By Johnathan Paoli
The ANC will take a definitive decision on the future of dual membership at the close of its 5th National General Council (NGC), national media liaison Mothusi Shupinyane Ka Ndaba told Inside Politics on Wednesday.
“The General National Council will take a resolution regarding the issue, and adopt a position,” he said, as tensions with the South African Communist Party (SACP) escalate.
At the centre of the crisis is the SACP’s December 2024 resolution to contest the 2026 local government elections independently, a break with decades of alliance tradition.
ANC Secretary-General Fikile Mbalula has told delegates that the party’s national executive committee (NEC) has effectively issued the SACP with an ultimatum: reverse the decision or accept that dual members may lose their ANC membership.
He warned that the NEC had rejected proposals to allow SACP members to campaign for both organisations, saying this would create “sleepers who could work against the ANC from within”, citing KZN incidents where strategy was allegedly leaked to the uMkhonto weSizwe Party.
Mbalula said that if the NEC’s December position is upheld at the NGC and at the January lekgotla, dual membership would end.
It would also sever SACP activists from ANC election structures, placing the future of the tripartite alliance in uncharted waters.
But ANC National Chairperson Gwede Mantashe, himself a dual member of both parties, said on Tuesday on the sidelines of the conference that the choice lay with individuals, not the ANC.
“Every member will take a decision. It is my decision what I want to do with my membership,” he said, adding that he will vote ANC in 2026.
He did, however, say that the SACP’s decision to run independently was possible “suicide” in their drive for progressive politics.
“We’ve accepted that, for your information. We’ve just accepted that. And we think that the party can walk the talk and actually kill itself. The ANC is consistently saying, we are the only side that drives change. It’s committing suicide,” Mantashe told Times Live.
The ANC’s internal debate is shaped further by its August NEC discussion document.
The document emphasised that the ANC–SACP relationship was rooted in a century of shared struggle under the framework of the National Democratic Revolution; that alliance decisions must be taken collectively because unilateral actions risk the “common ruin of the progressive forces”; and that the SACP’s decision to contest independently poses strategic and historical challenges that the ANC describes as “uncharted waters”.
“Let us do everything to snatch victory from the jaws of what we see as a potential monumental defeat of the National Democratic Revolution in our country, due to, among other reasons, self-sabotage and self-fragmentation. We have a duty to consolidate the unity of the…forces and preserve strategic cohesion of the Alliance and the mass democratic movement as a whole,” it stated.
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