The SACP’s steadfastness to implement the organisation’s decision to independently contest the coming local government election is proving to be a source of consternation within the party and among its partners, the ANC and trade union federation Cosatu. It is also a kernel of discussion in political circles.
From its side, the ANC is not taking the SACP’s decision lying down. Repeatedly, the 114-year-old organisation has stated that the decision of its partner to contest elections independently is wrong and threatens the relationship between the two allied parties and the arrangement that allows members to hold dual membership.
In a January 8 statement, the ANC national executive committee (NEC) drew a line in the sand: “We want to make it clear: all members will be required, as per the constitution, to campaign for ANC victory in the forthcoming local government elections. There must be no confusion”.
Internally, within the SACP, there is clearly an impending rupture, with a minority uncertain about the wisdom of the decision, while the majority appears eager to implement the decision taken at the party’s special national congress in December 2024.
Since the start of the debate, I have tried to listen carefully. I even went, two years in a row, to the SACP’s annual pilgrimage at Soweto’s Avalon Cemetery, where commemorations of the party’s former leader, Joe Slovo, take place. My intention has been to hear the message from the horse’s mouth.
The triggers
From what I hear and know, the debate on whether to go it alone electorally or not has been bubbling in the SACP for more than 20 years. The first trigger to the “go it alone” resolution were inglorious failures of the ANC. The congress in 2024 prefaced the decision on electoral contestation with a declaration, “notwithstanding the political and social advances since 1994, years of neoliberal policies have reinforced the legacies of colonialism and apartheid, entrenching racial and gender inequalities, deepening economic marginalisation and perpetuating systemic poverty and unemployment”.
The second igniter is the way the alliance between the ANC, Cosatu and the SACP operates. Over the last few years, there have been strident calls to reconfigure the alliance. With no progress in reconfiguring relations, it became impossible to keep the lid on a boiling political kettle.
While sympathetic and appreciative of the two catalysts, I find gaping holes in the motivations in support of the SACP contesting the next local government elections. Some gaps are small, while others are the size of the Big Hole in Kimberley. There is also too much umming and ahhing that makes the rationale politically inaudible.
Not challenging ANC?
The argument that the SACP’s decision to field its own candidates in the coming elections is not a challenge to the ANC creates the first gap in the party’s motivation.
Anyone who heard the SACP’s First Deputy General Secretary, Madala Masuku, telling delegates at the ANC’s national general council (NGC) that “the decision to contest elections is not to contest the ANC” will realise how such messaging will fall flat with voters.
Why contest every ward and “wall to wall” in municipalities, if not to displace other parties and individuals that are standing?
Unfortunately, Masuku’s line at the NGC is the approach of the SACP. The resolution that mandates the party to stand in elections that are expected to take place towards the end of this year or early next year states: “The contestation of elections must not necessarily be seen as a contest against the movement or the ANC.”
I doubt if the electorate will be convinced and vote for the SACP if its message is that the party is fielding a candidate alongside the ANC, not to challenge the other aspirant councillor, but to “save the national democratic revolution [NDR]” and address “the crisis of representation”.
The party’s approach is a deliberate attempt to skirt the conclusion that, presently, the ANC represents the interests of the ruling classes.
SACP complicity
The second hole in SACP’s motivation is the lack of admission of political complicity in the dire situation that the country finds itself in.
Historically, there is an overlap in the SACP’s and the ANC’s paths as organisations. Since the 1920s, the communist party propped up the ANC. Inspired by a perspective that national liberation and establishment of a Black-centred democratic republic were the immediate aims of the struggle, the SACP sought out what was a moribund and marginal organisation before World War 2, and helped and propelled it to lead the struggle for democracy. The party considers the ANC as the ‘representative of all the classes and strata which make up African society’.
It is the SACP-formulated NDR that preordains the ANC to lead in South Africa. Even when failures were glaring after 1994, the SACP defended the governing party and fought against those who questioned the leading role of the ANC.
Absent in the communist party’s calls for support for the SACP in the coming elections is reflexivity in the theory and practices that shored up and buttressed the ANC.
Also astounding is a lack of reflection on minority positions within the organisation that argued that the communist party and not a nationalist movement should lead the struggle for democracy.
Need to rethink alliances
Thirdly, it appears that the SACP wants to have its cake and eat it too. For more than 20 years, the party has decried the dysfunctionality of its alliance with the ANC and Cosatu. In its motivation to contest the coming elections, the SACP insists on asserting its independence, while in the same breath, it wants to keep the alliance intact.
In a discussion document distributed towards the end of last year, the party’s National Chairperson, Blade Nzimande, warns the SACP against what he characterises as right-wing tendencies within the broad ANC movement, as well as ultraleft forces who seek “to use this moment to weaken or break the alliance.”
The SACP argues for preservation and holding firm to the alliance. This is despite clear evidence that alignment is a source of political contamination and entanglement.
What the party needs to realise is that its theory of change and version of a national democratic revolution pushed forward a catch-all party — the ANC — into the leadership of the struggle for democracy and transformation.
The SACP also needs to note that present conditions require a rethink of alliances and theories of change, including the NDR.
Problem of vanguardism
Fourthly, what is worrying about the proposal of the communist party to run candidates in the next local government elections is its SACP-centric and vanguardist nature. It looks as if the party drives the strategy. It is the SACP that has taken the decision, and it is the party that will contest.
Despite decades-long resolutions to build broad alliances and popular left fronts, it does not look like the party is going into the new terrain with new social forces and movements, fighting new sources of exploitation and oppression, such as unemployed and marginalised workers, youth movements, anti-GBV groups, shack-dwellers, women’s groups, environmental organisations and queer movements. The SACP enters electoral politics not as part of a new mass movement. It first takes the decision and thereafter consults other organisations with the hope to pull them along. This is crude vanguardism.
No alternative vision of the local state
The last major hole in the party’s motivations relates to its vision of the local state and power.
It is common cause that the majority of local governments in South Africa are failing to deliver basic services. This is a product of various factors, ranging from inappropriate fiscal designs to spatial inequalities, poor tax base, mismanagement, corruption, unresponsiveness and lack of accountability.
It is a result of such failures that there is a review of government policy on local government. In 2019, the SA Law Reform Commission launched a review of legislation applicable to local government. In March last year, the Department of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs formally initiated a review of the 1998 White Paper on Local Government, South Africa’s overarching policy on local government.
Although the SACP’s resolution to contest the local state touches on how to ensure sustainability of funding for local government and how communities are to be involved in the selection of candidates, the party puts no clear alternative vision of the local state. There is also no record of the organisation taking its perspectives on local government into ongoing review processes.
Instead, what we have is a call “for the mastering of the legislative and governance frameworks regulating local government”.
What the country requires is new imagination on how to make municipalities functional for the majority of people who live under their auspices. Local governments are central to the economic and social well-being of citizens, the majority of whom are women and youth. Local states also oversee spaces that are prone to marginalisation, ecological degradation, violence and femicide.
Unless those in the SACP who support the independent path map out a vision of local government that puts care and sustainability for communities and all living beings at the centre, the proposed road will not inspire large sections of society.
In coming up with an inspiring vision of local government, supporters of an independent left pathway must also close the other holes identified above.
Dinga Sikwebu is a retired trade unionist based in Johannesburg. Presently, he is a Global Labour University (GLU) research associate at Wits University.
