Manamela, Mapaila weigh in on ANC
ANC national executive committee (NEC) member and Education Deputy Minister Buti Manamela has weighed in on his party’s failure to achieve an outright majority in the May 29 elections.
The former Young Communists League leader said the ANC’s failure to achieve its goal at the polls presented an opportunity for alliance partners to reflect.
Manamela was speaking at the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) policy conference taking place at the Birchwood Hotel in Boksburg on Tuesday evening.
The current political juncture could be regarded both as a crisis and an opportunity for the ANC to advance and deepen the National Democratic Revolution (NDR), he said.
Depending on the choices the party takes, it would influence the ANC’s position regarding the NDR, he said.
“We have to take a step backward, we have to soberly make an analysis of this moment and what it represents,” Manamela said.
The NEC engaged with its alliance partners last week on Thursday and different parties in an effort to come up with possible scenarios and also to look at what their implications would be, he said.
This period needed the NEC to exercise extreme caution and also required one to have a tactical flexibility and strategic consistency, Manamela said.
However, any decision made in the formation of a new government shouldn’t reverse the gains made over the past 30 years, he added.
Speaking immediately after Manamela, SACP general secretary Solly Mapaila said the ANC’s failure to win an outright majority at the polls was a major setback for the revolution.
“The first task we have after suffering this setback is consciously rebuilding out movement, renewing ourselves, to embark on what we call self revolution, we can’t continue this way,” Mapaila said.
The SACP would not work with white monopoly capital to rebuild democracy, he said.
“Their primary force here politically is the DA and its surrogate partners. The moment we have is to be free from capital.”
Without mincing his words, Mapaila said the ANC had a clear available option to form a coalition with minority parties, adding that they could do it with ease. He could not understand why the ANC was dilly-dallying around the issues as it was so simple for them to choose coalition partners.
Mapaila said the counter-revolution had arrived in South Africa.
“We see this through various sectors, including mining bosses like Sibanye Stillwater announcing retrenchments before elections,” he added.
The NUM’s three day conference is meant to address issues affecting the mining, energy and construction sectors.