BARNEY MTOMBOTHI | Time to kick the last breath out of the SACP

It’s often said that you don’t kick a man when he’s down. But in politics, not to do so is almost akin to a dereliction of duty.

Politics is about taking advantage of the other guy’s misfortune. If found lying spreadeagled on the turf gasping for breath, you don’t hesitate to put the boot in. You go for the jugular.

The South African Communist Party is in its death throes. The expiration probably won’t be messy or chaotic — there aren’t enough comrades left to cause any such commotion. It could therefore be more of a quiet meandering into eternal rest. Mourners will be few. Perhaps just a handful of comrades belting out a lusty if sorrowful rendition of The Internationale before mercifully performing the last rites. But that suggests there would still be some life left in the carcass. Chances, however, are that the party is more likely to simply wither on the vine.

The SACP convened what it pretentiously called the Conference of the Left at the weekend. They formed another outfit, predictably called a council of the left, after which they resolved to have another meeting. It was quite an achievement.

But there’s frankly no need to waste one’s breath on the SACP. Except perhaps on its epitaph. It’s been on life support for a while now, barely kept alive by crumbs thrown in its direction by the ANC — often barking more than it can bite, and thus rightly ignored.

Ultimately people are driven by the dictates of their stomachs. Ideology is a luxury to indulge in for when the exigencies of the stomach have been taken care of

The party of Moses Mabhida, Yusuf Dadoo, Joe Slovo, JB Marks and, of course, Chris Hani — titans of the liberation struggle — had some heft during its heydays in exile. It packed a punch, and nobody climbed the greasy pole in the movement without its blessing. Now all it has is poor Solly Mapaila, who, having overplayed his hand, finds himself and his rump out in the cold.

Blade Nzimande, for long the face of the party, has taken a back seat in its jousting with the ANC. As a member of Cyril Ramaphosa’s cabinet, I guess he can’t rock the boat too much. He knows on which side his bread is buttered.

Ultimately people are driven by the dictates of their stomachs. Ideology is a luxury to indulge in for when the exigencies of the stomach have been taken care of. Gwede Mantashe, a former SACP chair, once famously remarked that it was cold outside the ANC. I don’t think he ever thought it would be his former comrades who’d be freezing out in the cold.

Margaret Thatcher once said of the UK’s Labour Party that it had gone so far to the left that it had left Great Britain entirely. This miserable lot has simply been left behind. They seek to recreate the Berlin Wall but have yet to extricate themselves from its rubble. They stay put even when the facts on the ground have changed, determined to visit on South Africa in the 21st century the outdated ideas of a German itinerant who died in extreme poverty while living off handouts from friends in the 19th century.

Mapaila is looking for something to do and is casting about for friends who can help him out. His stokvel is all contradictions and hypocrisy. The SACP general secretary, who not so long ago was fulminating against state capture and loudly calling for Jacob Zuma to be expelled from the ANC, is now embracing the MKP. Zuma’s party cannot in any way be described as sympathetic to socialist or communist ideals. It is, if anything, a tribal outfit. Also, the MKP and the EFF have adopted diametrically opposed positions on the issue of undocumented immigrants; while the EFF favours something akin to open borders, MKP members have been prominent in the current nationwide demonstrations against illegal immigration.

The SACP’s decision to take part in elections could be interpreted as rats deserting a sinking ship, but it’s a welcome development for the country.

They should get on like a house on fire.

But they’re united more by what they’re against than by what they stand for. It is their utter loathing for Ramaphosa and his GNU project which brought them together. They’re hoping Ramaphosa’s revived albatross, the Phala Phala scandal, will eventually fell him and that Paul Mashatile, their man in the ANC, will deliver on the nirvana they seek. But the fact that the ANC boycotted their confab and that they were unable to even entice the disaffected section of the organisation could mean that it’s round one to the Buffalo.

There’s another reason to be wary of this lot. It’s the same bunch that blessed the country with the disaster that was the Zuma presidency. Nzimande led his SACP behind Zuma; Julius Malema too whipped into line his ANC Youth League — which later transmogrified into the EFF. Zwelinzima Vavi, the other member of this terrible trio, has found himself a new gig and is now singing a different tune. But at the time his support for the cause was decisive. He brought the enormous political muscle of Cosatu. They later fell out with their man, not because of the looting but because, once in power, he cut them out of his inner circle. Zuma had found new friends.

The SACP’s decision to take part in elections could be interpreted as rats deserting a sinking ship, but it’s a welcome development for the country. They need to stand on their own and will soon realise there’s very little appetite among voters for their type of politics.

It also puts a stop to the unacceptable practice of people enjoying unearned power and privileges. Although a dying horse, the communists could, however, do enormous damage to ANC prospects in the November 4 poll if the results of the recent Emfuleni ward 28 by-election are a harbinger of things to come. The 89 votes the SACP received were enough to deny the ANC victory in its own stronghold and allowed the DA to squeak through by a mere eight votes.

The alienation of the SACP from the ANC will hopefully not only lead to its demise but also to the total breakup of the tripartite alliance, which has been the undoing of the country. For democracy to prosper, we need parties to compete fairly against each other, instead of an unelected nomenklatura ganging up against the citizenry.