The South African Communist Party takes itself by surprise (Part Two)

Read Part One here. This article is co-published with the journal, Amandla!

Most of the many eulogies following Tito Mboweni’s untimely death were from the business community. They serve as reminders of his central importance in why the ANC so quickly abandoned the policies that bound the ANC and SACP in the long and hard struggle against apartheid.

These original policies – which terrified big business into thinking that the ANC was “marinated in Marxism”, as Pieter du Toit put it in his best-selling, The ANC Billionaires – Big Capital's Gambit and The Rise of the Few, were sufficient for Cosatu to become the third member of the Tripartite Alliance.

Even though written in secret, the SACP had no reason to be surprised by Gear’s (Growth, Employment and Redistribution) public appearance in 1996. The SACP chose not to see the writing on many public walls, proclaiming that what was supposed to be a capitalism consistent with the National Democratic Revolution (explained in Part One) had metamorphosed into what for it was a nightmare of neoliberalism. Much of the graffiti was written by Mboweni.

Thabo Mbeki figured large in the ANC’s provocative attempts to be rid of the SACP, as was detailed in Part One of this article. This wasn’t Mboweni’s style. As minister of labour (1994-1999), governor of the Reserve Bank (1999-2009) and finance minister (2018-2021), he simply ignored them (and Cosatu) and got on with the business of changing the ANC.

This might be the reason why Mboweni doesn’t figure at all in Tom Lodge’s 636-page magisterial history of the SACP, Red Road to Freedom: A History of the South African Communist Party 1921-2021. I hope to rectify this serious omission, briefly.

As early as 1992, Mboweni was involved in arranging for a group of about 15 leading members of the Mass Democratic Movement (MDM) to go to Washington for special briefings by the World Bank to, in Trevor Manuel’s words, “help train these people so that we can govern the country” (Pieter du Toit 2022).

Du Toit further relays how Mandela, enthusiastic about training his officials and policy teams in the necessary financial skills, used his influence to ensure their fullest exposure to neoliberalism or, as Du Toit saw it “living in the real world”, a chapter heading in his book. Thanks to Mboweni’s intervention, a group spent two weeks at leading global banker Goldman Sachs in New York.

The team included Lesetja Kganyago, who in 1996 became director-general of the Treasury, then in 2011, deputy governor of the Reserve Bank until becoming the Reserve Bank’s governor in 2014, a position he still holds.

Maria Ramos, who was also to be the Treasury’s director-general until 2004, moved directly into banking in 2009 by becoming Group Chief Executive of Absa Group, South Africa’s third-largest bank. She was appointed chairperson of AngloGold Ashanti in December 2020 having previously served on its board. She was appointed to the board of Standard Chartered PLC as an independent non-executive director in January 2021 and became the independent non-executive director of luxury goods company Richemont South Africa in 2011. Richemont was founded by Johann Rupert, South Africa’s richest person with an estimated wealth of $14.5 billion in 2024.

Trevor Manuel, head of the ANC’s pre-1994 economic department, was himself selected by Mandela to be his first minister of trade and industry following the 1994 elections. During his two years in that position, he championed neoliberalism by seizing opportunities “to open up our domestic market to international competition and to encourage long-term investments”.

Consistent with the neoliberal shibboleth of free trade, he removed the so-called “barriers to trade” – the protections given to local industries – at a pace even faster than required by the recently formed World Trade Organisation (WTO).

Beginning with the decimation of South Africa’s clothing and textile industry, this contributed to the subsequent de-industrialisation of South Africa. Nonetheless, Manuel’s embrace of neoliberalism was sufficient for Mandela to appoint him to the key position of finance minister in 1996, a post he held until 2009. Like Maria Ramos, he was to end his career holding major positions in the corporate world.

What all this means is that by 2007, when the SACP (and Cosatu) turned to Jacob Zuma to save the Tripartite Alliance from Mbeki, the SACP was not able to see that the NDR had somehow slipped into reverse gear, even though it was in plain sight. Although the party’s youth league once again called for the SACP to contest elections in its own right, there was little support for it within the party generally.

More importantly, there was no substantial self-critique of either the party’s two-stage theory or its fantasies about the NDR. Indeed, a leading member of the party told me in late 1999/early 2000 that the ANC needed to be given a 20-year period in which to rediscover its progressive commitments. He never did explain how this 20-year period was magically going to self-expire. The only necessity for him was to endure it.

