Three ways the Charlie Gard case could affect future end-of-life cases globally

Supporters outside the now-abandoned case in the British High Court, rallying for infant Charlie Gard to travel to the US for experimental treatment. Peter Nicholls/Reuters

The tragic case of Charlie Gard, the British infant whose parents have just ended their legal fight to send him to the US for experimental treatment, has captured global attention.

The case is significant for a number of reasons, both in the huge amount of publicity it has attracted, its progression through several courts, and the number of influential commentators who became involved.

Not only does the case highlight the challenges for parents, doctors and judges in making end-of-life decisions about critically impaired infants, it is unique in another respect. It highlights the changing role of the wider public in shaping how decisions about medical treatment are made.

Here are three factors from the Charlie Gard case that could influence future cases around the world.

1. Using social media to mobilise support

More than any case of this kind, advocates for Charlie Gard have been effective in mobilising support using social media and the internet.

Early on, Charlie’s family set up a website (with merchandise available), as well as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram accounts to highlight how they disagreed with doctors about their son’s care. The social media campaign was further bolstered by hashtags #charliesarmy and #charliesfight to keep the topic trending.

The campaign, which brought together supporters under the banner of “Charlie’s Army”, attracted support from US President Donald Trump, and the Pope.

The online campaign also raised awareness of Charlie’s rare genetic condition, mitochondrial DNA depletion syndrome, which in his case, resulted in muscle weakness and irreversible brain damage.

The social media campaign helped gather support for several protests about Charlie’s care. We’ve also seen criticisms of, and death threats against, Charlie’s treating doctors at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London, again fuelled by social media.

Clearly, Charlie’s case has been played out both in the courts of law and the court of public opinion. The courts were asked to decide upon emotional and ethical issues. Yet, in this case, every aspect of Charlie’s life seems to have been played out through social media.

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Further reading: Charlie Gard: who is best placed to decide his fate?

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It’s time to ask ourselves whether matters that ultimately concern life and death, particularly of the most vulnerable and who cannot speak for themselves, be considered more privately. In this light, we may need to reflect on whether a social media campaign really has a place, not only now but in future cases.

In future cases where parents and doctors disagree on treatment decisions, will the Charlie Gard case form a template for how to rally public support? And could a similar approach influence future decisions about broader medical treatment, not just about end-of-life care?

2. Crowdfunding to pay for unauthorised treatment

In a novel move for cases of this kind, Charlie Gard’s supporters had raised £1.3 million via a GoFundMe crowdfunding initiative for him to be able to travel to the US for experimental treatment.

His parents and a handful of medical experts believed nucleoside experimental therapy, while not a cure, could provide a small chance of improving his quality of life. This is a claim Charlie’s treating doctors rejected.

With finite health-care resources, there’s a chance other families of critically ill infants could think of crowdfunding to fund a treatment doctors or the courts consider not in the best interest of the child.

The crowdsourcing campaign raised £1.3 million to send Charlie Gard to the US for experimental treatment.
Screenshot/gofundme

Yet crowdfunding for medical expenses is not as simple as setting up an account or website. There are processing fees, and other tax and legal implications to consider.

Beyond that, we need to ask ourselves what happens when crowdfunding money runs out and how people choose which campaign to donate to. We also need to consider not only how crowdfunding affects issues of privacy, but also how it affects the wider issues of fair and appropriate access to medical treatment.

3. Fuelling anti-establishment sentiment

End-of-life decisions for critically ill infants have traditionally been made privately, in collaboration between doctors and parents. Typically these decisions require an evaluation, among other factors, of the child’s best interests and quality of life. Parents generally tend to listen to and follow the advice of the medical professionals.

In this case, some may see the attempts of Charlie’s parents to overrule the courts, hospital and medical advice as a departure from the traditional paternalistic doctor-patient relationship (sometimes known as “doctor knows best”).

Unlike many others in this situation, Charlie’s parents had rejected not only the advice of the treating medical team, but have also repeatedly rejected the decisions of the courts, who are assumed to be fulfilling an independent and objective role.

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Further reading: When parents disagree with doctors on a child’s treatment, who should have the final say?

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Future cases will demonstrate whether the Charlie Gard case can be regarded as an indicator of a trend away from the medico-legal establishment. But, as some have indicated, “doctor knows best” is shifting to “parent knows best”.

