/ 17 October 2008

Inside the Shikota movement

The new party mooted by Mosiuoa Lekota and Mbhazima Shilowa wants to be a modern party without the pressures of ideological baggage.

The new party mooted by former defence minister Mosiuoa Lekota and former Gauteng premier Mbhazima Shilowa wants to be a modern party without the pressures of the ideological baggage that the alliance-based ANC has to carry.

Shilowa declared his support for a new formation this week and named himself as the ‘convener and
volunteer-in-chief”.

The party’s policies will cast a net beyond the rhetoric of revolution to address the needs of modern-day voters, organisers said.

According to former deputy defence minister Mluleki George, the alliance used to work, but now the South African Communist Party (SACP) wants to control it. ”They want to make statements about Parliament and how the state should be run,” he said. ‘If they want to do that they must go it alone.”

The Western Cape organisers for the new party insist that it should advance beyond an ‘outdated alliance” and instead create a modern social democratic one that is not steeped in the traditions and ideologies of another era.

Insiders agree on the importance of formulating clear policy positions that will go beyond the current emphasis on ‘defending the Constitution”, which has become Lekota’s mantra since he announced a possible breakaway party.

For now, the clearest agreement among his supporters is on the need to ‘modernise”. Said one: ‘We have to drop the language of Stalinism and the national democratic revolution and move beyond the constraints of an outdated alliance. People from the left, including the Communist Party, are welcome, but if they want to take the revolution on to its second [fully Marxist] stage, they need to go elsewhere.”

She said that although the new party will be in favour of a developmental state, the definition of such a state needs to be clarified. ‘We don’t even know what the words ‘developmental state’ mean.”

It is said the new party will want the developmental state to be couched in social democratic principles rather than moving to a ‘harder” leftist approach, as mooted by the SACP, which claims it is playing a more influential role in the ANC than it did under former president Thabo Mbeki.

Shilowa indicated this week that he is putting together a preparatory committee made up of prominent people who will scour the country with him to drum up support for the convention due to take place on November 2. The venue is still undecided, but George said the Free State seems the most convenient place because it is in the centre of the country.

The ANC plans to fight the new party on the basis of policy, starting with a range of regional meetings planned for this weekend across the country. ‘We are not distracted by these turbulent times, we are preparing to govern,” said ANC secretary general Gwede Mantashe on Thursday at a press briefing in Johannesburg.

The imminent formation of an ANC splinter group has activated the ANC’s election machinery, the immediate purpose of which would now be to ensure that those who leave do not do so moving with ANC structures. Another ANC tactic in taking on Shilowa’s group is to challenge its public claims to morality, democracy and constitutionality.

Members of the ANC’s national executive committee (NEC) are convinced that Mbeki is intimately involved in the splinter.

Told about this, an organiser of the new party asked: ‘Did they say that? That would help us a lot, because that would actually make [Mbeki] take a position. For [the ANC] it will be scoring an own goal to spread things like that because it would make it easier for us.”

An ANC representative said the party would be in trouble if it failed to stay in touch and work with its branches to resist the rebels.

Attacking the Shilowa group’s positioning as a party of morality and commitment the rule of law, an NEC member asked: ‘What is this morality? Where are the values of selflessness and modesty if you look at how both Shilowa and Lekota have become multimillionaires since they joined government.

‘The ANC has never been about self-enrichment, but these two, who own wine farms, have amassed wealth while serving in government but the poor have remained poor. If their strategy is to show that the leadership of the ANC is rotten to the core, then they must at least show that they are holier.”

Other ANC members are planning to attend Shilowa’s convention to try to move it away from its objective to form a proper political party to challenge the ANC.

Said one: ‘ANC activists will not go there to disrupt it but to contest it as it is also a site of struggle.”

At a discussion at the Institute of Security Studies (ISS) in Pretoria this week, ANC deputy secretary general Thandi Modise referred to former head of the presidency in the ANC Smuts Ngonyama and business tycoon Saki Macozoma as key members of the new formation. Macozoma is rumoured in ANC circles to be funding the new party.

According to Macozoma these statements show how insecure the ruling party, is despite its show of bravery. ‘The only thing these people have not accused me of yet is witchcraft. They ‘believe’ based on what? Did they ask me to explain anything? No. It is the same crowd that concocted hoax emails for which some of them are on trial in Pretoria.

‘It’s pathetic. As Malcolm Muggeridge once put it ‘a ruling class in retreat cannot tell who its friends are and who its enemies are’,” he told the Mail & Guardian.