SACP+may+stick+oar+into+ANC+succession+race,+Sunday+Times

Sunday Times, Johannesburg, 07 May 2006
=SACP may stick oar into ANC’s succession race=


 * //Communist Party will ask members to consider backing a specific candidate for the presidency//**


 * BRENDAN BOYLE**

The SA Communist Party is weighing a decision to abandon its officially neutral stance on the leadership of the ANC and publicly back a specific candidate for president of the ANC and the country.

Though many SACP members, including general secretary Blade Nzimande, have been vocal defenders of suspended ANC deputy president Jacob Zuma since he was sacked from the Cabinet last year, the party’s official position is that it is up to the ANC to choose its leader without interference from alliance partners.

Overt support from the SACP could provide a rallying point for a rival to the ANC leadership’s preferred candidate for president of the movement at its national conference late next year, and for the national presidency in 2009.

The SACP will this week launch a hefty analysis of its historic and current relationship with the ANC, giving members a year to weigh key questions ahead of the SACP national conference next June.

“Should we actively back a specific presidential candidate in 2007 and 2009?” is one of nine questions posed at the end of the 43-page paper written by SACP leaders and endorsed by the party’s central committee.

A formal SACP intervention in the ANC leadership contest would almost certainly enrage President Thabo Mbeki, who strongly defended the ANC’s right to lead in his weekly Internet letter on Friday.

“No other force exists in our country to play this role,” he said in comments possibly crafted to pre-empt the SACP discussion. “This includes the building of a ‘revolutionary’ constituency organised for the exclusive purpose to demand that the revolution must ‘deliver’ what this constituency demands, while it, and its leaders, consciously decide that they have no responsibility to contribute to the advance of the revolution.”

The SACP paper, which the Sunday Times has obtained, strongly endorses the alliance with the ANC and the Cosatu labour federation, but puts the question: “What should the party’s medium to longer-term perspective be on electoral participation?”

It is harshly critical of ANC free-market policies since 1994 and calls for increased internal pressure for a change of direction towards socialism.

“But how do we strengthen a different kind of class hegemony over the state? Not by weakening the state, nor by watering down the ANC’s overwhelming electoral mandate as liberal commentators constantly advise,” the paper says.

Instead, it calls for a rebuilding of a mass-based ANC and condemns moves within the organisation to modernise the ANC administration and enhance the authority of the party’s presidency to echo the centralisation of national power in the state Presidency, at the cost of Parliament and grassroots structures.

In thinly veiled criticism of Mbeki’s leadership, the paper says a major internal review of the ANC and the ANC-led alliance is necessary, in part to avert a crisis caused by “attempts to assert a managerialist, technocratic control over a mass movement”.

The document is sharply critical of the existing black empowerment strategy, which, it says, is encouraging the development of a black elite whose “lifestyle aspirations are those of the white capitalist”.

It says BEE is working against the development of a strong public service by encouraging successful black managers to move to the private sector to meet empowerment targets.


 * From: http://www.sundaytimes.co.za/articles/article.aspx?ID=ST6A184127**

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