Questions of “best interests” and “quality of life” are nuanced and difficult, but to Charlie’s vocal supporters in the court of public opinion, this case has been one of “us” and “them”.

We don’t yet know how this power shift will play out in future cases. But so far, public debates have been less about Charlie and his individual best interests, and more about the interests of others – be they political, “sticking it” to the establishment or being heard on social media.

Perhaps, in the future, the courts may want to regain some control in end-of-life cases by enforcing suppression orders (limiting what’s made public about a case) to avoid such a media circus.

Where to from here?

It is likely that this will become a seminal case for some of the above reasons. The case will also be discussed to some degree in both Commonwealth and non-Commonwealth jurisdictions, as evidenced by US President Trump’s involvement.

In the meantime, it might be prudent to pause and reflect. Amid all the noise of clicks, hashtags, likes, tweets and protests, we need to go back to the essentials. At the heart of this frenzy is a very ill 11-month-old infant, who was unable to express his wishes. Yet there were millions who thought they could do just that.

Neera Bhatia, Senior Lecturer in Law, Deakin University

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

South Africa's main opposition party can't cure its foot-in-mouth syndrome

Controversial: Helen Zille. EPA/Nic Bothma

South Africa’s main opposition party, the Democratic Alliance (DA), has been on a steep upward climb since 2004. It has increased its share of the vote in every national poll to reach 22.23% in 2014; it has also greatly expanded its support at the municipal level, where in 2016 it secured 26.9% of the vote and ousted the ANC from control of major urban centres, such as Johannesburg, Pretoria and Port Elizabeth.

The DA has also broadened its support beyond its traditional Western Cape stronghold to build a national presence; a victory in the province of Gauteng, home to Johannesburg and South Africa’s economic hub, now looks far from inconceivable in 2019.

This was all made possible by the DA’s impressive progress under the leadership of Helen Zille, former mayor of Cape Town and now premier of the Western Cape. She stood down in 2014, partly in recognition of the fact that a society where politics is still defined by race would only have so much room for a party with a white leader. Her successor, Mmusi Maimane, the party’s first black leader, is trying to win support from previously indifferent or hostile black communities. He seeks to reposition the DA as a party not merely at ease with the new South Africa, but genuinely enthusiastic about it.

Maimane claims the DA has jettisoned the historical baggage which caused it to be viewed as the party of privileged white suburbia. Given that black Africans make up 80% of South Africa’s population, the toxicity of that image is self-evident. The DA’s campaign to build black support may still be in its infancy, but the 2016 elections showed that progress has indeed been made, particularly among the urban black population.

Still, the challenge remains formidable – and Zille, who once seemed to understand what the DA needed to do to win, has suddenly made it much harder.

Don’t go there

Having made way for Maimane several years ago, Zille crashed back into the debate recently with a now-infamous spurt of tweets in which she suggested that people bear in mind that colonialism left some positive legacies. Coming from a senior member of a party with a racially narrow electoral base in a still racially fractured society, this was at best idle self-indulgence, and at worst self-destructive small-mindedness.

In the space of a few minutes, Zille undid years of work. She reinforced the entrenched suspicion about the DA: that, at heart, it is nostalgic for the days of white minority rule, and is unable to comprehend how it is received in the black communities which endured settler colonialism, empire and apartheid. Her idle tweets lend credence to the idea that the DA simply does not or cannot feel black South Africans’ pain, and that it instead caters to the narrow prejudices of wealthy whites. It takes a wrecking ball to the edifice maintained by Maimane – and indeed, by Zille herself.



When challenged, Zille bafflingly kept it up. Yes, she was technically correct when she insisted that she didn’t defend colonialism per se. But her protestations are unconvincing; to quote a senior party colleague, John Steenhuisen, her behaviour is “utterly inexplicable”. She is experienced enough to know that perceptions are crucial in politics, and that her words reflect not only on her, but on her party.

So why did Zille think it necessary to open this debate now? With all that’s going on in South Africa, what makes this issue so urgent?

Perhaps she simply sees it as her prerogative to voice any sentiment she likes under her constitutional right to freedom of speech. But there’s simply no need to exercise that right in all circumstances, no matter the cost. What of her obligations to respect party policy and to do nothing which brings the DA into disrepute?

