[5] However, in his account, the leadership elected alongside him in 1998 – headed by Blade Nzimande – was dominated by "doctrinaire Marxist-Leninists" who were largely uninterested in promoting democracy or the renewal of the party.
[1][8] Midway through his first term, at an SACP congress in 2002, Zita failed to gain re-election to the Central Committee; his critics said that, since joining Parliament, he had radically altered his views and become a supporter of President Thabo Mbeki's neoliberal Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) policy.
[11] Zita left Parliament in the 2009 general election and became a special policy adviser to Tina Joemat-Pettersson, then the Minister of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries, a newly created portfolio.
[13][14] The opposition Democratic Alliance (DA) welcomed his suspension, saying that he had "done little to put this struggling department back on a solid footing",[14] as did Agri SA, which described Zita as an example of the pitfalls of cadre deployment and criticised his "ignorance of and sluggish way of addressing problems of commercial agriculture".
City Press reported that Zita and Joemat-Pettersson had "bumped heads" over plans for the department to spend R800 million on a development project in President Zuma's hometown.