SOUTH AFRICA’S ruling ANC hit back at former finance minister Trevor Manuel yesterday after he rejected the notion of “white monopoly capital.”

In an article on the Daily Maverick website, Police Minister Fikile Mbalula, a member of the ANC’s national executive committee, laid into the comments reportedly made by the long-serving finance minister at the Nelson Mandela Foundation last week.

The City Press newspaper reported on Sunday that Mr Manuel told the gathering: “White monopoly capital doesn’t exist.”

He said the real problem was “Indian monopoly capital out of Saxonwold” — a reference to billionaire Gupta family, which has been accused of “capturing” President Jacob Zuma’s government by his erstwhile allies, and their Johannesburg suburb home.

Mr Mbalula suggested “remedial class” for Mr Manuel, who “abandoned the poor masses for the minority’s trough” as finance minister.

He accused Mr Manuel of entrenching the neo-colonial order in which British, US, European and Japanese corporations continue to dominate the South African economy.

In April, union federation Cosatu, part of the tripartite alliance which led South Africa out of apartheid, joined fellow junior partner the Communist Party (SACP) in calling for Mr Zuma to quit after he sacked finance minister Pravin Gordhan, who escaped the mire of corruption claims levelled at Mr Zuma and others in the ANC leadership.

The ANC announced last week it would launch a probe into all allegations of big-business influence on government — not just the Guptas — since the first democratic elections in 1994.

But the SACP warned that this was an attempt to “dilute [the inquiry] into investigating such a wide field that its work will never be completed.”

Following a weekend meeting the party’s central committee declared: “What makes the Gupta-centred parasitic network the most dangerous and the most immediate counter-revolutionary threat to our democracy is, precisely, the fact that it is eroding the two principal weapons in the hands of the popular forces to drive radical transformation — a democratic state and a popular movement that was once led by the ANC.”

It accused the “Gupta-funded ideological apparatus” of pushing “diversionary narratives” that “invoke narrow right-wing Africanist themes.”

The SACP statement claimed that the ANC’s national executive committee was “paralysed by deep divisions that … render it incapable” of sacking Mr Zuma.

A bid to bring a no-confidence motion against Mr Zuma at the May 27-28 weekend ANC national executive committee meeting was defeated after 54 members opposed it, with just 18 in support.