ANC fissures, Cosatu's weakness highlighted by communists' Blade Nzimande

SACP leader Blade Nzimande says the primary task of the party is to “build” the ANC.

Delivering his political report at the party's special national congress meeting in Kempton Park on Tuesday, Nzimande said party members should focus on building local branches of the ANC and unions under Cosatu.

He emphasised that things had changed since the party last met nationally in July 2017, referring specifically to the election of Cyril Ramaphosa at the ANC's national conference in December that year.

“We met at a time when there was huge political uncertainty, even among ourselves as the SACP ... The divisions and tensions inside the ANC were so deep that we were not even certain whether the ANC was going to survive Nasrec,” he said.

“But now Nasrec has come and gone. Fortunately, the ANC still remains one organisation. However, it is still divided and has not overcome the fissures that it had in the run-up to the Nasrec conference.

“The reason we are concerned about the ANC is because there can be no national democratic revolution that can be advanced and radicalised without a united ANC at the centre,” he said.

“The central committee says to you that one of the primary tasks of the period is to build the ANC. The primary challenge of the moment is to build the ANC. Communists must build the ANC branches and seek to build this organisation.”

Another important task for the SACP was to fix the unions under Cosatu.

“We are meeting now in a period where our other ally, Cosatu, faces its own internal challenges. The central committee has said we are concerned about the weaknesses we are seeing in Cosatu’s industrial unions,” Nzimande said. “We can’t celebrate that. We need to go out and be part of rebuilding those unions in Cosatu.”

Nzimande also took a dig at opposition parties, calling the DA a “white liberal” organisation and describing the EFF as “neo-fascists”.

“The main opposition, the DA, has deep problems ... What has always been the crisis of dominant trend of white liberalism in the DA and the undertones of its racial organisation have been exposed for all to see,” he said.

He described the EFF as a “black chauvinistic organisation” which had exploited the weaknesses in the Progressive Youth Alliance.

“Our student formations are in trouble. The youth formations in our country generally are weak and this other neo-fascist organisation is exploiting that.”