After all, as premier of the Western Cape, she is as conspicuous a figure as any in the party, so the original tweets and her subsequent justifications can hardly be dismissed as the ramblings of a minor functionary. And it’s far from unreasonable for those outside the party to conclude that her sentiments are shared more widely among her comrades.

Turning back the clock

Crucially, Zille’s behaviour grants the ANC a welcome reprieve just as it goes into meltdown over the various problems with Jacob Zuma’s benighted presidency. Now the party leadership can implore its constituency to cling to nurse for fear of something worse, ceaselessly deploying the Zille tweet in the months and years ahead to contrast itself with a supposedly racist and backward-looking rival.

And where the racist accusation cannot be personally levelled at DA figures, an alternative ANC narrative will quickly surface – namely that the DA’s senior black figures are little more than marionettes, their strings pulled by white puppeteers.

The DA leadership knows how vulnerable it is to that criticism, and is taking action accordingly. While Zille initially refused to apologise – an action bordering on extreme egotism – she eventually issued an unconditional apology for her behaviour on June 13, and has now been removed from any further role in the party’s internal structures.

While she remains premier of the Western Cape, her official sanction was a crucial victory for Maimane. Had Zille gone unpunished, his credibility would have been shattered. Still, it may yet prove too little, too late. For all the progress the party has made, it can only win power with a clear-headed strategy to attract many, many more black votes.

With her idle, tone-deaf musings, Zille has shaken her party’s structures, taken the heat off the ANC and undermined Maimane’s project. Her reputation is unlikely to survive, and the damage she’s done could take years to repair.

James Hamill, Lecturer in Politics and International Relations, University of Leicester

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

ANC policy papers point to a party in a panic about losing power

Reuters/Mike Hutchings

The documents released ahead of the policy conference of South Africa’s governing African National Congress (ANC) expose a panicking party that sees enemies everywhere. While previous policy conferences addressed real policy issues, all energies are now focused on retaining state power as the leadership faces damning claims of capture by a kleptocratic elite.

The discussion documents show a party that professes a desire for self-correction and renewal. But, it seems to have neither the guts, nor the necessary internal balance of forces to do so.

At the same time the documents point to deepening paranoia and an increasingly authoritarian tendency. In combination, they seem to emanate from a parallel universe where the party’s interests have become elevated above those of the South African society at large.

Some of the text show a party that’s going through the motions. There’s trotting out of lofty ideals left over from when it still occupied the moral high ground. It’s a rhetoric that used to be meaningful and powerful. But it’s been emptied out by the ANC’s increasing failure to harness the state’s resources for the good of all.

For example, one of the documents “Organisational Renewal and Organisational Design” claims:

[the ANC’s vision] is informed by the morality of caring and human solidarity, [and its mission] is to serve the people of South Africa.

Beyond this nostalgia for what it used to be, the ANC documents display little sense of the depth and severity of the political, constitutional, economic and governance crisis facing South Africa. What does come across strongly, however, is a party that feels beleaguered and panicky about possible loss of state power.

Party and state are conflated

The “Organisational Renewal…” document issues the following admonition:

it is in the interests of the movement to… undergo a brutally frank process of introspecting and self-correction.

This sentiment is overtaken by disappointment over the party’s poor performance in the 2016 local government elections. Several pages are dedicated to investigating how other liberation movements became defunct. It transpires that the primary emergency is “to ensure that the ANC remains at the helm” of government.

Of course political parties are about getting and holding on to power. But because of the ANC’s habit of conflating party and state, there seems to be no understanding that its feeling of destiny – that it should rule “until Jesus comes” as President Jacob Zuma put it – won’t dictate the will of the people.

Parties get reelected because they demonstrably govern in service of the will of the people. If the ANC should demonstrate that, it will be returned to power in 2019 . If not, it won’t.

There is an admission that the,

moral suasion that the ANC has wielded to lead society is waning; and the electorate is starting more effectively to assert its negative judgement.

Significant sections of the motive forces seem to have lost confidence in the capacity and will of the ANC to carry out the agenda of social transformation [due to] subjective weaknesses [in the party].

These weaknesses are identified but in a way that skirts around the extent and depth of state capture. More and more evidence, including hundreds of thousands of leaked emails, have emerged that an Indian family of business people, the Guptas, has over the past numbers of years gained a hold over Zuma and a network of ANC leaders. This grip stretches from national to local level, and from government departments to state-owned enterprises.

