What are we to make of SACP leader Solly Mapaila’s repeated outbursts against the ANC-led government of national unity?
When he first spoke out against it, in the early days of talks between the ANC, the DA and other parties now involved, many dismissed Mapaila’s protestations as just another public tantrum of the kind that the ANC’s allies normally throw when things don’t go their way in tripartite alliance meetings.
They’d come around, one keen observer of the SACP and Cosatu, told me in the days leading up to the announcement of the new cabinet. “Solly’s colleagues in the politburo will be invited to the executive as ministers and deputy ministers, others will be accommodated elsewhere and soon all this noise will subside,” predicted the observer.
To his credit, Mapaila has continued to hold the line — labelling the ANC’s agreement to work with the DA in the government as a “sell-out decision” — even though some of his party’s most prominent leaders serve in the very same government.
Are we to assume from this that tensions are developing between the SACP general secretary and some of his colleagues, who seem at peace with the strategic direction the ANC chose after losing its parliamentary majority?
Relatively optimistic remarks about the GNU by the likes of deputy finance minister David Masondo, who is second deputy to Mapaila in the SACP, suggest that there is indeed a discord at the party’s headquarters in Braamfontein.
What Mapaila has failed to address adequately in the interviews he has given about the matter, is this: if his party is truly behind him in this view that the ANC “sold out” by going into a coalition with the DA, the IFP and other “right-wing” parties, why did the SACP not forbid its members to take up cabinet posts?
He can’t get away with arguing that they did so as ANC members, because it is a known fact that even though many of them hold dual membership, they made it into the cabinet on a SACP ticket.
Mapaila has also not sufficiently answered how a 'minority government' would have ensured political stability, especially given the experiences at local government level where motions of no-confidence have resulted in metros such as Johannesburg changing mayors as often as Chippa United
Mapaila’s failure to address this question has opened him and the SACP to renewed criticism from the ANC Youth League, whose president Collen Malatji, believed to be a Fikile Mbalula protégé, is now daring the party “to go it alone” by contesting future elections in its own name.
Mapaila has also not sufficiently answered how a “minority government” — the option he says the ANC should have taken — would have ensured political stability, especially given the experiences at local government level where motions of no-confidence have resulted in metros such as Johannesburg changing mayors as often as Chippa United Football Club changes coaches.
What appears pretty clear from Mapaila’s interviews, however, is that the SACP general secretary does not have the ear of the ANC secretary-general, Fikile Mbalula, let alone that of the ANC president.
For much of its 103 years of existence, first as the Communist Party of South Africa and later as the SACP, the party’s general secretaries have enjoyed close relations with either ANC presidents or their secretaries-general.
It is often said Chief Albert Luthuli, the last ANC president before the party was banned in 1960, would hardly take any major decision without first conferring with his trusted comrade, SACP general secretary Moses Kotane.
The tradition continued in exile where ANC president Oliver Tambo worked closely with Kotane and his successors — Moses Mabhida and Joe Slovo.
Post the unbanning, the relationship has often been characterised by ideological and political tension but, in most of the cases, the channels between the most senior leaders of these organisations remained open.
This was the case even during the Thabo Mbeki years, when, despite an almost non-existent relationship between him and SACP general secretary Blade Nzimande, the SACP’s relations with then ANC secretary-general Kgalema Motlanthe were always cordial.
But in the Ramaphosa-Mbalula era, Mapaila seems to have been frozen out of the inner circle — reduced to shouting from outside without much influence. If indeed it is true, as claimed by one SACP leader, that a party delegation was deliberately sent to a wrong venue when the ANC was to meet opposition leaders to iron out details of the GNU, the ANC clearly sees little value in listening to its allies.
The question is, what will Mapaila and his collective do about it? Lead the SACP out of the government and the ANC-led alliance? Unlikely.
Follow in the footsteps of their predecessors who, after being isolated and ignored by Mbekiites and others they labelled as the “96 class project”, threw in their lot with Mbeki’s then deputy — campaigning for him to be the next president? Look where that led — state capture, a deeply divided and weakened trade union movement and a less influential SACP.
Besides, an ANC that is as weakened as it is today may not survive another acrimonious leadership race. We should not be surprised if the current outcry eventually dies down and the status quo in the alliance remains.
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