Cronin+warns+ANC+not+to+suppress+dissent,+B+Boyle,+S+Times

Sunday Times, Johannesburg, 21 January 2007
=Cronin warns ANC not to suppress dissent=


 * Brendan Boyle**

Political dissent within the ANC-led tripartite alliance should be acknowledged and accepted as a legitimate safety valve, South African Communist Party deputy general secretary Jeremy Cronin said this week.

Delivering the Joe Slovo Memorial Lecture in Johannesburg, Cronin cautioned that attempts to suppress dissent could cause dangerous pressures to build.

Cronin said efforts by the ANC, including President Thabo Mbeki, to deny the succession race and stifle political debate would threaten the aims of the ruling alliance.

Cronin used the SACP’s vigorous defence of ANC Deputy President Jacob Zuma’s legal rights as the peg for an analysis of the state of debate among parties driving what the ANC’s allies call the “national democratic revolution”.

Cronin said that instead of denying political contestation within the party and the alliance, the ANC should encourage debate.

“Political differences can be handled politically. But if the divisions are not rooted in politics then there are no political solutions to them — only the sheer play of power, of administrative and disciplinary measures, of factions and conspiracies, of judicial commissions, of expulsions and counter-expulsions, of palace coups, or of intra-elite wheeling and dealing,” he said.

Cronin said last year’s joint statement by Mbeki and Zuma saying there were no political differences between them was one example of what he termed “political denialism”. So too were Mbeki’s reassuring statements after each of his visits to provincial ANC committees and the party’s frequent insistence that there was no succession race underway.

Cronin said it was equally misleading to reduce the problems facing the country to challenges merely of delivery. Instead of allowing legitimate debate about policy alternatives to address backlogs, the ANC preferred to insist that all the correct policies were in place and all that was left was to implement them.

He said there had been some recent departures from the denial of dissent, including Social Welfare Minister Zola Skweyiya’s support for a basic income grant already dismissed by the Cabinet.

“It is encouraging that within the ANC, since the July 2005 National General Conference, there has been greater preparedness from diverse quarters to open up policy debate in these ways.”


 * From: http://www.sundaytimes.co.za/PrintEdition/News/Article.aspx?id=363429**

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