But in the ANC documents black capitalists are blamed for “corrupt practices including attempts to capture institutions of political and state authority…” The Guptas only get an opaque acknowledgement with reference to lobbying:

[T]he lobbying process engineered by clandestine factionalism destabilises the organisation… Factionalism’s clandestine nature makes it a parallel activity…

But it’s almost as though the document’s authors don’t believe their own diagnosis, or the implications of the party’s “subjective weaknesses”. The document becomes contradictory. Even as it admits that the “motive forces” … “still desire such change and are prepared to work for it”, it starts to cast suspicion:

the mass of the people can, by commission or omission, precipitate an electoral outcome that places into positions of authority, forces that can stealthily and deceitfully chip away at the progressive realisation of a National Democratic Society.

The people are the problem, not the party

That “the people”, rather than a party that’s lost its way, are in fact the problem becomes more ominously clear in the document on “Peace and Stability”. Leninist vanguardism makes the party still feel it knows best, and that the people are useful fools.

It’s worth quoting the whole section to see the extent of the paranoia in the ANC and the array of enemies it creates to avoid confronting the enemy within.

According to the document, the main strategy used by foreign intelligence services is to:

mobilise the unsuspecting masses of this country to reject legally constituted structures and institutions in order to advance unconstitutional regime change. The alignment of the agendas of foreign intelligence services and negative domestic forces threatens to undermine the authority and security of the state.

Their general strategy makes use of a range of role players to promote their agenda and these include, but are not limited to: mass media; non-governmental organisations and community-based organisations; foreign and multinational companies; funding of opposition activities; judiciary, religious and student organisations; infiltration and recruitment in key government departments; placement of non-South Africans in key positions in departments; prominent influential persons…

A small clique vs South Africa

The proposed organisational renewal is to bolster the ANC secretary-general’s powers. Even this belated and lacklustre attempt to reduce the ANC president’s control over the party is compromised, as the clarion call of the discussion documents is “Let us deepen unity!”.

That’s why the actual enemies cannot be confronted, those that have insidiously corrupted the very life and soul of the party. Instead, a worrying paranoid and authoritarian tendency emerges. Its targets are journalists, judges, church and business leaders, activists, opposition parties, foreigners and intellectuals.

Nowhere is the fact confronted that Zuma, president of the ANC and the country, has ceded South Africa’s sovereignty to a foreign family, or that state-owned entities and government departments are being repurposed to enrich a small clique at the expense of South Africa’s people.

Christi van der Westhuizen, Associate Professor, Sociology, University of Pretoria

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Explainer: why amendments to South Africa's 'Money Bills Act' matter

South Africa’s previous finance minister, Pravin Gordhan, delivering his medium term budget last October.
Nic Bothma/EPA

South Africa’s public finances may be in their worst state since the first democratic elections in 1994. One source of these woes was the 2008 financial crisis. But its effects have been compounded by bad political decisions which have led to slower economic growth, under-performance of tax revenue collection and higher borrowing.

At the top of the list of bad decisions has been appointments to critical institutions that appear to have been based on patronage with the intention of facilitating corruption. In the public finance space these include the South African Revenue Service, Ministry of Finance, and the board members and managers of key state-owned entities.

The poor management and loss of investor confidence that’s followed played a significant role in South Africa’s recent credit rating downgrades. The downgrades compounded the broader public finance challenges by increasing borrowing costs for national government and state-owned enterprises.

In this environment, there’s increasing appreciation for the general oversight role and powers of Parliament, which has initiated investigations into various state entities.

Parliament has overall oversight of public finances, including the national budget, a role that is becoming increasingly important. Which is why it’s worth paying attention to the processes by which Parliament exercises oversight, and the institutions involved.

The Money Bills Amendment Procedure and Related Matters Act (“Money Bills Act”) of 2009 is a vital piece of the puzzle. Parliament has asked for public comment on a series of proposed amendments. Here’s why they matter.

What’s at stake

The Act guides Parliament’s oversight of taxes and borrowing, how those funds are distributed to different spheres of government (national, provincial and local), and national spending priorities. For example, the Act sets out the processes through which the national budget is approved by Parliament. It created a Parliamentary Budget Office to provide credible, independent and non-partisan advice to members of parliament (MPs). And it instructs provincial parliaments (“legislatures”) on how their oversight processes should work.

