened. I asked whether the GNU’s mid-term failures I predicted would be sufficient to shatter the delusions that have kept the SACP desperately hanging on to its marriage to the ANC.
With the ANC having most publicly begun an affair with the DA, the still to be answered question I posed was whether the ANC’s unfaithfulness would be enough for the ditched SACP to finally file for divorce.
My answer then — in late July — was a definite and immediate “NO”. Notwithstanding the SACP’s dalliance with the DA, I allowed for the possibility of a qualified “Yes”.
Given the SACP’s December announcement of its determination to stand as an independent party in the 2026 municipal elections, the new issue for this article is whether my original answers now need to be revisited.
My current NO answer begins with the SACP statement of 5 June 2024, which was to be the first of many similar ones: “To maintain strategic consistency, the SACP is against seeking a coalition arrangement with the right-wing, DA-led anti-ANC neo-liberal forces…
“The votes and number of seats from the May… elections offer coalition permutations, with the features of a developmental and transformation purpose-driven ANC-led Government of National Unity, excluding both the DA and the MKP.”
The ANC ignored the SACP’s alternative. Undeterred, the SACP’s General Secretary, Solly Mapaila, offered a minority government option, an option, moreover, that fed into its never-weakened illusionary image of itself as being “revolutionary”: “With the minority government, we can rule and put the revolutionary agenda clearly on the table. The forces of neoliberalism of the DA as well as the forces of distraction of counter-revolutionary forces symbolised by MK must be equally rejected.”
It, too, was ignored by the ANC. It ought to have been the final humiliation, it was not even consulted by the ANC. But the SACP still refused to read the message. With GNU a done deal, the SACP tried one last desperate move.
Solly Mapaila personally advised President Cyril Ramaphosa not to hurry when making his appointments to his Cabinet. Being assured by Ramaphosa that he would heed his advice, he was “surprised” soon afterwards to receive a message inviting him and others to Ramaphosa’s presidential residence in Pretoria, where Ramaphosa was to announce his Cabinet without even the pretence of having consulted the SACP, or Cosatu, the third member of the supposed Tripartite Alliance.
But none of this mattered to the SACP leadership. In early August 2024, it gave early notice of what it meant by its claimed critical acceptance of the GNU with its assurance that it would not oppose it.
By December, its general secretary was making its position even clearer, in an interview with the Mail & Guardian under the headline: “SACP: We are contesting the elections, but not the ANC”. Moreover it chose not to recall any of its various members who held ministerial positions on behalf of the ANC in all three spheres of government.
In Tom Eaton’s pithy words, it’s “like being invited to a party… and genuinely believing the host will be gutted when you don’t show up”.
All this affirms this was no ordinary battered partner syndrome. Far from being contrite and promising never to do it again, the ANC took umbrage at the very thought of any impropriety. ANC Secretary-General Fikile Mbalula was “insulted” by the very notion that the ANC could have sold out to the DA.
And he was right! Selling out was not needed, since the neoliberal policies of the GNU are the ANC’s unbroken policies since the early 1990s.
The ‘1996 class project’
The what?
Not even ChatGPT’s free AI could accurately crack the consciously coded meaning of the phrase, or say when it was first used.
It was coined by the SACP, probably by Jeremy Cronin, the then deputy general secretary, to refer to both the ANC’s ditching of the vaguely social-democratic Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) – which was the ANC’s policy platform for the 1994 election – for the World Bank/International Monetary Fund approved Growth, Employment and Redistribution (Gear) policy, formulated in secret, and introduced by Nelson Mandela, along with the injunction that it was “non-negotiable”.
What the SACP could never bring itself to accept — and the reason for the opaqueness of the “1996 class project”, is not Gear’s connections with the Washington Consensus or the conscious exclusion of both the SACP and Cosatu from any involvement in what went into Gear, but the neoliberalism that infuses Gear.
Worse still, was that the open champion of neoliberalism was the official Parliamentary opposition, the then Democratic Party before it became the Democratic Alliance in 2003.
