Navigating the Complexities of Post-Liberation Power Relations

Zamikhaya Maseti

The ANC SACP bilateral meeting of Monday, 24 November 2025, carried immense political weight, with many expecting the SACP to soften its longstanding intention to contest State Power in the 2026 National Local Government Elections.

Those expectations evaporated almost immediately. The SACP’s posture is resolute, and its decision is anchored in deeper strategic and ideological debates that have shaped the Alliance for more than a decade.

To understand the outcome of the bilateral, one must begin with the unresolved question of a reconfigured Tripartite Alliance. This debate predates elections, predates tactical disagreements, and has haunted the Alliance since 1994.

During my time serving in the Provincial Executive Committee (PEC) of the SACP in the Western Cape, this question surfaced repeatedly, yet we could never confront it with the confidence and bravery it required. The Party spoke often of a reconfigured Alliance, but the concept itself remained suspended between aspiration and ambiguity.

At its core, reconfiguration speaks to a structural realignment of power within the Alliance. The traditional arrangement in which the ANC occupies the apex position while the SACP and COSATU function as junior partners has exhausted its historical utility.

It no longer corresponds with the balance of class forces or the institutional demands of the present phase of the revolution. The Alliance cannot be ceremonial, and it cannot remain trapped in the formulas of the past. It must evolve into a strategic political centre with shared authority and co-determined direction.

Yet the concept has lacked conceptual rigour. At times it has been interpreted as a demand for symbolic recognition, at other times as a call for co-governance, and at other moments as a desire for deeper ideological coherence. This elasticity weakened its impact and created confusion within the ANC, which often responded to the demand procedurally rather than structurally. The absence of a grounded framework meant that reconfiguration remained both urgent and perpetually deferred.

It is against this unresolved backdrop that the SACP’s decision to contest State Power must be understood. Contestation is not a break with Alliance principles. The Party attempts to translate the long-promised but never realised idea of reconfiguration into political practice. The SACP’s electoral posture is therefore not a sudden tactical deviation; it is a structural response to decades of stagnation on the strategic question of the Alliance’s centre of gravity.

The meeting unfolded at a moment when South Africa’s political economy is undergoing profound shifts. The class balance has been reshaped by the networks of accumulation that emerged post-1994, networks that expanded and mutated over three decades in ways that entrenched inequality, deepened precarity, and weakened the transformative capacity of the state.

De-industrialisation has hollowed out the working class, unemployment has reached crisis proportions, and the state itself is increasingly vulnerable to competing class interests and the gravitational pressures of neoliberal orthodoxy. It is within this context that the Party argues that working-class power cannot remain a distant proposition; it must find expression within the Tripartite Alliance. 

To give substance to this proposition, the Party once called for the establishment of a Political Centre that would serve as the Alliance’s strategic nucleus, a proposal that was rejected and mocked by the ANC at the time.

For years, the Party attempted to achieve structural renewal through persuasion, resolutions, and bilateral engagements. Those efforts produced commitments to unity but not commitments to transformation. The ANC, for its part, recognised the legitimacy of many of the Party’s concerns but struggled to reorient the state apparatus towards a developmental trajectory. The Alliance, therefore, became trapped in a cycle of reiteration without renewal, reaffirmation without reconfiguration.

The SACP has now disrupted that cycle. Contesting State Power is its concrete attempt to insert working-class hegemony into the strategic leadership of the Alliance. This decision is not about distancing itself from the ANC; it is an insistence that the Alliance cannot remain symbolic. It must either become a decisive instrument of transformation or concede that the working class must find alternative pathways to influence the direction of the South African polity.

The ANC recognises the gravity of the moment. An outright confrontation with the Party would be self-defeating. The Alliance is more than a political partnership. It is a historic bloc forged in struggle, a pillar of South Africa’s democratic architecture.

A fractured Alliance would weaken the movement’s ability to govern and further disorient its grassroots base. Yet the ANC also recognises that it cannot respond to the SACP’s posture through nostalgia. The Party’s decision forces the ANC to re-examine its own internal weaknesses, its shrinking organisational depth, and the fragmentation emerging within its support base.

The bilateral revealed that the strategic divergence between the ANC and the SACP is not reducible to election mechanics. It is rooted in competing interpretations of the National Democratic Revolution, differing readings of the balance of forces, and divergent assessments of the state’s trajectory.

For the SACP, contesting State Power is a practical mechanism for asserting working class leadership at a time when the state is shaped increasingly by elite contestation and technocratic inertia. For the ANC, this posture presents both a risk and an opportunity. It may complicate electoral outcomes, yet it also creates space for a renewed engagement with the strategic direction of the revolution.

Whether reconfiguration is possible under current conditions remains uncertain. The ANC is confronting declining support and a crisis of organisational depth. COSATU is weakened by structural shifts in the labour market.

The SACP is attempting to redefine its role in a society where Left politics is necessary but constrained by global and domestic capital. In such a landscape, reconfiguration cannot be superficial. It must involve a redefinition of the Alliance’s strategic centre of gravity and a re-anchoring of its programme within the lived experiences of the working class.

The SACP’s contestation is therefore both a challenge and an invitation. It challenges the ANC to confront its vulnerabilities, but it also invites the Alliance to rediscover its transformative impulse. It challenges the Party to move beyond rhetoric, but it also offers an opportunity to reshape the organisational architecture of the Alliance.

It challenges the entire liberation movement to revisit the question that has haunted it since 1994, namely, what is the strategic centre of the National Democratic Revolution in a society marked by unemployment, inequality, and social fragmentation.

One such alternative, which now stands before the Alliance, is the building of a post-electoral pact rooted in the very notion of a Political Centre. This would allow the Alliance to move beyond ceremonial unity and anchor itself in a shared strategic command that redistributes authority, strengthens collective leadership, and redefines the direction of the revolution. It is an option that may yet rescue the Alliance from further drift and offer the working class a renewed stake in South Africa’s political future.

Reconfiguration demands more than slogans. It requires a strategic praxis capable of rebuilding the credibility of the state, restoring the authority of the Alliance, and reasserting the transformative horizons of the Freedom Charter.

Contestation may be the mechanism through which this re-anchoring occurs, but contestation without depth risks intensifying fragmentation. The bilateral has opened the door. Whether the Alliance walks through it together or fractures at the threshold will define South Africa’s next political era.

* Zamikhaya Maseti is a political economy analyst and holds a Magister Philosophae (M.Phil.) in South African Politics and Political Economy from the erstwhile University of Port Elizabeth (UPE), now Nelson Mandela University.

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