We have nothing to lose but our chains

I IS this the end of a beautiful friendship? Or the beginning of the end? Or is it the end of the beginning? Winston Churchill would have known. But the long bond between the ANC and the SACP appears to have reached a crisis.

I had not been paying it much attention, but a really excellent article on these pages last week by Piet Rampedi, on the ANC’s KwaZuluNatal provincial congress a week earlier, brought into sharp focus just what an important, and welcome, development a break between the two parties might be for the country.

We aren’t there yet, not by a long way. The SACP has clung like a leech to the ANC since the dawn of democracy in 1994. And before that too. It doesn’t contest elections (because it correctly suspects it would be annihilated in a popular vote) but its members, particularly under the presidency of Jacob Zuma since 2009, have sought and won tremendous political and administrative power. They are generously sprinkled through Zuma’s cabinet and run a string of critical parliamentary portfolio committees.

In return, they have been loyal to Zuma, backing him in the face of all logic at times. Zuma, as indulgent and neglectful as ever, has let them get on with running the economy, education, agriculture, public works and many other key departments.

But two things have happened. First, primarily through their own incompetence, most have let Zuma down, most obviously and most recently Higher Education Minister Blade Nzimande, the leader of the SACP. Second, they have irritated nationalists in the ANC.

This was graphically illustrated in Rampedi’s piece. The ANC’s provincial congress in Pietermaritzburg had been much delayed, mainly because Zuma’s favoured candidate, the party’s provincial secretary, Sihle Zikalala, was struggling to amass enough votes to beat his rival for the job, KwaZulu-Natal premier Senzo Mchunu. This time, however, Zuma got his way.

But as Zikalala stepped onto the stage to accept the congratulations of the assembled elders, he pointedly declined to shake the hand of Senzeni Zokwana, national chairman of the SACP and minister of agriculture, who he suspected of having campaigned against him.

Zikalala later apologised privately to Zokwana. But less than a week later the KwaZulu-Natal provincial branch of the SACP, complaining it was being spied on — presumably by operatives under the command of the government — called for the party to split from the alliance of the ANC, Cosatu and itself. Not, of course, without exhaustive consultation.

“We agreed with the view of revisiting the participation of the party leadership in the executive arm of the government,” the KwaZuluNatal arm of the SACP said in a statement after a congress of its own. “This must be carried out through assessment and review, which must include intensive engagement with other alliance partners.”

Needless to say, this intensive engagement would be designed to agree on the status quo remaining in place. Nzimande doesn’t want to not be a cabinet minister.

But imagine for a moment what a split would mean for South Africa, the economy, the relationship between the government and business, for the unions and for real communists in South Africa.

The latter would finally be able to vote for a party that spoke for them. That is how it should be. The ANC would be able to talk to business — “capital” — without being accused of selling out. Our politics would begin to look rational. And the next time Zuma says the ANC comes before the country (a sentiment, by the way, with which I entirely concur — no one can unite a country on the shoulders of a divided party or alliance) he can do so without looking over his shoulder.

The ANC is a social-democratic, moderately nationalist political party, much like Labour in the UK or the Spanish Socialist Workers Party. Through the alliance, the SACP distorts that essential truth. I have no problem with an ANC alliance with unions or union umbrellas such as Cosatu. The model works, even when the results are not always economically optimum.

The sooner new and young ANC leaders such as Zikalala are able to break free from political bonds forged in exile and under pressure, but which no longer fit the requirements of a modern industrial economy, the better. It’s about balance. Our politics is either fit for purpose or fit for nothing.