Additionally, the DP/DA was — and is — the Alliance’s and some left-wing circles’ symbolic representative of both those most privileged by apartheid white South Africa, along with its alleged racism.
Accepting the ANC-led new South Africa as capitalist was not a problem for the SACP. This was not because of it being a “sellout”, as is so often charged by the party’s left critics, but mainly because a capitalist South Africa was anticipated in its own two-stage theory of the transition to socialism.
But accepting the ANC’s embrace of neoliberalism was a step too far for the SACP. It was okay for the identified enemy — the DP/DA — to be the public champion of neoliberalism, but not the ANC, the leader of the Tripartite Alliance, that, moreover, both the SACP and Cosatu deceived themselves into thinking was in any way accountable to the Tripartite Alliance. Much easier just to bury the reality in the obscurantism of the “1996 class project”.
Both the SACP and Cosatu took comfort in the thought that the ANC was still bound by the objectives of the National Democratic Revolution, the fantasy that the capitalist-committed ANC would also somehow be part of the transition to socialism, under the leadership of the working class.
But even the delusionary consolation of the National Democratic Revolution had to be put on temporary hold. The SACP had first to survive Thabo Mbeki, the new president after Mandela. Mbeki was determined to be “rid of this turbulent” pest, the SACP, as King Henry II of England might have said had he been around.
Mbeki’s assault on the SACP as ‘ultra-left’
While Mbeki was ready to call himself a Thatcherite, after Margaret Thatcher, the British prime minister who, together with Ronald Reagan, led the neoliberal takeover of much of the world, and even though he eschewed the use of political labels, especially ultra-left, to isolate political opponents, he used much of his 2002 Presidential Opening Statement at the ANC’s 2nd National Policy Conference to launch a bitter attack on what he considered to be the SACP’s ultra-leftism.
A flavour of what Mbeki said merits repeating: having mentioned some of the SACP’s public unhappiness about Gear, he continued: “The left sectarian factions we have spoken of accuse us of precisely the agenda propagated by the Democratic Party. In this context, they never attack this party of reaction.
“Instead, on the basis of a false presentation of what is happening in our country, they have chosen to direct their offensive against our movement rather than the political and other domestic and international forces that, objectively, constitute an obstacle to the achievement of the goals of the National Democratic Revolution.
“Accordingly, they use all manner of falsifications to transpose the agenda of the Democratic Party on to the ANC. In this regard, they do not hesitate to tell blatant untruths about everything.
“The resultant false characterisation of our movement and its policies enables the left sectarian factions to explain why they wage a struggle against the national liberation movement, while being perfectly comfortable with the reality that, in this regard, they occupy the same trench with the anti-socialist forces which they claim are their sworn enemies.”
Hence, its inability to additionally process other things Mbeki said, in the bluntest fashion, in his conference address of 2002. For good measure, Mbeki offers a further reason for the SACP’s alleged reprehensibility: “The issue of the offensive of the ultra-left against our movement is also important because this ultra-left works to implant itself within our ranks. It strives to abuse our internal democratic processes to advance its agenda, against policies agreed by our most senior decision-making structures… It hopes to capture control of our movement and transform it into an instrument for the realisation of its objectives.”
It was against this (meritless) diatribe — and similar actions — that a then-leading member of the SACP was proud to tell me at the time that the SACP wasn’t going to fall for Mbeki’s game by doing anything so rash as to break with the ANC.
As the SACP’s current General Secretary, Solly Mapaila, was to say some 20 years later of the GNU: “No, we’re not serving divorce papers” on the ANC .
By 2024, the SACP didn’t even have the comfort of its self-deceiving National Democratic Revolution to sustain its marriage with the ANC.
