The 2026/27 local government election is poised to reshape SA politics fundamentally — both in relation to the ANC-led tripartite alliance and the broader electoral landscape.
It has the potential to usher in a big shift in SA politics, matched only by the ANC’s Polokwane conference in 2007, which marked the point where (according to former president Thabo Mbeki, opening that conference) the party “gravitated away from its moral axis” and ushered in the rise of “patronage and a lust for power”.
The Polokwane conference steered SA down the destructive and dangerous road the ANC and SA still continue down. And the man at the centre of it, former president Jacob Zuma, is still playing a pivotal, destructive role.
The upcoming elections have the potential to enable SA to either alter course and arrest the decline that began in 2007, or cement its continued demise. It is in the hands of the electorate, who have been subjected to poor governance, corruption, abuse and disregard for 18 years — a lifetime for a generation of voters.
The SACP played a leading, hyena-esque role in that Polokwane moment, which marked its first attempt to capture the ANC by capturing Zuma. But Zuma had grander, more selfish ambitions — he chose the Guptas instead.
On Friday last week, at a political event organised by the KwaZulu-Natal ANC’s task team, chief whip Mdumiseni Ntuli presented a paper on the SACP’s decision to contest the 2026/27 election, which he co-wrote with activists Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi and Lennox Klaas.
For the first time since Polokwane the destructive role of the SACP in the decline of the ANC is captured as a thread running through the 58-page paper. It is a critique of the SACP’s desire for a “reconfigured alliance” and its decision to contest the election on its own ticket to further the “national democratic revolution (NDR)” and the “road to socialism”, which it views as the same concepts.
Ntuli, Fraser-Moleketi and Klaas argue that the SACP should have contested elections decades ago, after the democratic breakthrough, to push for the socialist state it envisioned by organising the working class and the poor. Instead, it sought to usher in socialism by capturing the ANC.
Having convinced itself that this was the shortest road to socialism in our country’s historical conditions, it set itself the task to capture the ANC and the democratic movement, the trio argue. Yet the SACP has failed at even organising the working class, which in the SA context refers largely to Cosatu.
They argue that nationally workers constitute only 16.11% of the total membership of the SACP — in essence, the party has avoided the hard work of organising, conscientising and convincing large groups in society of the benefits of socialism, seeking instead to “reconfigure the alliance” with the ANC to ensure that the largest party’s programme shifts from a national democratic one to a socialist one.
If the document reflects the dominant view in the ANC, the tripartite alliance as SA knows it is already dead, because this type of “reconfiguration” is the single condition the SACP has laid for its continued participation in the alliance.
“The objective reality is that, practically, this national democratic movement will not and cannot turn its own … programme into a socialist programme. The ‘reconfiguration of the alliance’ project will not work,” the trio write.
In two weeks Cosatu will head to its central committee — a midterm policy meeting — to begin discussing its own position regarding the ANC and the SACP battle. However, it will only make a final call on who to support in the election at its national congress shortly before the election next year.
As these events roll by it is clear that SA is witnessing the slow demise of the tripartite alliance that led the country through contradictory and impractical policy stances for three decades. The true extent of the impact of its demise will only be clear after the 2026/27 election, for good or ill.
• Marrian is Business Day editor-at-large.
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