{"id":7544,"date":"2026-04-13T15:52:05","date_gmt":"2026-04-13T13:52:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/marxistworkersparty.net\/?p=7544"},"modified":"2026-04-13T15:52:06","modified_gmt":"2026-04-13T13:52:06","slug":"sandf-cadre-groups-programme-a-manifesto-for-xenophobia-and-far-right-policies-part-5a","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marxistworkersparty.net\/?p=7544","title":{"rendered":"SANDF Cadre Group\u2019s programme &#8211; a manifesto for xenophobia and far right policies PART 5A"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><em>In this final part of our five part series divided into \u00a0<strong>parts 5a and 5b<\/strong><\/em><strong><em>\u00a0<\/em><\/strong><em>we focus on the SANDF Cadre Group and their manifesto to rid the country of foreigners and to introduce measures that will strip citizens of their socio-economic rights. Many of their ideas especially relating to foreigners are echoed by almost all the political parties in the GNU.\u00a0 In the <strong>final part 5b<\/strong> of the series we deal with how Xenophobia is used to conceal the crimes of the capitalist class and the political elite through the exploitation and plundering of resources in Southern Africa and beyond and criticise government\u2019s response to the role of mining companies in looting the continent\u2019s resources. The series concludes with calls for trade unions and the working class to unite against xenophobia and related forms of discrimination.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In promoting xenophobia, the ANC is repudiating the very basis for its own establishment as a party &#8211; to overcome tribal divisions amongst Black Africans that enabled especially British colonialism to exploit and turn Black Africans against each other. In their wars of conquest and dispossession the British and Afrikaners were able to turn African tribes into their allies. Africans ultimately ended up on opposing sides of the Anglo Boer War of 1899-1902. The political basis for this was laid by the expansion of the number of provinces to four based predominantly on Bantustan boundaries, ethnic and racial demographics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Xenophobia has become deeply embedded in the state cascading down from the top. In 2017, Deputy Police Minister Bongani Mkongi denied that the remarks for which the SA Human Rights Commission condemned him, were xenophobic. Mkongi had warned South Africans not to &#8220;surrender&#8221; the country to foreign nationals. Insisting that he was speaking the truth, he said: \u201cWe fought for this land from a white minority, we cannot surrender it to the foreign nationals &#8230;\u201d He alleged that 80% of Hillbrow in Johannesburg was occupied by foreign nationals who prohibited South Africans from living in the area. He also predicted that one day the president of SA would be a foreign national.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The most sinister example of this phenomenon emerged within the army itself in 2020. In a presentation made to the ANC National Working Committee by the so called SA National Defence Force Cadre Group &#8211; members of the\u00a0<strong>Extended Army Command Cadre Conference<\/strong>, a recurring forum for SA Army commanders to discuss strategy and accountability led at the time by a retired SANDF General of Intelligence, Maomane \u201cMojo\u201d Motau.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There is a striking resemblance between the Cadre Group\u2019s thoroughly authoritarian and far right leanings and government practices, reactionary racist rhetoric from virtually all parties in and outside the GNU.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The Cadre Group document titled: \u201c<strong>ANC TURNAROUND STRATEGY 2025 &#8211; CHANGING THE COURSE OF HISTORY &#8211; A SUBMISSION TO ANC OFFICIALS\u201d, <\/strong>is the equivalent of a manifesto for xenophobia, racism, and authoritarian attacks on democratic rights. It also shows that all these reactionary ideas are the fruit of the same rotting poisoned tree of a capitalist system in crisis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The Cadre Group analyses the political situation in the country as characterised by <em>\u201ccrises of legitimacy, credibility, political coherency (sic) and morality\u201d<\/em>. Its objectives are to make the African National Congress <em>\u201cwin back the hearts and minds of our people; give our people effective and motivational leadership; lead our people to capture real power and defeat neo-colonialism and contribute to rolling back of neo-colonialism on the continent.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The Cadre Group\u2019s position is a virtual far right populist manifesto for the rising xenophobia, far right ideas, attacks on democratic rights that government, political parties across the board and other formations are liberally drawing from. Its programme inflames racial tensions and is a textbook example of the intersection of right-wing reactionary ideas reinforcing each other across the world.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Its populist rhetoric includes a mixture of left wing phraseology, like condemnation of the Washington Consensus and neo-liberalism, and far right proposals like forced labour for the unemployed on pain of imprisonment, forced prison labour, abolition of bail and ending all social grants except old age pensions. It promotes xenophobia, demonisation and persecution of NGOs, counterposing African identity and Black \u201cAfrican unity\u201d to the exclusion of all others. Its programme of action to achieve these objectives include:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li><strong><em>Employment<\/em><\/strong><em>. Business and institutions are to employ South African citizens as a national duty. The employment of foreigners is prohibited and should carry heavy penalties. Rare skills to be identified and published by government and insourced accordingly.