The SACP finally accepts the National Democratic Revolution is a delusion
As a brief reminder, the National Democratic Revolution (NDR) was an essential component of the SACP’s two-stage theory of the transition to socialism that dates back to the 1920s. The “D” part of the NDR was the democratic stage during which the nationally and racially oppressed national (African) bourgeoisie could grow and develop in ways hitherto denied them. It formed the basis of the multi-class (and in the case of the SACP non-racial) joint struggle against white supremacy both before and during apartheid.
Unlike the Chinese Communist Party of the 1920s, which led the struggle for national independence, the South African one completely submerged itself into the national Struggle.
In any event, the joint ANC/SACP Struggle against apartheid did achieve the first fully representative national election of 1994.
That should have put paid to any notion of a liberated African bourgeoisie having anything positive to contribute to the struggle for socialism, let alone lead the struggle. After all, Mbeki had announced, in the bluntest possible terms, that the ANC of 1992 was no longer the ANC sympathetic to any semblance of socialism: “Our movement, like all other national liberation movements throughout the world, is, inherently and by definition, not a movement whose mission is to fight for the victory of socialism. Had there been a merger of the national liberation and socialist goals in our country, with the ANC being both a national liberation movement and a party of socialist change, there would have been no historical need for a Communist Party, and no need for the existence today of our ally, the South African Communist Party.”
Accepting this stark reality, however, was too challenging for the SACP.
Far less in your face than Mbeki’s 2002 comments, though still plainly evident for those willing to see, was that even before the 1994 election, Mbeki was no longer the Mbeki of the SACP’s Central Committee.
In 1984, responding to a respected academic’s accusation that the ANC “had betrayed its socialist principles and sold out to the bourgeoisie” [Gevisser, M. 2007. Thabo Mbeki; The dream deferred, p.42] Mbeki stated that: “... the ANC is not a socialist party. It has never pretended to be one, had never said it was, and is not trying to be one.”
Gevisser further notes that by the time Mbeki landed in Cape Town in April 1990, he’d already rejected any notion of a lurch towards socialism, as many in the movement’s leadership with SACP ties wanted. “And,” he concludes, “it was to prove very… decisive given the role Mbeki was to play in directing the post-apartheid economy. His membership of the SACP lapsed.”
But the SACP remained tied to the ANC, despite the absence of any pledges that the battering would stop. After all, there was still the chance of “reconfiguring” the Tripartite Alliance. Both the SACP and Cosatu needed something to give some relevance to the alliance.
Reconfiguration — the SACP’s last hope
In a YouTube interview with Solly Mapaila in December 2024, he acknowledged: “We felt we needed to change the manner in which the alliance functions in the term that we call the reconfiguration of the alliance. This practically means that we needed to rebuild a new structure, a new strategy on how to approach collective decision-making consensually, and so forth. The reconfiguration of the alliance is also one of those terms that have actually been there for a really long time. This call, this plea, has been there for a really long time.” (My edited version of the verbatim transcript.)
The “really long time” began in 2002. Other landmarks, as detailed by Mapaila, include 2005, 2007 and 2019, when the alliance leadership finally released an agreed joint document on the nuts and bolts of reconfiguration. Even though a joint document had already gone through the ANC’s National Working Committee and Top Six, Mapaila continued, when it came to implementing the laboriously agreed document, the ANC insisted it had to go through a National General Council.
The intervention of Covid-19 meant a further delay to the 2022 National Conference where it was supposed to be submitted. But it wasn’t. Instead, contradictory allusions to it were made but without acknowledging that (the ANC leadership) had (already) signed it off.
Thus, Mapaila adds, in 2023, the SACP was surprised when the ANC developed a new document that criticised the SACP’s notion of reconfiguration as an idea to liquidate the ANC. So, the ANC produced a new document called the Renewal of the Alliance, in which it even criticise its own document, mistakenly thinking it was the one they signed off on in 2022.
“This worries us a bit,” Mapaila acknowledged, “because how can leadership structures at the level of the NEC not go through their own documents? So, what does that say to you about the quality of leadership in the NEC? … What does it say to the Communist Party?”
