The South African Communist Party (SACP) will not hand the ANC automatic support in hung councils, General Secretary Solly Mapaila warned on Friday, insisting that any coalition after its maiden independent election campaign will be negotiated on working-class terms, not alliance loyalty.
Speaking at the national Results Operations Centre (ROC) in Midrand, Mapaila said the SACP had earned the right to bargain independently after contesting elections in its own name for the first time in 76 years.
“There is no automatic support for any single party,” Mapaila said.
“We have been convening, we have been humbled by the various forces of the left. They have given us a mandate to convene the council of the left.”
For decades the SACP campaigned under the ANC banner and surrendered its electoral identity to the Tripartite Alliance. This week it broke that pattern. And Mapaila made clear the break was not symbolic.
“We will convene that meeting as soon as it’s possible. We will hear first from the various left forces that participated in this election and discuss a common agenda of the left forces,” he said.
“Because the left forces primarily represent the lowest in our communities. The most downtrodden, the poorest of the poor. Those that have been neglected by the democratic transition.”
The ANC is now reduced to around 31.9% nationally and facing dozens of hung councils, will need partners everywhere. In the past, the SACP would have been counted as a guaranteed vote. Mapaila is now telling the ANC it must negotiate like any other party.
“We have got our own pillars that are non-negotiable as well, for instance, as a communist party. Those are issues about services to our communities. Direct budgeting to our communities,” he said.
“So that when we set up collaborations, the collaborations will be based on that.”
Mapaila framed the SACP’s performance as a victory of organisation over money, a direct rebuke to big-spending rivals.
“Those who worked very hard, our members, on a zero budget. Yes, strictly so, zero budget. Led by our renegades on the ground,” he said.
“This is not a product of capitalist intervention. It’s a product of people’s intervention and self-reliance of our communities and our cadres.”
He said the party deliberately chose community work over campaign merchandise.
“We didn’t have T-shirts. Even our Red Brigade, some of them didn’t have T-shirts. They used their old T-shirts. We gave our candidates choices. Whether you have these resources for T-shirts, for your campaign, or for community development. And we are glad that the majority of them always chose community development.”
That work, he said, included fixing water pumps in informal settlements, removing garbage left for years, drilling boreholes and even building roads in villages without government help.
“We are not the kind of people that see a pothole more than twice. If you pass it once, when you see it for the second time, you then create a solution to resolve it,” Mapaila said.
“We put up water in different communities, even boreholes for instance. And believe it or not, we also did roads in some of the villages.”
Preliminary results suggest the gamble paid off, at least enough to make the SACP a player.
Nationally, the party was on around 2.5% to 2.6%, with 78 council seats – 9 ward seats and 69 proportional representation seats – at the last update on Friday.
Its strength was concentrated in the Eastern Cape, where it was on 6.14% to 6.2%, with strong showings in Mbhashe on 24.49%, Buffalo City on 18.3%, Mhlontlo on 16.55% and King Sabata Dalindyebo on 15.5%.
It also polled around 3.0% in the Northern Cape and 1.2% in Gauteng, and recorded pockets of support in Limpopo, including 18.7% in Greater Giyani and 14.5% in Collins Chabane in early counts.
For a party contesting en masse for the first time, Mapaila said winning wards outright, not just PR seats, was the breakthrough.
“Many others have won a lot of PR seats in the past. But we have gone in directly to take wards in different communities. This has really humbled us as the Communist Party,” he said.
Mapaila linked the campaign to the SACP’s banning in 1950 under the Suppression of Communism Act, saying the party had been “interrupted” for 76 years before it could contest elections in its own name again.
The decision to go it alone was taken at its December 2024 special congress, driven by anger over the ANC’s Government of National Unity with the DA and Freedom Front Plus, and what the SACP sees as the marginalisation of working-class solutions.
The ANC responded by demanding dual members choose which party to campaign for, a move Mapaila has repeatedly rejected as coercion.
On Friday he returned to that history, dedicating the campaign to Chris Hani and to the struggle for April 27 to become true independence, not just Freedom Day.
“We will be speaking for communities and nobody else. For the working class, nobody else,” he said. “So that’s what is going to drive our councillors.”