In the meantime, the SACP seemed more than satisfied with newly elected Zuma as president of South Africa. Among the key ministries Zuma allocated to the left was economic development, headed by Cosatu’s former clothing and textile general secretary (Sactwu), Ebrahim Patel.

SACP executive member Rob Davies got the Department of Trade and Industry, while the Department of Higher Education and Training went to the party’s general secretary, Blade Nzimande. The minister of the new Department of Women, Youth, Children and People with Disabilities was Cosatu’s health union (Nehawu) president Noluthando Mayende-Sibiya, while Jeremy Cronin, the SACP’s deputy general secretary, became deputy minister of transport, with Ebrahim Ismail Ebrahim and Yunus Carrim — both SACP leaders — being deputy ministers of the departments of International Relations and Cooperation, and Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs, respectively.

It wasn’t until 2015 that the SACP was publicly able to confirm its horrendous mistake in having backed Zuma.

Reminding the SACP of its own wisdom about individuals seldom having a definitive role in the shaping of history, it was South Africa’s fourth president, Cyril Ramaphosa, who, like his predecessors, considered Mboweni’s neoliberal credentials as sufficient to appoint him finance minister in 2018. The appointment came with the full approval of various global bankers and international financial institutions.

The London Financial Times called him “a free market purist”. For Colin Coleman, a leading banker, Mboweni was nothing less than the longstanding “Godfather of ANC economic policy.” A title well merited, for, in Coleman’s assessment, Mboweni

“…played a seminal role in the evolution of the thinking of Nelson Mandela, and the modernisation of ANC economic policy. As Governor he was loved by the global central banking community, by Alan Greenspan, and many others. He introduced and defended inflation targeting, and was a proponent of fiscal discipline and monetary independence. As Finance Minister he was always … a proponent of structural economic reforms.”

He didn’t disappoint them. He used his stature to insist that public servants’ salaries should be held constant and that the bailout of state-owned enterprises should stop. In June 2020, he proposed cutting the state’s wage bill over three years and adopting a zero-based budget in an effort to avoid a sovereign debt crisis.

In Business Maverick’s assessment, “clearly, his long stint at the Reserve Bank had impressed on him the importance of fiscal probity and the dangers of inflation.”

Still, the SACP’s battering by the ANC remained undented.

Some perspective to Mboweni’s assessment by his friends is provided by Patti Waldmeir’s 1998 best seller, Anatomy of a Miracle: The end of apartheid and the birth of the new South Africa. When he returned to South Africa in 1990, she considered his economic views to be left wing, which, for her, automatically meant they had to be “irrational”.

By 1994, “this irrationally left-wing” ANC leader was minister of labour in the first GNU. By 1997, I was interacting with him as the researcher at the ANC’s Parliamentary labour study group.

The labour study group consisted of all ANC members of the parliamentary labour portfolio committee, including the labour minister, the study group’s researcher and a Cosatu representative. It represented the ANC in the portfolio committee to which Parliament assigned the processing of all labour matters, before coming to the National Assembly for formal approval.

Anecdotes for the historic record

Having waited a respectful period since Tito Mboweni’s death, I’m now sharing these anecdotes (and a few others) because they add to the relevance of the question I posed at the beginning of this article: What makes 2024 so special to the SACP, when evidence of the ANC’s metamorphosis into a party of neoliberalism, signalled not only by Mandela, Mbeki and Manuel, but also by Mboweni, began in 1992?

The Mboweni anecdotes include:

Labour legislation

“As labour minister, he energetically set about reforming labour legislation in ways he would later come to regret.”

Apart from subsequently regretting what he’d done, the answer to my question to various leading members of the SACP about what it gained from its alliance with the ANC was always supposedly progressive labour legislation. Their response to my saying that the legislation did nothing more than bring South Africa into what was a 20th-century standard in developed countries, other than the US, was silence.

Moreover, my challenge for them to point to anything additional to the standard labour legislation, as might be expected seeing that the ANC’s two alliance partners just happened to be one of the world’s few remaining communist parties, and a socialist-committed labour federation, was left hanging.

There was, however, regressive evidence in the last labour law under Mboweni’s ministership: the Employment Equity Act (EEA) of 1999. Although the Act expressly rejected the apartheid “races” of African, coloured and Indian, Mboweni – like the ANC and the whole of Parliament – have chosen ignorance of this fact.

