GARETH VAN ONSELEN: The South African Cowardice Party

Contemporary socialist revolutionaries have a rich history of purpose and conviction to draw upon. Mao and Stalin, often evoked by the South African Communist Party (SACP), did not lack self-belief. They boasted an iron will. They bent millions to their vision and fashioned states out of a brutal and singular resolve. Yet the SACP — weak, indecisive, compromised and confused — is a disgrace on both fronts.

History’s great revolutionaries must look on the party from beyond the grave and convulse at the pathetic, shivering wreck of an institution it has become.

It is a sham political organisation. It rides on the back of the ANC’s electoral support, too insecure to stand alone, too brittle to offer anything but "influence". From the start it has used its limited persuasion to bring to power a demagogic nightmare. And now, fundamentally compromised by this complicity, it cannot even bring itself to command its representatives to correct the historical record. Today, "influence" is the pretence it uses to justify its irrelevance, and undetectable.

In Blade Nzimande it has a blind man leading the blind. Its youth wing has been crushed by the EFF, a party with the kind of conviction the SACP can only dream of. As a result, it has no fresh blood. Ahead of its elective congress the party said Nzimande "would have preferred not to stand for re-election, but party members wanted him to stay on". They want him to stay on because they have learnt the lesson he has been inculcating into the SACP for years now: we are a nothing organisation and for that, you need a nothing man.

Mission accomplished.

As if to augment its directionless, amoral dithering, it has been reported the SACP will instruct its members inside Parliament to oppose the motion of no confidence in President Jacob Zuma on Tuesday but, simultaneously, it will march with the people outside Parliament and join the call for Zuma to resign. If you were to distill hypocrisy from the abstract to the tangible, the resultant ooze would be the SACP. It is a party of the gutless and feeble. One that wishes to feign some kind of moral code but, in reality, is motivated by little more than cowardice.

Quite rightly, people argue the ANC has lost its moral compass. That instrument was faulty from the get-go, but, all things being relative, you can understand how poisonous leadership slowly poisons an organisation from within. The SACP has no such excuse. It is a separate institution with its own representatives, rules and regulations. That it so willingly drank from Zuma’s chalice, to the extent that its insides are now rotten, is a singular indictment of its leadership. And the man responsible, Blade Nzimande, now stands on a soap box made of cheap regret to proselytise about what is good and right.

It is disgraceful. He couldn’t tell right from wrong if you nailed the Bill of Human Rights to his forehead.

"The SACP does not have a mandate to support the removal of the whole ANC-led government or executive," an SACP spokesperson said at the weekend, "Its mandate is specifically to pursue the resignation of President Zuma."

If it had a real problem, an actual ethical concern with how Zuma has behaved, then it would not ask him to be the arbiter of his own fate

In two sentences you have the SACP fully and accurately described. Both recognise Zuma is unsuitable for public office, for whether he is removed or fired, the underlying conclusion is the same: he must go. That is called a moral conviction. But to then surrender that to political technicality is to relinquish your moral authority. To call on Zuma to resign is to outsource your principles to Zuma himself. He becomes both perpetrator and prosecutor of his own crime. And he has made it quite clear, time and time again, he believes himself innocent of all charges.

In another universe, one where Zuma does resign, he doesn’t fall on his sword. He leaves only because the game is up and his stranglehold on the ANC broken. He shows no remorse, expresses no guilt, acknowledges no wrongdoing. He leaves only because he cannot stay. If the SACP believes getting Zuma to resign is a victory for accountability, it is more delusional than its schizophrenic demeanour already suggests.

Resignation is not a moral call. It is a clever piece of rhetoric. It relies on the assumption that guilt and resignation are somehow related in Zuma’s mind. They are not. But this little amoral device the SACP has invented allows it to play off the various public connotations the idea of resignation evokes. It allows the SACP to pretend it is opposed to Zuma’s presidency for moral reasons when, it truth, it only wants him gone, for whatever expedient, private rationale it has been able to muster behind closed doors.

If it had a real problem, an actual ethical concern with how Zuma has behaved, then it would not ask him to be the arbiter of his own fate. The party would take a stand on behalf of principle — of accountability and justice — and demand that he be fired. That is how you address failure the world over. You oppose it; you do not accommodate it.

But how can the SACP oppose it? Opposition, in its internal narrative, involves words, not deeds. Its newsletters and speeches are excruciating in the antiquated socialist jargon they indulge, impenetrable in terms of conviction and interminable with regard to how they obfuscate and dance around a hard bottom line.

But the test of conviction is action, not sentiment.

Faced with a flood of media queries about its position on the motion of no confidence, the SACP released a further statement, ostensibly to clarify but in reality only to further muddy the waters.

"There is a persistent attempt suggesting that the SACP will be supporting President Zuma on Tuesday, August 8. This unfortunate attempt debases the straight forward clarification given. It has generated a lot of fake news and unnecessary reactions to it. It has therefore necessitated that the SACP succinctly sets the record straight: The SACP reiterates its consistent call for President Zuma to resign. If the president does not resign, the ANC should recall him!"

How dare it add that explanation mark at the end. It is to suggest some kind of enthusiasm it has no right to claim. Its call on Zuma to resign is noted. Now, how is it going to vote? Because resignation is not on the table on Tuesday. It is an entirety unrelated concern to the business at hand.

It has just three options: support the motion, oppose it, or abstain. The first is the only moral path it can defend. The second, even if abhorrent, at least suggests the vaguest sense of some kind of bottom line, however unjustifiable. But if it chooses the third, if it abdicates any and all responsibility, it confirms the party is a leach, a parasite, that sucks only self-interest from our democratic dispensation in return for nothing more than disease.

Contradiction, obfuscation and doublespeak now course through the SACP’s veins, to the extent that it cannot even give a clear description of where it stands on something as fundamental as Jacob Zuma. The very fact that it has to fall over itself to explain exactly where it stands, days before the vote, tells you it doesn’t stand at all. It is on its knees. It exists in a fog of its own creation. And the moral ambiguity that results is detestable.

But there is some consolation, however small. History has a way of disaggregating expediency from principle. If Nzimande thinks his "brave" words will stand him in good stead over time, then he understands nothing at all. All they will do is show him up as weak and indecisive. The worst kind of coward — the kind that pretends they are courageous. That is the actual chapter he is busy writing, whatever drivel Umsebenzi contains. The only revolution the SACP knows is the perpetual tumble it is caught in, as it goes through every possible position except the one that counts, several times a day.

The SACP is a blight on our politics. Complicit in the destruction the ANC has wrought, cowering before it and clueless in its resolve, it has one chance to correct the error of their ways. If it does not take it, then it has finally and completely lost any right to absolution.

Tuesday’s motion of no confidence is about far more than Jacob Zuma. It is the last chance saloon for the SACP. It’s time for it to stop drinking at the bar, step outside, and put this den of inequity out of business.