SACP+blames+powerful+presidency+for+ANC+ills,+Brown,+Mde,+B+Day

Business Day, Johannesburg, 22 May 2006
=SACP blames ‘powerful presidency’ for ANC ills=


 * Vukani Mde and Karima Brown**

THE South African Communist Party (SACP) yesterday launched a scathing indirect attack on President Thabo Mbeki, charging that an over-concentration of power in his office was fuelling the African National Congress (ANC) succession crisis.

This partly explained the intense interest in the succession race, the party said at a briefing in Johannesburg yesterday.

“The Presidency is overly powerful and concentrated...our democracy is excessively presidential,” SACP general secretary Blade Nzimande told the briefing.

The SACP also indicated it would not necessarily follow Mbeki’s lead in calling for a woman president to run SA after 2009, which Mbeki’s detractors say is an attempt to thwart ANC deputy president Jacob Zuma’s presidential aims.

“It’s a difficult issue. Obviously we are committed to gender equality and women’s emancipation in all sectors of society. Unfortunately, this matter has been raised in an atmosphere that is poisoned,” said Nzimande.

The ruling party’s succession crisis spilled over into the public domain after Zuma was acquitted on rape charges.

The acquittal re-established Zuma as a contender for president inside the ANC, but unleashed a fierce debate about his suitability outside the party.

Mbeki’s comments at the Gordon Institute for Business Science at the weekend, that South Africans should decide what kind of “leadership” they wanted after his 2009 departure, are being interpreted as a move to throw the succession debate beyond party boundaries. Zuma’s power base is thought to lie primarily within the party.

Mbeki’s comments were in contrast to his earlier stance that the ANC alone would decide the issue of the succession.

Since Zuma’s sacking by Mbeki last year the ANC has been paralysed by the succession crisis but the party is now attempting to regain the initiative.

Last week it released a document to its branches on the “challenges of leadership” leading up to the party conference next year and the 2009 general elections.

The document proposes a radical overhaul of the party’s leadership structures. If implemented, some of its recommendations would undo a large part of Mbeki’s legacy as ANC president.

“The trend in the past few years is that the national executive has evolved to consist only of the middle strata and business. It would be a travesty of its own express orientation if the ANC’s national leadership did not include working-class cadres,” the document says.

The document proposes to increase the number of seats on the executive to make space for unionists, the youth, women, racial minorities and representatives of the poor.

This attempt to co-opt these constituencies, some of which have been marginalised during Mbeki’s stewardship of the party, could have the effect of whittling away Zuma’s appeal to disaffected groups. Zuma has drawn his strongest support from the ANC Youth League, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) and the SACP.

The ANC’s discussion document and the SACP’s own discussion documents on its relationship to state power, could signal the emergence of a third way in the ruling alliance’s succession crisis.

According to the ANC document, this third way would involve placating the left, maintaining an arms-length relationship between the party and the state, countering the lobbying power of business and marginalising the divisive Mbeki and Zuma wings of the party.

In an echo of the concerns raised by the ANC document, the SACP yesterday said the “inordinate” power of the presidency was one of the underlying causes of the succession crisis.

The increasing power of the executive also weakened Parliament and other democratic institutions, said the SACP.

SACP deputy general secretary and ANC MP Jeremy Cronin said: “The balance of power between the three spheres of government is very important. In SA, Parliament is by far the weakest sphere. We therefore have an imbalance of power.”


 * From: http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/topstories.aspx?ID=BD4A203552**

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