<\/em><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><strong><em>Unemployed Able-bodied Citizens (0 &#8211; 90 Days)<\/em><\/strong><em> Review of all social grants except the old age grant; o All citizen of working age to be meaningfully engaged in productive work.<\/em>\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li><em>A national service programme to be put in place to engage citizens in productive work albeit at reduced payment.<\/em><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>Employment of non-citizen is not allowed in all sectors of the economy unless authorised by government under a law of general application<\/em><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>All citizens that are not employed to seek employment within 90 days and those who fail to get jobs should report to the nearest Labour Officer or Local Municipality offices within the prescribed period. Those who fail to comply run the risk of being arrested.<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><strong><em>Foreign Nationals (0 \u2013 90 Days) <\/em><\/strong><em>o We face a dire situation that requires extraordinary sacrifices from our people. It is therefore critical that foreign nationals afford us the space to deal with our challenges in the short to medium term. The following measures shall be implemented:<\/em>\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li><em>All resident permits to be reviewed<\/em><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>All foreign nationals, from whatever country and continent, to leave South Africa within the prescribed period.<\/em><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>Foreign nationals running small businesses and organisations such as saloons, spaza shops, mechanics, sale of second-hand motor vehicles, brick-making, construction work, property development and sales, restaurants, farming, general dealers, NGOs, consultancy business, artisan work and all other menial jobs should close shop or stop the businesses and leave the country within the prescribed period. The government to pass a law closing the conduct of these businesses and activities to citizens only<\/em><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>Harbouring of foreigners is prohibited and will carry heavy penalties. It is totally prohibited to lease or hire out property to unregistered foreign nationals.<\/em><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>Exceptions will be applied for those who are under threat of political persecution in their countries of origin; and<\/em><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>All foreigners should comply with this stipulation within the set period of 90 days and are warned that failure to do so will lead to arrest. Those arrested will be forced to work for their deportation costs under the custody of the Department of Prisons.<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>Business and institutions are to employ South African citizens as a national duty. The employment of foreigners is prohibited and should carry heavy penalties<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Arguing that SA lacks a National African Identity, it states<strong>: <\/strong>SA is an African country that historically received and became home to people from different continents and sub-continents. The population of the country therefore has different national demographic groups. The question of national identity was prescribed by the colonial masters and was used as a potent psychological weapon against Africans. They were made to develop a sense of not belonging to their continent. It is important therefore to correct this historical injustice. The racial classification of national groups is an issue of significance and goes to the heart of colonial control through the alienation of Africans from their identity. The following should be the main demographic groups of South Africa: Africans, Asians, Europeans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The multiple citizenship policy is to be abolished. This aspect has ensured that former colonialists enjoy and maintain political influence on the politics of the country. We should do away with this arrangement of multi-nationality and citizenship. This will obviously provoke national tension and discontent from the Europeans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It concludes that for this Turnaround Strategy to be implemented, <strong>\u201cPutting the ANC in someway on administration is therefore the only viable approach and solution to the challenges we face.\u201d <\/strong>The revitalisation of the ANC must be spearheaded by a National Task Team at all levels \u2013 national regional and local. Amongst the positions to be created is that of National Commissar. This amounts effectively to a call for the dissolution of the ANC in its present form.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Most alarmingly, it raises what it describes as the \u201ccritical question\u201d of cancelling the 2021 local government elections. \u201cIn the previous elections we have suffered a bruising hammering and lost almost all major metros in the country. The next turn around might be much more humiliating than we think. The battering can actually spell the end of the ANC as a major political party in the national political system and a liberation movement enjoying the support of our people. It is our view that we should reschedule the elections and support the view of harmonising the national, provincial and local government elections. We can in the process buy time to implement our Programme and recover.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It sparked such alarm within the ANC leadership that its National Working Committee met with them twice. The ANC was obliged, through a statement by Gwede Mantashe, to reassure the country that rumours of a coup d\u2019etat were \u201cfarfetched.