ANC Leader Corrects the Record - GreenLeft Wkly


Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit

source: Green Left Weekly #304 2/4/98


Feature letter: ANC national conference

It is with a mixture of amusement and irritation that I have just read
Oupa Lehulere's story on the ANC's 50th National Conference, held in
Mafikeng in mid-December (Green Left Weekly, #302). 

Lehulere was clearly nowhere near the conference. He is hoping perhaps
that he can get away with sloppy journalism because he is writing for a
largely Australian readership, a readership that was even further away
from Mafikeng than he was. 

As you might imagine, my amusement began to turn to irritation when I read
that I was supposed to have been the chairperson of the conference's
economic policy commission. In that capacity I am supposed to have turned
down COSATU's request to table its opposition to the government's
macro-economic policy framework, GEAR. Partly as a result of this, GEAR,
we are told, was adopted by the Conference without a murmur. Wrong, wrong
and wrong again! 

I was not chairperson of the economic policy commission, but convener of
the overall resolutions committee. COSATU delegates participated actively
in all commissions, including the economic policy commission. Along with
many other ANC delegates, including some who are cabinet ministers, COSATU
participants forcefully raised their concerns around the macro-economic
policy framework.  The Conference did not endorse GEAR (on this Lehulere
can perhaps be forgiven; some of the local commercial media also got it
wrong). 

There are numerous other factual errors and short cuts in Lehulere's
article. He appears to present the electoral dynamics within the
Conference as being a struggle between a centrist, new elite leadership on
the one hand, and a grassroots opposition personified by Winnie
Madikizela-Mandela on the other. Norm Dixon, in some of his own
pre-Conference coverage, written from much further away, nonetheless has a
much better understanding of some of this. 

Just before the Conference, Madikizela-Mandela and her close political
associates, ran a high-profile campaign on (in my judgement) a relatively
demagogic, right-wing and Africanist platform - calling for the return of
the death penalty, dismissing feminism as a European and ``reactionary''
fad that was undermining ``traditional African family values'', calling
for the expulsion of communists from the ANC, and generally arguing that
the key strategic task of the present was the fostering of a black
capitalist class. 

Madikizela-Mandela was contesting for the deputy presidency of the ANC,
and Lehulere is a little skimpy with the facts when he implies that she
graciously retired from the contest and was still elected to the national
executive committee with a high vote. She declined to contest the deputy
presidency when it was clear that she could only secure a little over 100
endorsers in a Conference of 3000 delegates. 

As you can see, I am fairly harsh on the political positions advanced by
Madikizela-Mandela and others close to her. The ANC is, however, a broad
national front, and it is not surprising that such views should exist
within it. 

If there are those in the ANC who wish to expel SACP members, for our
part, the SACP is not trying to expel other ideological currents within
the ANC.  We shall contest them, but we think that preserving the broad
character of the ANC is essential for the political challenges we are
confronting. 

Lehulere is also wrong in his calculations on how many SACP members were
elected into the ANC leadership. He fails to mention that the new
Secretary General, Kgalema Motlanthe, is an SACP central committee member,
and the new Deputy Secretary General, Thenjiwe Mthintso is an SACP
political bureau member. As for the remaining 60 national executive
additional members, 18, and not 9, are SACP members. 

That there are intense and complex policy debates within the ANC is, of
course, correct. That the new situation has seen the rapid development of
new and upwardly mobile black strata is also unquestionably correct. These
latter developments will, of course, have an impact upon the policy
debates within the ANC. 

Lehulere has been arguing for years that national liberation movements
like the ANC are inevitably captured by a new bourgeoisie. He reads the
ANC Conference, like everything else about the ANC, from the standpoint of
this doomsday, ``I-told-you-so'' metaphysics. 

Of course, in reality, this sad outcome may well eventuate. But hundreds
of thousands of South African ANC members, communists and trade unionists
are determined that it should not. It is a question of militant but
intelligent struggle, organisation and comradely engagement inside of the
ANC itself - if we all confine ourselves to aloof metaphysics then, of
course, the doomsday prophecies will be self-fulfilling. 

Jeremy Cronin
SACP deputy general secretary and 
ANC national executive committee member
South Africa


                             -30-

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