SOUTH AFRICAN Police Minister Fikile Mbalula made a stinging attack on critics of President Jacob Zuma on Sunday.

In an executive statement on “organisation review” to the ruling ANC’s policy conference in Johannesburg he laid into “wedge-drivers” within the movement who are calling for Mr Zuma to quit over a series of corruption allegations and a failure to make the economy deliver for workers.

In a clear jab at the 101 Veterans group, which, together with the South African Communist Party (SACP) and trade union federation Cosatu, has demanded the president quit, he said: “We must resist those intent to rule from the political graveyards or rule forever … in retirement.”

He also railed against MPs planning to support the no-confidence vote against Mr Zuma on August 8 as “suicide bombers” who would face repercussions.

And Mr Mbalula accused those who have denied the concept of white monopoly capital — or colonialism — of “political amnesia” and “ideological dissonance,” pointing out that the term has been in popular South African currency since 1912.

“The aim is to have a competitive economy that is unleashed from the hands of a very few, predominantly white Afrikaner males.”

ANC Gauteng chairman Paul Mashatile told last week’s provincial congress: “There is nothing like white monopoly capital in our vocabulary.”

His deputy David Makhura called it “a distraction from serious issues such as state capture” — a reference to allegations Mr Zuma is beholden to the billionaire Gupta business family.

In its statement before the policy conference, Cosatu, which is part of the increasingly shaky tripartite alliance with the ANC and Communist Party that led the struggle against apartheid, urged delegates to avoid getting “bogged down” in “discussing lexical semantics regarding economic transformation” rather than actually transforming the economy.

It remembered the words of Deng Xiaoping: “It doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice.”

In its own pre-congress statement, the Communist Party acknowledged the dominance of white capital but stressed class struggle over a national one.

The party, which is expected to vote to stand against the ANC in elections for the first time at its congress next week, warned against “false radical economic transformation” led by a few black capitalists “who enjoy the fruits of high levels of class inequality.”

Meanwhile ANC chairwoman and parliamentary speaker Baleka Mbete said business leaders had threatened to “close down the economy” if the ANC did not toe the line.

“Former liberation movements are particularly targeted by Western powers for them not to stay in office for long because their values are not shared by those who believe they have a right to change government,” she said.