\u201d Such rumours have since repeatedly surfaced most recently in the context of the revelations of rampant corruption and state infiltration by criminal cartels at the highest levels of government and the state as testimony at the Madlanga Commission of Inquiry have confirmed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The ANC may have distanced itself from the implications of the Cadre Group\u2019s proposals to cancel the local government elections and dissolving the ANC and therefore, in effect the government itself. But the Cadre group\u2019s manifesto has served as a template from which not only the ANC, but its GNU partners and other formations might as well have drawn their reactionary positions on xenophobia, racism and anti-democratic authoritarianism.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Identity Politics right wing African nationalism<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The ANC\u2019s slogan that it has always stood for the liberation of \u201cBlacks in general and Africans in particular\u201d has contributed to the sense of marginalisation of what is depicted as \u201cminorities\u201d i.e. Colures and Indians as the slogan implies that they must take their place behind Black Africans in the queue for the fruits of liberation. In practice this has led to the subversion of the Employment Equity Act and a reversion to a pre-BCM African nationalism that excludes Coloureds and Indians. It inverts the pyramid of apartheid from its hierarchy of racial oppression into one of privilege in which Black Africans were the only oppressed, and Coloureds and Indians were privileged.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This is an act of historical re-interpretation and subversion of the aims of the Black Consciousness Movement. The BCM had consciously chosen the term \u201cBlack\u201d to unify Africans, Coloureds and Indians to defy attempts to divide them by their common enemy, the apartheid regime. Once this is legitimised it opens the door not only to racial discrimination but tribalism too, reawakening the very divisions the ANC was created to overcome.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Complaints of a similar nature to the ones in Limpopo of discrimination against non-Venda speakers are common in the Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality (NMB) where the equivalent demand is for job applicants to be able to greet in the isiXhosa \u201cmolweni\u201d. Whereas the Polokwane Municipality has denied the claims, NMB is consciously implementing racial discrimination as official practice, claiming that discrimination against Coloureds is not only allowed, but is required by the Employment Equity Act. NMB has completely subverted the aims of the EEA into a tool to overcome the consequences of legislative and institutional discrimination under apartheid into one perpetuating apartheid practices, victimising, persecuting, denying promotion and even dismissing people on the basis that they are Coloured.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It is this repugnant reversion to apartheid practices that provides fertile feeding ground for the likes of the PA and the CCC, to cynically exploit the perception of Coloured marginalisation. Just as the ANC\u2019s post-apartheid African nationalism is a cover for the promotion not of the interests of the African working class, but the aspirant Black African capitalists, so too these formations are promoting the interests of the same social layers within the Coloured community. Their parties and campaigns enable them to get elected for prestige, self-enrichment and a place for their noses in the state trough of corruption. The divisions, suspicions and distrust these competing petty bourgeois nationalisms create between the African and Coloured working class serve the interests of the Coloured and African capitalist elites.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>ANC\u2019s capitalist post-1994 governance programme &#8211; foundations for racism and tribalism<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The creation of the House of Traditional Leaders bestowed legitimacy on them in the name of defending culture and tradition, spawning today\u2019s nascent post-apartheid tribalism. Benefitting from parasitic state subsidies, they have exploited their authority by entering into self-enrichment deals with multinational mining companies and trampling on the democratic rights of their \u201csubjects\u201d especially women that earned condemnation from former president Kgalema Motlanthe as \u201cvillage tin pot dictators.\u201d&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The KhoiSan House of Traditional Leaders Bill was a blatant attempt to create a pre- and anti-democratic legal regime that deprives women of their constitutional and democratic rights including the right to represent themselves in court.&nbsp; It is the most egregious example of a cynical distortion of history to serve the interests of the post-apartheid political elite. The Khoi pastoralists and the San hunter gatherers were completely separate peoples with their own culture, language and different levels of socio-economic development.&nbsp; They were never \u201cone nation\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This has sown the seeds of the virulent Coloured nationalism now being promoted by a number of formations exploiting the false perception that Coloureds are marginalised to benefit Blacks. Some of them go so far as to portray the non-existent KhoiSan nation as the \u201cfirst nation\u201d and portray both Whites and Blacks as settlers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The PA has been the biggest beneficiary of this false narrative, rewarded by its elevation into the GNU as the alleged representative of Coloureds. Despite its oversized public profile, the PA\u2019s electoral support is miniscule. Its positions in local government are much more due to the ANC\u2019s electoral collapse than mass support. It is not an accident that it has been permitted to spread its reactionary, divisive ideas without a word of criticism by the ANC or any of its GNU partners. It serves their common capitalist class interests: to divide and weaken the working class as a whole as the crisis of capitalism demands an intensification of the offensive class war against the working class.