Amendments have been mooted almost since Parliament started implementing the Act seven years ago. The latest proposals are primarily the result of suggestions by Parliament’s legal advisers and deliberation among MPs from the finance and appropriations committees.

The main amendments relate to three broad sets of issues:

• how Parliament committees deal with public finance legislation and proposals;
• the institutional structure of the Parliamentary Budget Office; and,
• oversight processes of provincial legislatures.

One of the main concerns with the current Act is the time frames provided for oversight. Public finance issues can be complex and Parliament must facilitate public comment and engagement. But the Act allows little time for this.

Various amendments relax time constraints by adding the phrase, “or as soon as reasonable thereafter”. More time is important. But an open-ended statement like this could simply introduce uncertainty.

The parliamentary budget office

The intention of the original Act was that the office should be independent from Parliament’s administration. But this has never been properly implemented. The proposed amendments make independence even more explicit. They envisage making the Parliamentary Budget Office a “juristic person” and its director the accounting officer, while detailing the director’s financial management responsibilities. This is welcome to the extent that it removes any room for doubt, debate or misrepresentation.

In the current Act, the finance and appropriations committees are responsible for overseeing aspects of the office’s functioning. The amendments propose, instead, an “advisory board” of committee chairpersons and two “house chairpersons”.

In fact, this has been happening. But it’s problematic. The Parliamentary Budget Office should support MPs across the political spectrum. But currently all chairperson positions are held by representatives of the African National Congress (ANC). This is particularly problematic when it comes to the appointment of an acting director: representatives of one political party should not make that decision on their own.

Other amendments concern the Parliamentary Budget Office’s access to information from organs of state. There is general agreement across the world that this is critical, but the original Act didn’t address it explicitly. So these amendments are welcome, even though they could be strengthened.

Provincial legislatures

The current Act sets out norms and standards for provincial legislatures that they “must adhere to”. This could be unconstitutional, because it infringes on provincial legislatures’ right to determine their own processes.

As a result, an amendment rephrases this as, “must take into account”. Corresponding changes are made to the schedule of norms and standards, but the usefulness of the end result is questionable.

Perhaps a simple statement that decisions on provincial finances must be consistent with decisions already taken in the national parliament would be more appropriate.

What’s missing

A number of important issues haven’t been dealt with in the proposed amendments. These include:

• Oversight of taxes: The amendments don’t address incoherence in Parliament’s oversight of taxes. At present, the Minister of Finance announces tax proposals in February and these are treated for the most part as if they come into effect immediately. In fact, Parliament’s finance committees produce a report within 16 days indicating whether they agree or disagree with the proposals. And the actual legislation is only promulgated between July and October. Does it make sense that a major tax proposal could be blocked so late in the fiscal year? The sensible thing, taking into account bureaucratic challenges for the Treasury and Revenue Service, would be for tax legislation to be tabled with the Budget.
• Integrity and independence of the Parliamentary Budget Office: The original Act refers to the technical and management competences required of the office’s director. But a Parliamentary Budget Office should also be led by a person of the highest integrity. It would therefore be appropriate for an amendment to specify that the director should be a “fit and proper person”. A related issue is an amendment that allows the director’s contract to be renewed based on performance. Given that it’s unclear who the director accounts to on a yearly basis, it’s not clear how performance would be assessed. Lastly, nothing in the current Act, or amendments, explains how the Parliamentary Budget Office’s budget is set. Since an inadequate budget can compromise administrative and political independence, some minimum protections should be put in place.

The current Parliamentary Budget Office hasn’t pursued it’s mandate as it should have. At some point in the future the stability of South Africa’s public finances may depend on it doing so.

Seán Mfundza Muller, Senior Lecturer in Economics, University of Johannesburg

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Why South Africa's communists need to cut the ANC umbilical cord. Or perish

SACP’s Blade Nzimande, left, with Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa.
GCIS

The South African Communist Party (SACP) resolved at its recent 14th Congress to contest future elections in the country independent of the African National Congress (ANC), its dominant alliance partner.

If implemented, the resolution would fundamentally change the governing tripartite alliance that’s been in place for more than 60 years. It was formed during the struggle for liberation and has governed South Africa since 1994. The other member of the alliance is the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu).

