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WHICH WAY FOR SOUTH AFRICA’S COMMUNISTS?  
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Conrad Landin interviews Mzwandile Thakhudi
February 15, 2024
Morning Star
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_ Young Communist leader Thakhudi cites the history of the Alliance
to explain the SACP’s position today. “Comrade president Oliver
Tambo said our alliance is not a paper alliance, it is born out of
struggle, and out of sacrifice." _

Young Communist League of South Africa National Secretary Mzwandile
Thakhudi ,

 

WHEN South Africans head to the polls later this year, they will be
faced with a ballot offering myriad choices — from the governing
African National Congress (ANC) to the opposition Democratic Alliance
and its assorted new bedfellows, and new formations like RISE Mzansi
and the Jacob Zuma-backed Umkhonto we Sizwe party.

One major political force, however, will remain off the ballot. The
South African Communist Party (SACP) has been part of the ruling
Tripartite Alliance since the dawn of democracy. Leading SACP members
have been part of every cabinet since the end of apartheid in 1994,
but they enter parliament — and government — as members of the
ANC.

The SACP will nonetheless play a prominent part in the election
campaign. They will mobilise for a seventh ANC majority, in an
election many predict could see the governing party dip below 50 per
cent for the first time since it was unbanned.

As national secretary of the Young Communist League of South Africa
(YCLSA), Mzwandile Thakhudi will play a leading role in this effort.
“If you look into the South African demographics, the youth
constitute the majority,” he says. “If you look into the last
voter registration, of the 2.9 million people who registered, 77 per
cent were youth. Young people must now begin to understand their
responsibility in participatory democracy. That includes public
participation in lawmaking, but also the election of public
representatives, as well as to hold them accountable.”

Thakhudi is speaking to the Morning Star at the annual commemoration
at the graveside of former SACP leader, housing minister and
anti-apartheid hero Joe Slovo.

It is the first such event in a number of years which has attracted a
senior representative of the ANC — in this case ANC deputy general
secretary and Minister in the Presidency Maropene Ramokgopa. The
Tripartite Alliance, consisting of the ANC, SACP and trade union
confederation Cosatu, has come under strain in recent years, and
senior figures are doing their best to patch things up ahead of the
election.

Slovo was himself conscious of the difficulties posed by the
Liberation Alliance. “The alliance of the working class with forces
which reject its long-term socialist aspirations is never
unproblematic and without tension,” he wrote in 1988. “It requires
constant vigilance and, above all, the safeguarding of the
independence of the vanguard and mass class organs of the workers.”

He defended the SACP’s “two-stage theory” of the South African
revolution, stating that “the national democratic phase” was the
“most direct route of advance” at that point in history, but would
be followed by, “in our particular conditions, to a second stage,
socialist development.”

Thirty years on from the end of apartheid, some leftist critics of the
SACP charge that it has let down its vigilance and failed to push
towards the second stage. The decline of the trade union movement amid
worldwide trends and the corruption of some officials has undermined
such “mass class organs.”

The SACP, for its part, has returned to the question of standing
candidates separately to the ANC. This was ruled out for this year’s
elections at the party’s congress last year, in favour of pushing
for a “reconfigured” Liberation Alliance.

What does this mean? “There’s got to be a consistent convening of
consultation-seeking platforms among the alliance components, that we
move in unison, understanding each other out of a common analysis of
the state of our revolution in this country,” says Thakhudi.

“That suggests that the Communist Party’s opinions, the left
perspectives, must be recorded in parliamentary transcripts, to say
‘this is the SACP’s view, independent from other alliance
components.’ While we work together we should have an understanding
that the National Democratic Revolution is the minimum programme, and
there has got to be a common understanding of what we are doing.”

Given there is no official SACP group in parliament, how would that be
implemented in practice? “On policy questions, we’ve got to have
an alliance political council, which will sit quarterly, so that we
are able to synthesise the views and agree for governance.”

An SACP statement from January gives a flavour of some of the policy
priorities the party intends to assert. These include “a new
macroeconomic framework and an adequately funded high impact
industrial policy,” pushing for industrialisation and relief to the
current unemployment crisis. The party also wants to see the existing
social relief of distress grant transformed into a universal basic
income grant, as a step towards eradicating poverty.

What are the deficiencies of the current set-up? Thakhudi believes the
“organisational design of the Alliance” means that the “primary
forces” of South Africa’s liberation struggle, such as the poor,
the African majority and women, are sidelined in government policy
formulation. An SACP statement issued on May Day last year asserted:
“Instead of accountability only to one Alliance component, there
must be accountability to the Alliance under the principle of
collective leadership, with common discipline.”

The past few years has seen an increasingly outspoken SACP criticise
the ANC’s record in government — particularly over its failure to
reduce poverty and inequality. At the Joe Slovo commemoration, speaker
after speaker also slammed the actions of former president Jacob Zuma,
both for facilitating the “state capture” of public enterprises in
office and for backing the new MK party — named after the ANC’s
armed wing — in the forthcoming elections. Thakhudi went the
furthest, calling on the ANC to expel Zuma for his disloyalty.

The SACP was itself crucial to Zuma’s rise to the top of the ANC and
the presidency. After party influence was sidelined under president
Thabo Mbeki and his neoliberal economic policies, leading party
figures believed there would be more opportunity for left advance
under the Zuma. The SACP’s turn against the controversial president
later became a key factor in his downfall.

Thakhudi is keen to cite the history of the Alliance to explain the
SACP’s position today. “Comrade president Oliver Tambo said our
alliance is not a paper alliance, it is born out of struggle, and out
of sacrifice,” he recalls. “So it is not by choice that we are in
an Alliance.”

But the question of the future of the party’s strategy has not gone
away. “The discussion is still ensuing in the party,” the YCLSA
leader emphasises. “This year we have a special congress where we
believe the party will make an evaluation of that resolution. There is
a diversity of opinions in the party.

“The party identified three modalities to contest the election. One,
a reconfigured alliance, two, a broad left front, and three,
independently. The party, for now, opted for the first one. Why? Due
to the three watchwords that we have identified: that we must be
consistent on the strategy, flexible on the tactics, but while we are
analytically alert.”

In an interview last year, SACP general secretary Solly Mapaila said
that if the Alliance is not reconfigured, the SACP could move to the
option of a broad left front Popular Left Front, working “with other
social forces to constitute part of rescuing the NDR on the ground,
without necessarily waiting for a party political banner under the
ANC.” He told SABC News: “Hopefully, the SACP could play a much
more visible and dominant role and have credible candidates who could
lead that particular Left Front.”

“The party is a party of power, parliamentary power,” says
Thakhudi. “It’s not a party for its own sake.”

_Conrad Landin is a former Morning Star journalist and now co-edits
New Internationalist. The global justice affairs magazine’s next
issue, South Africa: 30 Years Later, is available for £1 as part of a
trial subscription. Visit a.nin.tl/SouthAfrica
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* South African Communist Party
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* African National Congress
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* Left strategy
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