The SACP appears ready to embrace undemocratic centralism in its
search for a new alliance partner
Thursday.
If the events of recent weeks and months are anything to go by, all roads would appear to lead, politically speaking, to Jacob Zuma’s uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) party.
It’s not just the 45% of voters in KwaZulu-Natal who decided to dump the ANC, the Inkatha Freedom Party and the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) for the former head of state’s new party on 29 May.
Or the flurry of leaders of zero-seat parties who jumped on the MK bandwagon as soon as they saw a future of collecting a R350 grant monthly unfolding on the leaderboard at the national results centre.
The one-(wo)man-and-a-webcam wonders who sprang up all over Mzansi in the build-up to the elections traded their handful of votes for a green T-shirt in the days that followed — some extremely low-hanging fruit for the MK party as it consolidated its election win.
Since then there’s been a steady movement of former bureaucrats, technocrats, securocrats and jurists — well, one former impeached jurist — into the ranks of the Zuma party and onto its parliamentary benches.
John Hlophe and associates sashayed into parliament when the MK party decided to participate, just in time for payday on the 15th, pre-election lists submitted to the Electoral Commission of South Africa be damned.
EFF deputy president Floyd Shivambu followed a month or two later, sparking an exodus of party members and leaders into MK in various parts of the country where it had lost ground — and legislature seats.
These days, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela House is vibing Montrose, a halfway stop on the road to Nxamalala, as the MK party continues to cannibalise it and other allies in the progressive caucus as part of its consolidation programme ahead of the local government elections in 2026.
Former public protector — and now former EFF MP — Busisiwe Mkhwebane says she is still applying her mind as to her next move after bailing from the Red Berets on Wednesday, the latest of its leaders to do so.
But all indications are that she, too, will make the pilgrimage to Nxamalala before very long, joining the long line of ANC and EFF leaders to do so since Zuma launched the party on 16 December last year.
It shouldn’t be long before Mkhwebane takes the parliamentary oath for the second time in the course of a year — there must be another personal and South African first there — and is back on the opposition benches, this time as an MK party MP.
I’m hoping uBaba deploys Mkhwebane as Hlophe’s stand-in until the impeached judge’s legal dramas as the party’s representative on the Judicial Service Commission (JSC) are resolved.
Not that I have anything against Papa Penny, but the wave of public outrage that Mkhwebane’s appointment to the JSC would generate would be good for a laugh.
Hopefully the idea of throwing the impeached public protector among the JSC pigeons appeals to the old man’s sense of humour as well.
We shall see.
The leaders of the other small parties on the opposition side of the chamber must be increasingly nervous of their newfound friends in green, who are busy numbering their numbers ahead of 2026.
The MK party’s constitution that Shivambu unveiled last week doesn’t talk about elective conferences and gives Zuma more power than God, but it also allows its members to be members of other parties.
It sounds pretty outlandish, as a fair bit of the MK constitution does, but the party went into the elections telling people to vote for them while remaining in the ANC and it almost got Zuma the 50% plus one he needed for his party to govern KwaZulu-Natal alone.
It may not work on the ANC constituency again, or on the voting base of other parties, but Julius Malema and everybody else wanting to retain their seats on the opposition benches — and their identity politically — will be sleeping with one eye open from now to 2026.
The South African Communist Party (SACP) is also talking about deploying all 17 of its votes elsewhere when local government elections come around again because the ANC has given most of its cabinet seats to Helen Zille’s lot.
The SACP has been threatening to divorce the ANC since Blade Nzimande was in the Young Communist League, and finally may have an actual — if somewhat unlikely — alternative for the first time.
Its leaders are now reprising 2007 and talking up an alliance with Zuma’s party in the future over the ANC’s latest failure to consult.
That should go well.
According to the MK party’s constitution, uBaba giveth and uBaba taketh away — undemocratic centralism — so one wishes Solly and the comrades strength in their search for consultation.