South Africa

South Africa

Op-ed: The ghost Alliance, haunting the future

Op-ed: The ghost Alliance, haunting the future

The past week and half has seen the African National Congress’s two critical alliance partners hold mostly successful congresses—success, of course, being a relative term in both cases. The South African Communist Party (SACP) and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) have declared themselves firmly behind the ruling party. Which means that the ruling party is as powerful as it’s ever been. Doesn’t it? By RICHARD POPLAK.

An alliance is only as strong as the rhetoric binding it.

This thought occurred to me last week, as I watched SACP honcho Comrade Blade Nzimande lavish praise on the richest ANC deputy president to ever hold the office. Cyril Ramaphosa made an appearance at the University of Johannesburg, Soweto Campus, to address SACP delegates from across the country, all of whom were at the organisation’s 3rd Special Congress, caucusing their way to glory.

Even the loosest conception of a ‘communist party’ would be unable to bear the appearance of the deputy president, who, despite his credentials as a fearless and committed mining labour organiser, has emerged over the years as the billionaire face of the ANC’s serpentine patronage network. Ramaphosa is often described as a smart businessman, and while he’s certainly that, the relevant point is that he hasn’t needed to be smart. He got rich the old fashioned way: by being in a prominent position when power was won.

But his happy story ends in the platinum belt in August 2012, when the country was forced to tally up just how much men like Ramaphosa has actually cost us. Go ahead and Google the Marikana massacre if need be, but as Ranjeni Munusamy put it in these pages, “Ramaphosa, a board member of Lonmin platinum mine where thousands were protesting in August 2012 – made phone calls that allegedly escalated the confrontation; sent emails reportedly calling for action to be taken against ‘these criminals’, whose crime was to seek a wage increase; and held secret meetings to get the government and police to ‘act in a more pointed way’ to quell the unrest.”

Flash forward three years, and there stood Cyril Ramaphosa, up on stage before the ANC’s communist alliance partners, praising them for their stalwart commitment to furthering the National Democratic Revolution. The NDR, for those with short memories, was adopted by the SACP in 1928 from the 2nd Congress of the Communist International, and was rolled into the ANC’s intellectual framework shortly thereafter. Over the years the NDR has served many masters in many guises, but it’s always alluded to the realisation of racial and economic liberation via the judicious use of socialism. Ramaphosa, who in a real country would be fighting for his political life while battling hundreds of millions of dollars of civil suits, nonetheless spoke about the unbreakable socialist front, and how it was propelling the country forward.

He wasn’t kidding. At no point during the worst moment in post-democratic South Africa did the alliance flounder. Marikana was vastly complicated, of course, but no one in the alliance was willing to properly engage with the official narrative, which was the absence of a narrative. “We have given opportunism far too much space and tolerance. Together as an alliance and with our local structures, together with government agencies, we need to help to restore basic norms of safety and security into the lives of our mining communities,” said Nzimande, way back in 2012. In other words, crush ‘em.

In other other words, we’re all in this together.

You’ll be thrilled to learn that nothing has changed. As I already noted, the 3rd Special SACP Congress went off without a hitch. Like Ramaphosa’s cameo, the appearance of Cosatu president, S’dumo Dlamini, served to remind delegates not only of common cause, but also of common enemies. Despite “the template called Vavi”—a sneering reference to recently canned general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi—and numerous dog whistle warnings about the shenanigans of the expelled National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa), Dlamini wanted to assure the communists that all was well in the lead up to his own special congress, scheduled for this week. There would be dissidents backed by the United States and other foreign powers looking to disrupt the proceedings, he warned, but nothing would throw Cosatu off course.

Nothing did. Sure, there were the dissident delegates who made life difficult for Dlamini on Monday. But after a long night of strategising on how best to nullify their influence, on Tuesday the federation president sewed up a successful vote on delegate credentials. He reminded his congress that, “There is nothing like ‘Numsa allies’. There are Cosatu unions. Set yourself free from that! Numsa is attacking us. They are planning to destroy this Cosatu. They planned against the Cosatu congress and resolved in that document to break Cosatu.”

Here, in all this roiling factionalism, is the alliance’s real weakness: the cracking of the federation, the cleaving off of huge icebergs of workers, the establishment of a workers’ party. But inside these special congresses, huddled within these enormous group hugs, one doesn’t feel weakness so much as strength. The ANC remains remarkably formidable—a huge, ancient, broad church that houses millions.

And yet the alliance itself has lost integrity altogether. The minor disagreements between players emphasise just how cozy it all is. Nothing anyone said at the SACP special congress made any sense; everything that came out of Blade Nzimande, S’dumo Dlamini and Cyril Ramaphosa’s mouths was an elaborate fiction, a ruse, a gambit.

When billionaires address communists in congresses, the game is all but up. The SACP and Cosatu may have made it through their big events without major embarrassment, but if an alliance is only as strong as the rhetoric binding it, then this one is all but done. It is a ghost alliance, referencing the past, haunting the future. Next month, Zwelinzima Vavi holds his anti-corruption march, and three months later, Cosatu will hold an elective congress.

The fraying is about to begin. DM

Photo: SACP General Secretary Blade Nzimande (Photo: Greg Nicolson), SA President Jacob Zuma, Cosatu President S’dumo Dlamini (Photo: Jordi Matas)

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