Caviar communism: YCL comes out of business-class closet

Recently the Young Communist League national secretary, Buti Manamela, was detained for questioning at Heathrow on his arrival. Sounds like a horrible experience to go through — one which he shares in an interview in the Mail & Guardian a few weeks ago.

What I found fascinating, though, was Manamela’s admission that he flew to the UK in business class. Clearly the irony is lost on him. I mean — hello! — doesn’t business class symbolise the untrammelled, opulent excess of the “evil” capitalist system? So much for comrade Manamela representing an organisation that claims to be fighting for the proletariat, the people — and, of course, a classless society. Ahem, classless.

Ag shame. If the South African Communist Party had even a shred of credibility, it has lost it now — though my hunch is that it has been without any since its remarkable reluctance to pay its outstanding debt to the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University for the use of its facilities for the party’s conference last year, an amount in excess of R1-million. It’s no wonder the SACP is in favour of debt relief!

This little gravy-plane episode, I suppose, is just another reminder that the SACP has long lost its battle with ideological irrelevancy, being clearly unable to put into practice the archaic “principles” it so vehemently preaches. In true Animal Farm style, this is a case of all being equal — but some being more equal than others.

Whatever its protestations to the contrary, the SACP is wholly reliant on the ANC to survive. And, of course, that is why it is such a toothless entity — it knows only too well on which side its bread is buttered, and it isn’t in promoting the ideology from which its name is derived. Clearly, serving the interests of the poor is not one of the SACP’s priorities — but of course that has been the case among communist parties the world over (such as the Soviet Union, whose communist elite lived as luxuriously as the tsars they booted out).

Yes, the SACP’s current focus is not poverty alleviation or holding the government to account for its service delivery and education failures, its inability to reduce unemployment and its shocking missteps on Aids — the things that have hit the poor the hardest and left us with a country with a vast socioeconomic schism between rich and poor. Rather, the SACP and its infantile youth league is focusing on blindly supporting a money-grubbing, power-hungry populist who will do anything to wriggle out of being accountable for the alleged corruption he so often claims is just a conspiracy against him. In return for what? Power and patronage: the story of communism the world over.

Perhaps it’s not so surprising Manamela flew business class after all.