That all official labour and general population statistics use these apartheid categories absent from all relevant legislation is done with parliamentary connivance. The racialised thinking of apartheid has the full blessing of the ANC and its two alliance partners (as I have explained in previous Daily Maverick articles).

Even more telling is Mboweni’s response to Cosatu’s insistence that the EEA contains a provision to reduce the gap – the class not “race” one – between the highest and lowest paid employees of any company. Mboweni considered any such provision so unacceptable that he threatened to withdraw the entire Bill if Cosatu insisted on its inclusion.

For the one and only time in my five years as an ANC parliamentary researcher, the Cosatu representative and I were excluded from the ANC’s meetings with Mboweni about this deadlock. A compromise in the form of Section 27 was finally agreed – perhaps because it has never been implemented.

The currently proposed amendment to the Companies Act compels companies to make public the gap between their highest and lowest-paid employees. However, it makes no mention whatsoever of a similar requirement in the EEA of more than 24 years ago.

The paramountcy of being properly dressed

Mboweni attended the Labour Study Group only once between 1997 and his appointment to the Reserve Bank in 1999. On this single occasion, many of the ANC MPs were late and it soon became clear that not all of them came prepared.

But none of this mattered to Mboweni. His anger, which he made apparent, was that many of the MPs were not appropriately dressed. Indeed, the only MP who arrived on time, wearing a jacket and tie and prepared for the meeting was, as always, the leading communist, Brian Bunting, who had previously been an MP until the banning of the Communist Party in 1950.

The rich-and-proud-of-it ANC leadership

Around the mid-2000s, I happened to be on the same flight from Cape Town to Johannesburg as the then governor of the Reserve Bank. Being a Cosatu representative at Nedlac, I was a frequent flyer with a gold card. Having had operations on both my neck and lower back, I needed an aisle seat, ideally with space. On this occasion, I was able to use my Gold card to get an upgrade to business class.

Someone I know invited me to sit next to her. The man sitting in the aisle seat next to her kindly agreed to swap places with me. So, I moved. Mr Mboweni was among the passengers still coming on board. Seeing the man sitting in what had been my assigned seat, he gave a peremptory order loud enough for everyone to hear: “That’s my seat. Move!”

The plainly startled man did as ordered, even though Mboweni saw no need to explain why it was “his” seat.

It turned out that other ANC leaders were also in business class. During the flight, led by Mr Mboweni, they shouted to each other about what luxury car they had just bought or were thinking of buying. The whole loud spectacle let everyone else know that we were among ANC VIPs proud of their luxurious lifestyle and in the broader context, indifferent to the contingent wastage involved. The poverty and misery of the majority of those who voted for them belonged to another world, not the one Mboweni had exposed them to via the World Bank, IMF and Goldman Sachs.

Whether or not aware of it, they were fulfilling their patriotic duty to feed the economy they championed by sustaining “consumer demand”; the economy that required them, in Mbeki’s words, to “get rich, get rich, get rich” and, having done so, to display their wealth in the most ostentatious ways possible.

My friend pointed out it could have been far worse had I been in my allotted seat, for I would not have been intimidated by Mr Mboweni claiming automatic ownership of an aircraft seat properly assigned to me.

Making corruption subject to principle

Being an early beneficiary of what Du Toit called Big Capital, Mr Mboweni had no need for corruption. But most ANC leaders were not so lucky. They were the would-be capitalists deprived of capital by apartheid. They were the people who, led by Zuma, captured the state to provide them with the needed capital.

A leading communist and member of the government told me, in 2011, that being fed up having to spend much of his time sorting out squabbles over corruptly obtained money among various ANC leaders, he’d proposed a principled solution to the problem, at an ANC meeting. The amount stolen, he suggested, should be determined by how many years each person had been an active ANC member during the period of the ANC’s illegality.

This last anecdote brings us back to what is so special about 2024. The SACP has been well aware for a long time that, among many other disappointments – the second GNU being but the latest – the cancer of corruption was – and still is – killing the ANC. But it still chose to remain the battered partner.

The ‘Yes’ part of whether the SACP might break from the ANC

In Part One of this article, I asked if the SACP was serious about divorcing the ANC. My answer was a definite “No”, for the immediate future, followed by a possible “Yes”, in the longer term.

It is now time to explain the qualified Yes possibility.

