Is Solly Mapaila the new Chris Hani?

Newly elected South African Communist Party (SACP) general secretary Solly Mapaila’s rhetoric is strongly towards the working class while uncompromisingly bashing the ANC’s neoliberalism.

At least on public platforms he appears to be a leader ready to return the party to its original mission – to be the vanguard of the working class.

But will he remove the party from ANC’s neoliberalism that his predecessor Blade Nzimande dragged it into during his 20 years at the helm? As the saying goes, Mapaila has hit the ground running, clearly sounding like someone about to chart his own route in the fashion of Chris Hani, Joe Slovo and Moses Kotane.

He did not mince his words to tell President Cyril Ramaphosa, the ANC top brass and delegates at the recent ANC national policy conference that this country is on autopilot under Ramaphosa.

There are clear indications that under Mapaila, ideology will be back on the SACP agenda. He had been raising pertinent issues around capitalism and its failures.

We could not help but recall the global devastation caused by the 2007-2008 financial crisis emanating from the US financial sector crash, resulting in many foreclosures.

Few have recovered from the crisis and the Ukrainian war had not helped the situation either. South Africa is still on its knees with its ongoing power load shedding and policy blunders.

Nzimande himself recently spoke in glowing terms about Mapaila, whom he said had been a full-time communist for more than 20 years, during which he was key in the rebuilding and growing the SACP.

This makes Mapaila a home-brewed leftist leader who knows the country’s challenging conditions. But the jury is out whether Mapaila would Thursday 12 25 August 2022 extricate the party from the corruption spell of the ANC.

Nzimande and his previous deputy general secretary Jeremy Cronin worked comfortably under the ANC capitalism and even joined the government as Cabinet ministers.

This position contradicted that of Hani, who prior to his death vowed never to join the government but to remain outside to build the party and attend to grassroots working-class issues.

According to Dale McKinley, a political analyst and former SACP Central Johannesburg chair and Gauteng provincial executive member, Nzimande became the face of the SACP becoming the junior partner of the ANC in government.

“He spent the last 24 years turning the SACP into a junior partner of the ANC in government as opposed to being the vanguard of the working class.

He defended the alliance with the ANC and expelled those who advocated for independence of the party from the ANC,” McKinley says.

McKinley was himself expelled from the party in November 2000 for allegedly undermining leadership and bringing the party into disrepute because of a critical article he penned about its move away from the working class.

“Cronin and Nzimande did not want to give up alliance with the ANC and their argument was to influence the ANC from within in favour of the poor, but that did not happen,” McKinley said.

But some doubted Mapaila would be any different to Nzimande notwithstanding his rhetoric. One observer said: “Theoretically, he is sound but he is a political offspring of Blade Nzimande.

Their politics have always been about accessing resources via the ANC for themselves.” Whether Mapaila takes the Hani route to stay away from the state, or follow Nzimande and abandon the party in favour of joining the government, remains to be seen. But so far he sounds a lot like Hani.

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