Let’s Get This Party Started: On the Split in the New Afrikan Black Party and Founding of the Revolutionary Intercommunal Black Panther Party

By Kevin Rashid Johnson, Minister of Defense RIBPP

On December 29, 2020, I joined with several recently expelled members of the New Afrikan Black Panther Party (NABPP) and other comrades to create a new revolutionary intercommunal party as a split from and restructuring of the NABPP.

This new formation, which unlike the NABPP has a democratically elected leadership, is the Revolutionary Intercommunal Black Panther Party (RIBPP).

The Dividing Line

This separation was compelled by maneuverings of Tom “Big Warrior” Watts (aka Xing Eela) the present General Secretary of the NABPP, and Shaka Zulu (aka Zulu Sharod), the NABPP chairperson, to expel and silence anyone who questioned or challenged their behavior or self-appointed and self-validating holds on power over the NABPP.

On December 21, 2020, an agenda was issued to all NABPP members to hold a party-wide meeting where all members could hear and consider a proposal to democratically elect a new party leadership and criticisms of Tom and Shaka as obstacles to the development and growth of the NABPP, its mass organizations, its work, and the application of its rules and principles.

These were important considerations in light of the entire Central Committee (CC), five people total including myself, having resigned because of Tom and Shaka’s problematic leadership and behaviors. I formally resigned as Minister of Defense and from the CC and Politburo on November 12, 2020, in protest of Tom and Shaka’s failures to abide by the principles of the NABPP, and Tom’s flagrant dishonesty and role as de facto controller of the Party.

To prevent the Party-wide meeting from taking place Tom first issued a threat to publicly expel me if I supported going forward with the efforts to criticize him before the entire Party, which all NABPP members had a right to do under the organization’s rules and principles requiring the practice of criticism and self-criticism, democratic centralism (DC), and inner-party democracy, but which Tom and Shaka prevent the application of.

Purging All Critics

On December 12, 2020, the day after the call for the Party-wide meeting was issued, Tom and Shaka went further to declare themselves to be the only legitimate NABPP members outside of prison, and essentially liquidated THE ENTIRE OUTSIDE PARTY, including loyal and committed comrades whom they’d publicly embraced as bona fide NABPP members just the day before.

This opportunist move to liquidate critics and challengers to their power followed on the heels of them also declaring the ENTIRE UPM illegitimate (liquidating the NABPP’s entire mass organization), and Shaka’s unilaterally expelling another Party member on November 8, 2020, who was a leading member of the UPM, all to avoid criticisms that the UPM had against Shaka for commandist behavior, mistreatment of women members, threatening others, and so on. Before I had resigned from the CC, it was collectively agreed that Shaka should allow the UPM to voice those criticisms of him, which he’d been dodging for over a year.

Manufacturing Shaka Loyalists

Tom and Shaka then moved to replace the rank and file NABPP and UPM membership that they expelled with people whom they perceived they could directly control, by declaring that the only ‘legitimate’ Party members and UPM consisted of entirely new people personally recruited and trained by Shaka in the Newark, NJ area where he lives.

To accomplish this they’ve instituted political education classes for new recruits presided over by Shaka, where he presumes to teach political material, like dialectical and historical materialism, that he demonstrably doesn’t understand himself. The obvious objective and result being not to win these people over to the politics and work of a revolutionary Party and mass organization, but instead to Shaka’s personality.

Like Huey P. Newton did in splitting the original BPP in 1971, Tom and Shaka have expelled and threatened everyone whom they felt criticized them and threatened their self-appointed and self-validating holds on power over the organizations (which positions they believe they ‘own’), and embrace only people whom they can directly supervise and control.

Returning To the Course

I, along with the unjustly expelled members of the NABPP, and others who’ve worked closely with the NABPP, find Tom and Shaka’s designs and deviations from the basic principles of inner-party democracy, DC, revolutionary proletarian ideology (Maoism), and basic justice unacceptable and a perversion of the founding purposes and principles of the NABPP.

We uphold those purposes and principles and find the need to continue with the ACTUAL line, strategy, and ideology of the NABPP which we believe in and believe to be the most advanced. We simply cannot do so within organizations controlled by Tom Watts and Shaka Zulu, because of their dishonest and unprincipled deviations and the fact of their threats against and expelling us so we could not struggle internally against them.

The NABPP has not adhered to the mass line, has not developed bases within the oppressed communities, and has essentially become a platform for Shaka to build a celebrity cult around himself, and a black front organization that is actually controlled by a Euro-Amerikan, Tom Watts, but is portrayed as New Afrikan led.

We have therefore split with the NABPP and reconstituted as the RIBPP to carry forward the line, strategy, and ideology to which the NABPP is supposed to adhere.  We don’t seek “All Power!” as Shaka Zulu is fond of exclaiming, but instead “ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE!”

This pronouncement is made on behalf of the Central Committee of the RIBPP:

Chairperson, Stephney “Sojurner” Soreal

General Secretary, Shupavu wa Kirima

Minister of Justice, Maurice Garlic Jr.

Minister of Labor, Peter “Comrade Pitt” Mukuria

Minister of Defense, Kevin “Rashid” Johnson

Dare to Struggle!

Dare to Win!