I suggested in my Daily Maverick article on the May 2024 election that the GNU had a reasonable chance of attracting capital sufficient to cause a moderate spike in South Africa’s GDP.

I further suggested that the spike, even if it were to occur, would be of short duration. This prediction was premised on neoliberalism’s inherent contradiction being aggravated by increasing numbers of developed countries following Trump’s protectionist lead.

Might being right meant they could all ignore the provisions they and their corporations had written into the WTO. They – more particularly the US and EU – used the WTO they had created to be the battering ram forcing open global markets in the name of globalised free trade from which all countries were supposedly guaranteed to benefit.

My final expectation was that the return of our economy to its present dysfunctional state – for which workers and the poor would, as always, pay the highest price – would result in sufficiently large numbers abandoning the SACP (and the trade unions) to join what would effectively be an anti-capitalist united front.

My understanding of the SACP’s unexpected decision to stand against the ANC in the 2026 national municipal elections – notwithstanding the ambivalences in which the decision has been wrapped – is the party leadership’s attempt to pre-empt any such defections. “Look,” they are now able to say, “we’ve heard you; we agree with you, and we are now doing what many of you have wanted us to do for a long time. Party unity is now the order of the day. We need it to achieve what you want.”

And it seems to be working. But for how long?

Variables that shape the future

1) The conditions during the contesting of the 2026 elections. Will those conditions – even assuming that the SACP does contest the election – be sufficient to maintain the unity the leadership sees as essential? The evidence, thus far, is that the leadership is more concerned about consolidating its position with the ANC than giving practical expression to its claimed “reject[ion] of neo-liberalism in its entirety,” as Solly Mapaila pledged in front of Cyril Ramaphosa, on 6 January 2025 commemorating the 30th anniversary of the death of Joe Slovo. He immediately tempered this radical talk by reassuring Ramaphosa. Standing as an independent party in 2026, he comforted Ramaphosa,

“in no way mean[s] we are abandoning the alliance we have built since the late 1920s (sic) To be clear, we do not have a single resolution to leave the alliance.”

For good measure, he reaffirmed the alliance’s commitment to the NDR while still able to emphasise that the SACP remained a revolutionary party.

This comes from the SACP’s website. However, I have always maintained that one doesn’t have to read academic books or papers or visit unfamiliar websites to know enough for an alternative understanding of what the mainstream media likes to present as the only truth. This is why most of the information I use comes from the mainstream media. Like ENCA’s news on 6 January that contained a piece by the SACP’s spokesperson in which he repeated the idea, mentioned earlier in the day by the SACP’s secretary-general, that contesting the 2026 election was intended to strengthen the alliance.

2)  The position of the rank and file, including sections of the middle leadership of the SACP. So far as is publicly known, they seem to be holding the party line. How long the party’s unity holds depends heavily on the following three variables.

3)  Cosatu – its leadership has committed the federation to loyalty to the ANC, notwithstanding some murmurings within its leadership.

But for both Cosatu and the SACP this acceptance depends on ….

4)   The state of the economy. If unemployment were to drop – or the statistics could be massaged sufficiently to make them look as though brighter times were beckoning, the alliance might continue until the 2026 election, at least. Unless …

5)  The pull of real alternatives. All that is required is for one organisation to emerge from the plethora of small left-wing parties that acts as a catalyst to the realisation of a viable United Front. The front must be sufficiently broad to attract those dissatisfied with neoliberalism, even if they’re unclear about the term. Most people know it as poverty, unemployment, inequality and austerity. They are also to be found within the SACP, Cosatu, Saftu and other trade union federations. They are to be further found among reluctant voters and the sizeable and growing number of non-voters.

Speaking truth to power

Like Noam Chomsky, Arundhati Roy rejects this fashionable idea. Both argue that the powerful already know why they do what they do. They similarly don’t need others to implore them to do what they knowingly choose not to do – like not acting on the science of climate change they claim to accept.

The needed United Front depends, crucially, on the Left’s ability to make as many people as possible aware that another world is possible. More importantly, still, is for them to know that they are the midwives in waiting for this better world.

Of relevance for us, as Arundhati Roy writes of Chomsky in The Architecture of Modern Empire (2024): “He’s not interested in speak[ing] truth to power. Power knows the truth. He wants to provide information to people who are powerless, not to those who oppress them”. DM