Chris McGreal in Johannesburg Thursday July 25, 2002 The Guardian
President Thabo Mbeki cancelled an opening speech to the South African Communist party congress yesterday as hostile delegates tried to purge the party's central committee of members who serve in his cabinet.
He backed out less than 24 hours before the conference opened, delivering a snub to the African National Congress's long-standing ally after weeks of confrontation between them about his rightwing economic policies and his authoritarian style of leadership.
His office offered a thinly veiled excuse, saying he was too busy with cabinet meetings. But the president was apparently worried about being met by a display of outright hostility from the party on whose central committee he served in the 1980's.
Adding to the pressure, the third member of the alliance, the trade union confederation Cosatu, announced this week that it would call a general strike in October in protest at privatisation.
The Communist party is in the interesting position of regarding itself as being engaged in a struggle against growing Stalinism in the presidency and ANC hierarchy.
The friction between the two parties was brought into the open by the Communist party's deputy secretary general, Jeremy Cronin, warning of a "bureaucratisation of the struggle".
He said the ANC was increasingly serving a narrow elite and in danger of becoming like its counterpart in Zimbabwe.
The comments were made eight months ago in an interview with an Irish academic, but have only just come to public notice on the internet.
Mr Cronin accused the ANC leadership of bullying, and said communists in the party had been "marginalised, shouted down, subjected to heavy presidential attacks, beginning with [Nelson] Mandela".
Last year the ANC national executive issued a briefing paper which accused communist and union leaders of a "counter-revolutionary plot".
Last week the ANC spokesman Smuts Ngonyama responded to Mr Cronin's comments by calling him"a frustrated individual", and accusing him of being "unfaithful" and "spreading lies". Others in the ANC hierarchy joined the attack.
Although the three alliance partners sometimes try to paper over the cracks, they have basic differences on economic and social policies.
Mr Mbeki's strategy depends on privatising and restructuring the centralised apartheid-era economy on Thatcherite lines.
The Communist party and unions want to retain public ownership and legislate for improved pay and conditions for workers.
Cosatu's general secretary, Zwelinzima Vavi, said that while the gap between the overall income of blacks and whites had narrowed, there was a new gap between a small band of wealthy blacks and the mass of poor people confronted by rising unemployment and surging food prices.
The Communist party and unions have also challenged Mr Mbeki's much vaunted revival plan for the continent, the New Partnership for Africa's Development (Nepad), as "notoriously vague" and essentially a partnership between the continent's elite and the west.
Several members of Mr Mbeki's cabinet are expected to face a strong challenge to their seats on the party central committee at the congress.
One is the safety and security minister, Charles Nqakula, an influential ally of Mr Mbeki, who could be unseated as Communist party chairman.
Also at risk are Essop Pahad, minister in the president's office and Mr Mbeki's enforcer, and the public enterprises minister, Jeff Radebe, who threw down the challenge to his own party in March by announcing an acceleration of the privatisation programme.
The public service minister, Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi, who has been at perpetual odds with the unions over wages, decided not to seek re-election to the central committee.
Despite their differences, it serves the parties' interests to hang together. Without the ANC, the communists, who lack broad support, would have minimal representation in parliament.
And Mr Mbeki does not want to see the alliance fall apart because that would probably lead to the formation of a rival party to the left of the ANC, where it is most vulnerable.