On the SACP's lumpen power grab

[NameOfBeast]

Paul Trewhela writes at politicsweb:

In my view, the SACP is promoting Zuma for all it is worth because (a) he provides good cover, in a political context in which the naked ambition of the SACP would appear to be just too naked; and (b) he provides a means of access to a very wide ancillary further mass base of support, as the figurehead of a Zulu-led tribalist alliance directed against the more disguised former Xhosa-based hegemony within the ANC of the last almost fifty years.

One must assume that the ANC of today is not the ANC of Mandela or Tambo. The broad ethnic alliance of the past, which animated the spirit of the Freedom Charter, and which progressively broke down the organisational barriers that inhibited the ANC from becoming a fully non-racial political party, is now a thing of the past. One most assume that the ANC now has no or very little broad political support among whites, former so-called "Coloureds" or so-called "Indians", especially those of a Hindu background. Since the Congress Alliance of the period of the Freedom Charter looked precisely to this kind of political alliance across racial groupings, the ANC of 2009 is a very different kind of animal.

Further, this is the first time in its almost hundred years' existence that the ANC has permitted itself to be defined so strongly by tribal terms. This invalidates the spiritual premise on which the ANC was founded, which was to put an end precisely to this kind of division.

Simultaneously, the old, old lessons of the apartheid dictatorship - the lessons of the rule of BJ Vorster and PW Botha - are having to be learned again, as new advocates of the old dictatorship advance their claim to state power in the former language of liberation.

http://www.politicsweb.co.za/politicsweb/view/politicsweb/en/page71619?oid=114859&sn=Detail

 

[Albereth]

The ANC does not exist as a political party anymore. It may have had these ambitions for about 8 years and then it all went wrong. They just could do it.

Many commentators had said that the challenge had been for the ANC to change itself from a terrorist organisation to a political party. And while Mandela was around this may have been the case. But Polokwane has shown that democracy is a word used in advertising the party, not a philosophy that the ANC follows.

The country is being ruled by a group of gangsters known as the NEC. They aren't answerable to any parliamentary oversight.

Perhaps COPE is the ralling point of those who do believe in democracy.

Still the question remains as to why Mandela still hangs around with the ANC? Some have said loyalty. But this blindness seriously erodes his claim as one of the leading statesmen of the 20th century.