SOUTH AFRICA’S former ambassador to Cuba has warned the Communist Party against breaking alliance with the ANC and going it alone in the elections.

Former South African Communist Party (SACP) Limpopo provincial secretary Phatse Justice Piitso’s open letter to the party’s second deputy general secretary Solly Mapaila was published yesterday by the New Age, the country’s only pro-ANC newspaper.

Mr Mapaila told the weekend City Press newspaper that breaking the 80-year-old alliance with the ANC “is almost a fait accompli” ahead of the party’s congress this summer.

He said the ANC was “rotten to the core” and in the grip of the so-called “Premier League” faction of three provincial government leaders.

Mr Piitso warned Mr Mapaila against leaving the mass without a vanguard and the vanguard without a mass.

He quoted Vladimir Lenin’s “Left-wing Communism: an Infantile Disorder,” where the revolutionary leader wrote: “With the vanguard alone, victory is impossible.”

“To throw the vanguard alone into a decisive battle before the whole class, before the broad masses have taken a position of direct support of the vanguard, would not only be folly, but a crime.

“Apart from the ANC, there is no other political formation with the necessary capacity to lead transformation of our society.”

Mr Piitso cautioned the SACP against what he called populism, saying: “Vladimir Lenin warns us of the dangers of bowing to the worship of the spontaneous working-class movement and belittling the importance of consciousness and theory.

“The party must foster unity of the ANC as a leader of the struggles of our people for national liberation.”