DOES the ANC still need its alliance partners, the SACP and Cosatu, given the recent tension between its youth league and the communist party?

Methinks not, though the ANC views it as a strategic alliance.

It appears that the SACP wants to advance its communist agenda through the ANC. Otherwise, why is it not planning to go it alone in the next elections, as the young communists have persistently proposed?

For Blade Nzimande to be an ANC minister and SACP secretary-general is hypocritical.

During Thabo Mbeki's reign, the alliance partners were alienated. So bad were relations that Mbeki once told the alliance not to interfere in ANC affairs. However, his mishandling of Cosatu and the SACP partly led to his downfall.

Jacob Zuma's career was resuscitated by the so-called left (read Cosatu and SACP), Mbeki's nemesis, after he was thrown into the political wilderness by the then president. And now the left wants a handsome return of their investment.

The challenge for Zuma is to maintain good relations between the ANC and its alliance. Is he succeeding?

According to the SACP, relations have improved since he became president, but tensions are already surfacing. Zuma is failing to show leadership on these challenges

Nothing suggests that relations will improve, as the communists would have us believe.

History is repeating itself. Isn't it time that the so-called strategic alliance ends?

Thabile Mange, Kagiso