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Business Day, Johannesburg, 28 February 2006
=Khutsong heralds new era for ANC’s ties with allies=


 * Karima Brown**

THE South African Communist Party (SACP) line on the crises in Khutsong — “We are not against the African National Congress (ANC) we are for the people” — is a telling signal of the changing dynamics in the tripartite alliance between the ruling party and its allies in the SACP and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu).

It also signals a broader debate about their relationship with state power.

While the SACP and Cosatu remain committed to their election pact with the ruling party this time round, on the ground their decision not to campaign for the ANC in Khutsong sends an unambiguous message that they will no longer give the ANC a “blank cheque” during elections. Of course, this warning to the ANC that their support should not be taken for granted is not new. The SACP and Cosatu have recently crossed swords with the ANC on key political and economic issues.

But Khutsong signals more than a willingness to withhold succour at election time. It indicates a preparedness to revisit old orthodoxies about alliance relations and to contest state power separate from the ANC.

On one hand, the SACP’s experience in Khutsong points to a chance for the party to engage more tactically in an alliance that has more often than not straitjacketed the SACP and Cosatu and corralled them behind unpopular ANC policy decisions.

At local government level, some ANC councils have adopted distinctly antipoor measures that have led to electricity and water cutoffs. Often this has resulted in battles between these councils and poor people, with the left in the alliance providing political cover for the ruling elite, and at the same time being precluded from forming tactical links between itself and the burgeoning social movements.

Khutsong presents the possibility of changing this modus operandi. Khutsong’s residents’ struggle against provincial redemarcation has been driven largely by local SACP and Cosatu structures. The South African Democratic Teachers’ Union and the National Union of Mineworkers — Cosatu’s two most powerful affiliates — have also played a pivotal role in organising the resistance.

This locally driven opposition to the ANC has allowed the SACP and Cosatu to openly defy ANC national leadership despite the election pact. In Khutsong at least, the SACP has sidestepped blame for the ANC’s shortcomings because it has refused to cover its left flank. The SACP’s use of broad-front politics on this issue has given legitimacy to the community’s frustration and anger that not even the ANC can question. This tactic has seen the churches, business and other civil society groups rally behind the call against redemarcation. In this sense the SACP reminds the ANC of its own history as a broad front, a history the ruling party has forgotten in its thoroughly modernised pursuit of power.

But Khutsong is also about the SACP’s vision of itself. The crisis brings into sharp focus a debate raging inside the party about its relationship to state power. The party’s 2005 special conference officially shelved the option of contesting municipal elections, thus putting the lid on a groundswell feeling that the party should adopt a more independent line. The party elders who argued against going it alone fear that such a move could see the SACP reduced to the political fringe, with diminished capacity to influence the ANC on strategic policy questions.

SACP deputy secretary general Jeremy Cronin was candid about this view. According to him, the party did not want to be in opposition to the ANC. As a communist party, it had invested heavily in the liberation movement and believed the ANC was the best vehicle through which the SACP could advance the cause of socialism. A significant faction in the SACP and the ANC feels that opposing the ANC this way would strengthen its centrist wing, which would love to see the back of the communists. The SACP old guard decided to deny them this opportunity.

But younger communists say Khutsong shows that the inevitable was merely postponed. They do not advocate a wholesale dissolution of the alliance, and instead toy with permutations that include retaining the alliance at national level but competing against the ANC in local elections.

As the ANC’s credibility gap widens, the ruling party’s leftist allies have an opportunity to rekindle their relationship with the poor in a way that is no longer contingent on the ANC. While the ANC has state power and controls all the necessary tools for improving the lives of the poor, it no longer holds the gate pass into poor communities.


 * Brown is political editor.


 * From: http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/specialreports.aspx?ID=BD4A161354 **