NO FREE TICKET: ANC DRAWS THE LINE AS SACP CAMPAIGNS ALONE IN ALL 9 PROVINCES

Liberation movement enforces discipline after talks fail. Dual members told to choose one party or lose ANC deployment  

THE MARRIAGE IS OVER. The ANC-SACP alliance cracked. Talks produced no sanity. The divorce papers are signed. What’s left of the ANC-SACP marriage is a facade. The crack is now visible to all.

By Mpho Dube, Editor-in-Chief

The Azanian | Truth. Fearless. Unfiltered.  

AZANIAFROCOMEDIA – The Catalyst of Impact

POLOKWANE– The ANC-SACP alliance is over. National talks produced no agreement. 

The South African Communist Party is now campaigning alone in all nine provinces for local elections. The ANC, as the senior partner and governing liberation movement of 30 years, has enforced Alliance discipline. 

The ANC remains the dominant political force nationally. It lost its national majority in the last elections with 40% support, but retained 74% in Limpopo. The ANC is the party in power. It is the party that issues deployments, privileges and political space. 

The rupture hardened in Limpopo after the ANC reshuffled only one portfolio in the Legislature, the Health Portfolio Committee chaired by SACP Provincial Secretary Dr. Chuene Malebana. No other chair was moved.

The SACP Limpopo, in a 24 June statement signed by 1st Deputy Provincial Secretary Cde Skinjar Ramugumo, called it a “political attack, not administration” and accused the ANC of “rooivaar” politics.

When an Alliance partner unilaterally removes a SACP cadre from leadership while leaving all others intact, it reduces the SACP from an equal partner to a ‘rooivaar’ – a red danger to be neutralised, the SACP said. That is the same method the apartheid state used to silence the Communist Party.

The ANC has now made its position clear. There is no free ticket. Dual ANC-SACP members must choose which formation they will campaign for. Those who campaign for the SACP will lose ANC privileges, political space and deployment opportunities, because those are ANC resources as the governing party.

The directive has opened new cracks in branches where the Alliance once campaigned as one. The SACP says it has already run solo by-election campaigns and is now taking an independent campaign nationwide.

The ANC in Limpopo unpacked the matter through Head of Communication and Provincial Spokesperson Tonny Rachoene, who is also MEC for Public Works, Roads and Infrastructure. Rachoene left no stone unturned in restating the ANC national leadership’s position.

Members cannot campaign for two parties. The ANC has taken a decision, and it will be implemented, Rachoene said.

An analysis in The Azanian on 11 April described the alliance as a facade, a Potemkin village of power, not principle. 

The SACP says it will not be diverted, rejects “rooivaar” politics, and will mobilise workers, the unemployed and the poor.

We did not survive banning under apartheid to be intimidated by Alliance partners in democracy, the SACP Limpopo said. All Power to the People.