Rethinking the Tripartite Alliance Elections Strategy: A Response to David Masondo

Zamikhaya Maseti

This intervention is not a polite exchange of scholarly pleasantries, nor is it an attempt to curry favour with the architects of the paper under review. It is an unmandated, uncompromising rejoinder, rooted in the discipline of Marxist–Leninist analysis and sharpened by the lived experiences of liberation movements that have navigated the perilous waters of state power.

The purpose here is to strip away the veils of South African exceptionalism, to expose the illusions that have sedated our strategic imagination, and to insist on a class-based reading of our current political moment.

The critique that follows is not intended to undermine comradeship, but rather to strengthen it. True revolutionary discipline demands not silent agreement, but rigorous engagement with theory and history. We cannot afford the comfort of pacifist intellectualism when the structural conditions for rupture within the Alliance are already visible to the trained eye.

This rejoinder must be read as both a warning and a call to arms, a reminder that history is unsparing to those who mistake sentiment for strategy, and that revolutionary survival rests on clarity of analysis, unity in action, and preparedness for the inevitable contradictions of post-independence governance.

My enduring impression is that the paper is couched in a pacifist theoretical register. By pacifism in the intellectual sense, I am not referring to the noble ethics of nonviolence, but rather to a scholarly reticence —a reluctance to grapple with the antagonistic contradictions that define the post-independence political economy.

It is a posture that seeks harmony where history demands confrontation, conciliation where dialectical necessity demands rupture, and in the process produces an analysis that is civil in tone yet anaemic in its engagement with the structural conditions that have historically brought ruling liberation movements to the precipice of decline after thirty years in power. This is neither conjecture nor abstraction; it is a recurring material reality recorded with painful regularity in Africa, in Latin America, and across the broader post-colonial world.

The Democratic Deconsolidation Thesis is approached with tentative caution, as though the thesis may disintegrate when applied to the South African situation. This hesitancy cultivates a more profound danger, the entrapment in what I call the South African Exceptionalism Theory.

This is the intoxicating belief that our liberation credentials, our democratic architecture, and our negotiated settlement have somehow immunised us from the political and electoral misfortunes that have undone other post-colonial states. Exceptionalism is the opiate of the governing elite; it sedates revolutionary vigilance, dulls the capacity for strategic foresight, and breeds complacency in the face of gathering contradictions.

Antonio Gramsci’s warning on the emergence of morbid symptoms in the interregnum is instructive. When the old is dying and the new cannot be born, a crisis of authority and legitimacy develops, producing distortions and political decay. South Africa is not exempt from this dialectic; in fact, the symptoms are already manifest, declining popular trust, factional decomposition, and the erosion of alliance cohesion. The lens of exceptionalism misreads these as episodic turbulence, when they are in fact structural signals of a deeper historical shift.

Another theoretical lens that must be applied is the concept of the post-colonial predatory state. This analytical frame makes clear that national liberation does not dissolve the class struggle; it heightens it. As the post-independence political economy matures, class and ideological contradictions sharpen, and when these contradictions become irreconcilable, unity is no longer a revolutionary virtue but a political fiction. At that point, the rupture is not a betrayal; it is the dialectical outcome of the revolution’s internal contradictions.

The lessons of Latin American dependency theory, as articulated by Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Theotonio Dos Santos, and Ruy Mauro Marini, also bear repeating. Many liberation movements in state power, once embedded in the circuits of global capitalism, found their nationalist development agendas colliding with the imperatives of transnational capital. This collision intensified internal class cleavages, forcing strategic choices that fractured alliances from within.

Nicaragua stands as a sobering historical example. Born of the anti-Somoza struggle, the Sandinistas forged a broad revolutionary alliance that combined multiple ideological tendencies. Yet under the combined pressures of U.S. economic warfare, counter-revolutionary destabilisation, and the intensification of internal class contradictions, the alliance unravelled. By 1990, the Sandinistas suffered an electoral defeat, proving that revolutionary legitimacy, once eroded by material pressures and internal fissures, cannot be recovered by nostalgia alone.

This historical record teaches us that the Tripartite Alliance cannot be romanticised as political triplets conjoined for eternity like Siamese twins. It is a historically contingent formation, its unity resting on a material and ideological alignment that, once dissolved, cannot be restored through sentiment, through shared history, or liberation credentials.

The Marxist Leninist duty before us is not to preserve the illusion of eternal unity, but to subject the alliance to a sober class analysis, to theorise the inevitability of rupture, to prepare for its consequences, and to manage the transition in a way that preserves the revolutionary gains of the National Democratic Revolution. South African exceptionalism will not save us. Only a clear-eyed, historically grounded, and uncompromisingly dialectical approach to the political economy of our moment can avert the fate that has already overtaken so many of our comrades in arms.

This is the hour to return to the discipline of the revolutionary vanguard. We must train our cadre to think with the sharpness of Lenin, to see with the foresight of Marx, and to act with the decisiveness of those who understand that history is unforgiving to those who hesitate.

We must cleanse ourselves of the narcotic of exceptionalism, steel the movement for the inevitability of rupture, and prepare organisationally to lead under new conditions. The revolution will not be defended by sentiment; it will be defended by clarity of theory, unity of action, and the courage to break with illusions before illusions break us.

* Zamikhaya Maseti is a Political Economy Analyst.

** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL, Independent Media or The African.