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The promotion of xenophobia has thus fertilised the ground for the resuscitation of the tribalism and racism that the forces promoting it has provided the platform enabling them to present themselves as enjoying levels of support far in excess of reality. Ethnicity has consequently spilled over from employment practices including promotion in government into society. Racism has followed suit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>DA and National Coloured Congress\u2019 racism feed of each other<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In 2018 then Western Cape Premier Helen Zille described Black people migrating from the Eastern Cape into the DA-ruled Western Cape province as \u201crefugees.\u201d Fadiel Adams, MP representing the National Coloured Congress (CC) homed in on and amplified the racism in Zille\u2019s statement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>He called for \u201call people not born in the Western Cape pre-94 to sell their assets and go home\u201d. The influx into the Western Cape was also creating a burden on Cape Town infrastructure. Fadiel Adams goes on to say: \u201cThey are a strain on the infrastructure. Our trains aren\u2019t riding because they weren\u2019t designed to cope with this amount of people,\u201d he said. And&nbsp;queues were now too long in hospitals\u201d.&nbsp; In an interview with eNCA, asked if he shared the same views with Hellen Zille about refugees from the Eastern Cape, Adams said: \u201cI very, very rarely agree with Helen Zille, but on this day, I will.\u201d Adams was thus advancing the same argument in relation to migration between provinces within SA\u2019s borders as used by xenophobes against those migrating across them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Even worse, in demanding all post-94 residents from in-migration go home, Adams is referring to Black people. It is racist. This is the equivalent of a yearning for the fleshpots of Egypt. Part of the apartheid regime\u2019s divide-and-rule policy entailed the imposition of a Coloured Labour Preference (CLP) policy. With Whites guaranteed employment under amongst others, job reservation, CLP was consciously intended to create animosity amongst Coloured towards Black Africans, to see them as a \u201cswart gevaar\u201d who would swamp them by their numbers in the competing for jobs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In 2012 the Gatvol Capetonian Movement out of which the NCC had grown, first as the Cape Coloured Congress, took their position to its logical conclusion, calling for Western Cape independence.&nbsp;Khoisan king Khoebaha Calvin Cornelius III announced in a video that he had already seceded \u201cthe Cape\u201d from the rest of the country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The standard bearer of the idea of Western Cape secession is the Cape Independence Party&nbsp;(CAPEXIT). Their envisaged new \u201cCape of Good Hope\u201d would include municipalities with a predominantly Afrikaans speaking population, in all of the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Northern_Cape\">Northern Cape<\/a>&nbsp;(excluding two districts), six municipalities in the&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Eastern_Cape\">Eastern Cape<\/a>, and one municipality in the&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Free_State_(South_African_province)\">Free State<\/a>. The Freedom Front plus supports CAPEXIT\u2019s demands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The most notorious example of the unapologetic championing of inflammatory racism is the White farmer genocide myth peddled by Afri-Forum. It was seized upon by US president Trump, the world\u2019s imperialist xenophobe and racist-in-chief who has provided all these forces a point of reference as it tries to desperately halt its decline as the world\u2019s most powerful hegemon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The political party Jacob Zuma founded is in all but name a party based on an appeal to Zulu identity. In naming it UmKhonto we Sizwe, after the armed wing the ANC established in 1960, Jacob Zuma has engaged in a similar repudiation of the ANC\u2019s and the original MK\u2019s anti-tribalist&nbsp; foundations.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<div class=\"mh-excerpt\"><p>In this final part of our five part series divided into \u00a0parts 5a and 5b\u00a0we focus on the SANDF Cadre Group and their manifesto to <a class=\"mh-excerpt-more\" href=\"https:\/\/marxistworkersparty.net\/?p=7544\" title=\"SANDF Cadre Group\u2019s programme &#8211; a manifesto for xenophobia and far right policies PART 5A\">[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7546,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7544","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-comment"],"aioseo_notices":[],"acf":[],"brizy_media":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marxistworkersparty.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7544","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marxistworkersparty.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marxistworkersparty.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marxistworkersparty.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marxistworkersparty.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7544"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/marxistworkersparty.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7544\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7545,"href":"https:\/\/marxistworkersparty.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7544\/revisions\/7545"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marxistworkersparty.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/7546"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marxistworkersparty.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7544"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marxistworkersparty.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7544"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marxistworkersparty.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7544"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}