[The SACP calls for working-class unity and “patriotic and left
popular fronts” to challenge big business oligarchs, reverse their
influence in the state apparatus and put South Africa on the road to
economic, social and green transformations.]
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AS INEQUALITY GROWS, SO TOO DOES SOUTH AFRICA’S COMMUNIST PARTY  
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Robert Griffiths
June 6, 2022
Morning Star
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_ The SACP calls for working-class unity and “patriotic and left
popular fronts” to challenge big business oligarchs, reverse their
influence in the state apparatus and put South Africa on the road to
economic, social and green transformations. _

Blade Nzimande,

 

Blade Nzimande is South Africa’s Minister of Higher Education,
Science and Technology. He is also the general secretary of South
African Communist Party (SACP).

We met after he had just finished attending the Education World Forum.
More than 100 government ministers for education and skills had spent
three days in London discussing resources, infrastructure, learning
pathways, technology, innovation, research and citizenship.

Shrugging off fatigue, he spoke to me with clarity and passion about
the challenges facing the peoples of his country, Africa and the
world.

Obviously, the war in Ukraine was an early talking point in our
discussion. Tory government ministers had tried to win support for a
joint statement at the EWF condemning the Russian invasion.

Nzimande and other attenders had not been impressed by this sudden
attempt to “shoehorn” the issue into the conference proceedings,
using dead children as a point of relevance.

“I had to point out that dead children are dead children wherever
they are killed, whether in Ukraine, Yemen or Palestine,” he said,
refusing to place a higher value on young lives tragically taken in
some countries than in others.

South Africa’s Communists have adopted a policy which Nzimande
insists is not one of neutrality. “We are on the side of peace,”
he declares, “For a ceasefire and negotiations that could lead to a
stable settlement which recognises the legitimate interests of both
Ukraine and Russia.

“We know from our own liberation struggle in South Africa that,
however grim the immediate situation, peace and a just settlement can
be achieved.”

He certainly holds Nato and successive regimes in Kiev — and their
alliance with fascists — primarily responsible for the conflict in
Ukraine. The US and other Western powers have provoked President Putin
into a war that they hope will weaken Russia and thereby send a signal
to China.

“Behind this lies the beginning of the end of US world hegemony,”
Nzimande suggests, citing China’s economic rise as the main factor
now challenging the US “unipolar” domination.

The biggest gap on the world stage is that once filled by the
Non-Aligned Movement, he argues. Born in the 1950s during the first
cold war, its member states remained outside the Soviet-led Warsaw
Pact and US-led Nato and other military alliances.

Countries such as Yugoslavia, India, Egypt, Ghana, Indonesia and Cuba
concentrated instead on the struggle for national sovereignty and
independence against imperialism, colonialism and all forms of foreign
aggression and domination.

But since the end of the first cold war in the early 1990s, it has
lost its focus and sense of mission, pushed aside initially by Western
promises of a peaceful and prosperous “New World Order” for all.

“Today we have Brics — the co-operation between Brazil, Russia,
India, China and South Africa — but it needs to become broader, more
dynamic and a force for peace as well as development,” Nzimande
proposes.

He hopes that a victory for Lula da Silva in Brazil’s presidential
election in October will provide the spark and leadership needed to
revive the Non-Aligned Movement, especially if supported by
governments in Mexico, India, Vietnam, Cuba and his own South Africa.
This could help build the alliance required to counteract the second
cold war aimed at China and win justice and sovereignty for the
Palestinian people.

Nzimande is not very optimistic about the immediate prospects for
progress in Africa.

“The African Union is ineffective and lacks transparency in its
decision-making,” he comments, pointing to their recent admission of
Israel as a state with “observer status.”

Nzimande also expresses his disappointment with the situation in
Zimbabwe, where the regime of President Mnangagwa has responded to
protests against economic depression, mass unemployment and runaway
inflation with repression.

“Of course, the SACP does what it can to assist the newly formed
Zimbabwe Communist Party and our comrades in Swaziland in their
struggle for economic justice and democratic rights, against state
repression,” he confirms.

Years of economic depression in Zimbabwe have driven millions of its
citizens to seek work in South Africa. The same dynamic is at work in
Mozambique. In South Africa today, unemployment by even the lowest
definition is running at 35 per cent.

“This influx of mostly undocumented workers presents us with further
challenges,” Nzimande admits. Already there are shanty towns
(“informal settlements”) on the periphery of South Africa’s
major cities such as Johannesburg, Cape Town and his own native
Pietermaritzburg.

Migrant workers from nearby countries provide easy prey for homegrown
and incoming gangmasters and gangsters. They are a source of
super-exploited cheap labour, especially in some service sectors in
the cities.

Competition with native workers sometimes spills over into conflict,
which places a special responsibility on the SACP and Cosatu (the
Confederation of South African Trade Unions) to try to resolve.

Julius Malema’s self-styled Economic Freedom Fighters party pose as
the only true defenders of migrant workers, but Nzimande is not
impressed.

“They blow a lot of hot air,” he tells me, “and their chief
concern is to find a fresh source of votes in the future.” This is
necessary because, he reckons, they have reached the limit of their
electoral support — about 9 or 10 per cent of the poll — now that
many workers have seen through their demagogic posturing and
corruption.

Not that the ANC, its government and the tripartite ANC-Cosatu-SACP
alliance are without their own problems.

“The internal struggle in the ANC continues against a background of
economic stagnation and growing economic and social inequality,”
Nzimande says.

“The defeated neoliberal faction in the ANC is counter-attacking the
‘state capture’ faction that arose under ex-President Zuma, while
the SACP and Cosatu reject both factions,” he explains.

Instead, the SACP calls for the widest possible working-class unity
and “patriotic and left popular fronts” to challenge the big
business oligarchs, reverse their influence in the state apparatus and
put South Africa on the road to deeper economic, social and green
transformations.

Nzimande identifies the main areas that could advance this process: a
more militant working class with a stronger manufacturing base (the
Communists are supporting strikes such as the 12-week struggle of the
unions in the Sibanye-Stillwater gold mines); a bigger movement for
land reform; the mass involvement of women in the labour and social
movements in the fight against patriarchy; and a stronger co-operative
and self-help sector in local communities; and a campaigning peace
movement, where he believes much can be learnt from Britain’s
experiences.

Next month’s SACP conference will seek to strengthen the party’s
organisation and cadre development programme.

These are urgent problems — “the kind we like” according to
Nzimande — as membership rises to 330,000. He will be standing down
as the party’s general secretary after 24 years in post. Among the
frontrunners in any contest to succeed him is SACP first deputy
general secretary Solly Mapaila.

Then will come a momentous conference of the ANC in December, when it
too will elect its leadership going into the National Assembly
elections due in 2024.

These events will help determine when a more radical phase of South
Africa’s national-democratic revolution will open up a new stage on
the country’s road to socialism.

_Robert Griffiths is general secretary of the Communist Party of
Britain._

* South Africa
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* South African Communist Party
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* African National Congress
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