22/02/2026
Today we commemorate the life of Cde Jabulani “Mzala” Nxumalo, who permanently departed our world on this day in 1991, and whose life and work remain central to understanding the task of renewal and re-positioning of the African National Congress under changing historical conditions.
Mzala belonged to a tradition within the ANC that understood renewal not as an episodic response to crisis, but as a continuous process grounded in the scientific evaluation of prevailing material conditions. His contribution to the theoretical and organisational work that informed Operation Vulindlela reflected a disciplined Marxist understanding: that strategy and tactics cannot be fixed by sentiment, memory, or personality, but must be constantly recalibrated in line with the balance of forces, the level of organisation, and the concrete realities of a given epoch in the struggle.
In The Chief with a Double Agenda, Mzala offered more than a historical critique. He demonstrated how personal power, when disguised as culture, tradition, or popular mandate, becomes a vehicle for counterrevolutionary fragmentation. His analysis showed that parallel structures built around individuals are not neutral expressions of mass support, but political projects that bypass collective discipline, weaken democratic accountability, and ultimately undermine the national liberation movement from within. This was not a moral argument; it was a materialist one.
For Mzala, organisational decay did not begin with open betrayal, but with the abandonment of correct method: the failure to distinguish between strategy and tactics, the elevation of personalities over programmes, and the substitution of immediate popularity for long-term revolutionary objectives. His work warned that when movements stop analysing conditions rigorously, they become vulnerable to demagoguery, factionalism, and breakaways that claim the language of liberation while hollowing out its content.
As the ANC confronts the challenge of renewal today, Mzala’s legacy reminds cadres that breakaways and populist shortcuts are symptoms of theoretical weakness, not signs of renewal. Genuine renewal lies in strengthening the movement itself—its internal democracy, its political education, its organisational coherence, and its rootedness in the lived struggles of the people. Those who invoke ANC alliance history while discarding ANC principles merely confirm the dangers Mzala identified decades ago.
To honour Cde Mzala Nxumalo is therefore not only to remember a fallen intellectual and organiser, but to recommit to the method he defended: unity over personality, principle over expediency, organisation over spectacle, and strategy firmly anchored in material reality. It is through this method that the ANC has corrected itself in the past—and through it that the movement retains the capacity to renew, reposition, and lead.
Issued by DCIP
ANC Mzala Nxumalo Region