Indeed, what!
What is clear is that none of the above has much to do with why I think the SACP surprised itself by its decision to step outside the shadow of the ANC.
But, having done so, the SACP’s general secretary is now able to acknowledge what the party hitherto chose not to see — like the fiction of reconfiguring the alliance, as we have just seen.
Or, Mapaila’s pointed dismissal of the GNU as “a political deal between the ANC political elites and the Right led by the DA” (Sunday Times 20 October 2024).
Hence, too, in the previously mentioned YouTube interview, Solly Mapaila had this to say about:
- Neoliberalism: “When you look at the performance of these people in the Cabinet, their perspectives are not different from those of the ANC leaders. In other words, the ANC embracing neoliberalism, which is a system of the modern capitalist economy.”
- The National Democratic Revolution: “The National Democratic Revolution… is a revolutionary programme to end colonialism… the oppression of capital over the people… racism and gender inequality and class inequality. But the source of the problem has been European colonialism and later on apartheid, so once you have a leadership (the ANC!) that collaborates with this particular system, then they have no interest to free their people from any of these interrelated problems.”
No less significant than what the party is now able to say is what it still can’t bring itself to mention. Such is its dependence on the ANC, that, like the most battered of spouses, it can’t even say anything when the abuser takes the most reprehensible of actions against others.
The SACP (like Cosatu) has chosen silence as its response to the 78 corpses pulled from the Stilfontein mine besieged by the police’s months-long blockade of food, water and medical supplies to the miners. Three of Ramaphosa’s ministers authorised this inhumane callousness, the objective of which, according to one of the ministers, was to “smoke them out”.
Shortly after this most un-Ubuntu of strategies, Ramaphosa, calling for the UN Charter to be respected, insisted that the UN “must be capable of combating the use of hunger as a weapon of war, as we are now seeing in some parts of the world, including in Gaza and Sudan”.
It finally took the intervention of the courts to remind the government of its oath to uphold the Constitution — if not its humanity — by lifting the blockade.
Ramaphosa’s ANC January 8 Statement
Apart from the “ blah! blah and blah” with which Greta Thunberg dismissed COP28, there are a few takeaways from Ramaphosa’s 39 minute, 5,773 word speech on 11 January 2025.
The ANC leadership, having correctly interpreted the SACP’s bombast about its “independence”, has decided to humour it. With minimum effort, the ANC has concluded that its ally — and, by extension, Cosatu — can be retained within the alliance. Doing so has the further benefit of minimising losing votes to the SACP and possible Cosatu Alliance, should the SACP go ahead with its public declarations of 24 December 2024 regarding the 2026 municipal elections.
Hence, apart from Ramaphosa being present at the 30th anniversary of the death of Joe Slovo and saying things about the alliance in his January 8th speech such as: “The alliance remains the proven vehicle to uplift the working class and the poor. It has won many historic victories,” followed by further empty pledges to uphold the Freedom Charter and numerous references to the National Democratic Revolution — “The National Democratic Revolution is our shared theory of fundamental change and the Freedom Charter is our common minimum programme” — for the ears of those with the SACP sufficiently desperate to hear something they can fool themselves into thinking is positive; and singling out as the ANC’s first priority — “to improve the ability of our economy to create wealth and employment for all” — with no further detail as to how or why it should be necessary after 30 years of ANC rule, Ramaphosa said nothing he hasn’t been saying since 2018.
This returns us to the theme of this article: What is likely to be behind the SACP’s decision to contest the 2025 election outside the ANC’s protective womb?
The question is all the more pertinent, for despite the evidence given hitherto, the SACP leadership has chosen to ignore its Central Committee’s policy document from 1993, The Role of the SACP in the Transition to Democracy and Socialism. Recognising the critical role of the ANC in this two-staged cause, it noted that the SACP should not adopt an autonomous role unless “the national liberation project is successfully hijacked by some liberal project”.
My answer will be offered in Part Two of this article. DM