Between the mid 1940s and 1950s, South African communists differed with their international counterparts in their interpretation of the role of class struggle in liberation politics. Despite fearsthat nationalism would invariably deliver a political settlement with little change in the material living conditions of the working class, the party tactically aligned itself with the Congress Movement, led by the ANC. It regarded the South African situation as “unique” and therefore requiring “more creativity in how the party sought to advance the class struggle”.

Relations within the alliance are now at an all time low. Ahead of the latest congress, the increasingly strained relations between the SACP and President Jacob Zuma, who is also president of the ANC, and thus the leader of the alliance, had reached an unprecedented low point.

This came amid growing claims alleging that Zuma is the kingpin behind the capture of the state by private business interests. The party has called for the president’s resignation and barred him from speaking at its congress. Zuma had earlier been subjected to similar treatment by Cosatu.

Oddly, the SACP says it will remain within the alliance despite its stated aim to contest elections, effectively in opposition to the ANC. Yet, the mere act of it contesting elections may be construed as a split in practical terms.

But, the party has been here before.

A decade of indecision

Relations among the alliance partners have been strained throughout the democratic period because of the policies of the ANC in power, with Thabo Mbeki’s administration from 1999 to 2008 associated with “neoliberalism” or “the class project of 1996”. In turn, Mbeki was critical of what he called divisive “ultra-leftists” in the alliance when closing the 51st ANC conference at Stellenbosch in 2002, increasing fears of a possible split.

Consequently, the leftist SACP first resolved to contest state power independently at its 12th Congress in 2007. But then the party deferred the final decision to implement the resolution to its central committee, the highest decision making body between congresses.

The central committee was mandated to either lobby for a “reconfigured alliance” with greater leftist influence and control, or to decide on contesting elections independently. The idea of a reconfigured alliance won the day, with the SACP then pinning its hopes on an expected victory by leftists in the ANC. Zuma, its preferred supposedly leftist candidate for the position of ANC president, went on to defeat Mbeki in December 2007.

Thabo Mbeki, former president of South Africa, had a fraught relationship with the SACP.
GCIS

The party “reaffirmed” the decision to contest state power at its 13th congress in 2012. But, once again, it failed to empower its central committee to implement the decision. It only mandated it to table “a report” to “enable fuller discussion” in December that year.

Again at the 2017 congress, the party has resolved to contest elections but qualified the resolution by asking its central committee to conduct further analysis and engage its stakeholders on the best way to achieve this.

In essence, the SACP has been tiptoeing about the idea of contesting state power at its three conferences over the past 10 years.

The resolution from the 14th Congress, therefore, could have shown a bolder commitment by the SACP to contesting state power. But once again, decisive action has effectively been postponed by failing to instruct the central committee explicitly to implement it.

When pressed to clarify the tentative nature of the party’s resolution, SACP General Secretary, Blade Nzimande, confirmed that more discussions were to follow before a final decision could be made. This deferring of a final decision to another structure makes the resolution exactly the same as those of the past two conferences.

Clinging onto the ANC’s coattails

Despite successive disappointments, the party still appears to be hoping for an outcome that will favour it in the ANC succession race. Nzimande has denied this. This time, their key man is ANC presidential hopeful and deputy president of the country Cyril Ramaphosa.

This reliance on ANC succession politics may see the SACP fail to contest elections in 2019 once again. But the failure to stop relying on developments in the ANC and start implementing a now ten-year old resolution to contest elections will be more spectacular this time round. That’s because at the rate the governing party is losing support, there might no longer be a dominant ANC in South African electoral politics.

That the ANC is leaking votes presents the SACP with its best ever chance to strengthen its hand within the alliance. It’s a golden opportunity to end the ANC’s abusive tendency to act unilaterally, regardless of the SACP’s position on key issues.

The SACP might have more direct and observable value from real electoral support, which can be translated into seats in municipal councils, provincial legislatures and in parliament.

One more alternative to the ANC?

There has not been a practical and scientific way to determine what the SACP brings to the ANC in terms of electoral support. The picture was complicated by the fact that SACP members are also often members of the ANC. The party could not take for granted that its close to 220 000 members would vote for it if it left the alliance.

But with the ANC in its current crisis, the SACP might present a close enough alternative for supporters who are fed up with the governing party and who don’t have an alternative party to vote for.

But it will never know unless it breaks the perpetual indecisiveness.

Ongama Mtimka, Lecturer and PhD Candidate, Department of Political & Conflict Studies, Nelson Mandela University

This article was originally published on The Conversation.