SACP statement at the occasion of 94th anniversary Mpumalanga Provincial Rally, presented by 2nd Deputy General Secretary, Cde Solly Mapaila
23 August 2015
Communist Cadres to the Front: Unite the Working Class, our Communities, and our Movement!
The SACP is celebrating its 94th founding anniversary in the context of a difficult international economic situation. This has serious implications for us.
The fundament problem we must resolve is that our economy was engineered to serve as an exporter of raw materials. Our mineral resources were exploited to advance industrial development in the UK in particular, Europe in general, and in the United States. Local production of finished goods was not developed to its full potential to meet the overwhelming material and cultural needs of our people as whole. Our economy was internally designed to satisfy the needs of a few only, and this on a racist basis based on the oppression of the overwhelming majority.
Since 1994, in the first two decades of our democratic transition, we have made massive progress through social delivery. We have built millions of free houses benefitting more than 16.5 million people. We have expanded electrification to over seven million houses, compared to only five million in hundred years between 1994 and 1894 since the first household electricity connection in Cape Town.
We have expanded access to education at all levels. We are near-universal education for all children. Millions of children are now receiving food at school so they do not learn on a hungry stomach. Millions of students have gained access to colleges and universities than ever before. Over 1.4 million through the reform of the National Student Financial Aid Scheme, NSFAS.
There are many other important social achievements. This including massive expansion of social grants to fight poverty, physical and social infrastructure covering rural areas, clinics, roads, and so on, all for the first time.
However, there was insufficient transformation of our colonially structured economy. As a result, we are vulnerable to changes in production conditions that happen in the economies where we are exporting our raw materials. The Chinese economy has recently been slowing down, with trade in our raw material exports reduced. Europe has been entangled in multiple economic crises, negatively affecting trade in our exports.
The mining and steel sectors have responded to the crisis by announcing intentions to retrench thousands of workers. We must fight against these retrenchments by all means necessary!
However, we also need to advance, on a medium- to long-term bases, our struggle to eliminate the material basis of the fundamental problem!
Let us advance the second, more radical phase of our democratic transition!
Our alliance has agreed that we must place our country`s democratic transformation on to a second, more radical phase of the transition. At the centre of this transformation is the elimination of the colonial economic structure of our country and the advancement of democratic national sovereignty!!
This requires new policies that will make it possible for us to use our mineral resources to develop local production through manufacturing and industrialisation. We must upgrade our economy to produce high value added manufactures.
The development and diversification of local production are the basic conditions for the millions of the unemployed to find work. Decent work, including better conditions will improve the capacity of our people, especially the workers, to afford the products that they need for subsistence and to support their material and cultural lives. In turn, this will contribute positively towards production.
But alone we will not succeed. The rest of our region and continent must, likewise, advance further in the direction of complete decolonisation. This would require, among others that we vigorously combat the entire legacy of colonialism and tackle imperialist exploitation!
But there are local battles we must win!
Next year, our country will be holding local government elections. We must win these elections overwhelmingly and advance in increasing our support in the next national elections. We need unbroken leadership on this democratic power in order to push our second, more radical phase of transformation through the government!
We must intensify the political struggle outside the government in order to support progressive government policies but equally important in order to win leadership in all key sites of struggle.
Let us decisively confront and tackle the enemy and his agents!
Let us first recall what the SACP said 39 years ago in 1976 in a statement titled `The enemy hidden under the same colour`, quoting President Samora Machel:
`The other face is that of the indirect and secondary enemy, who presents himself under the cover of a nationalist and even as a revolutionary thus making it difficult to identify him... THE FIGHTER MUST DISTINGUISH FRIEND FROM FOE EVEN IF THE LATTER IS CONCEALED UNDER THE SAME COLOUR, LANGUAGE, FAMILY TIES OR TRIBAL MARKINGS AS THEIR OWN, EVEN IF HE RAISES HIS FLAG WITH US`.
Communist cadres, as directed by our recent Special National Congress, must go to the front and unite the working class, our communities, and our movement!
This task cannot be confused by the enemy within!
Our programme on the enemy has long been outlined. In addition, let us remember President OR Tambo when he always advised us:
"Beware of the enemy within. Remain vigilant at all times!"
Let us recall what President Tambo said when he closed the ANC Consultative Conference held in Morogoro, Tanzania, in 1969:
"Wage a relentless war against disrupters and defend the ANC against provocateurs and enemy agents. Defend the revolution against enemy propaganda, whatever form it takes. Be vigilant comrades. The enemy is vigilant."
Those who think that the ANC alone can do it without the alliance and the rest of the mass democratic movement are the internal enemies of the ANC and the alliance. They represent the enemy within.
In contrast, as the revolution advances, we will need more of the alliance, not less of it, and we will need more of the mass democratic movement. Any disunity, disintegration, fragmentations and factionalism will only serve the interests of the enemy. Its agents will wallow in the proceeds of corruption, while the rest of the people will continue facing the hardships and effects of economic exploitation. A few will eat the crumbs of patronage, and will, on this basis, pronounce support for the factional leaders who dispense that patronage.
Such things will corrode the revolutionary fibre of our movement, and, certainly, lead to the defeat of our ANC one day.
We cannot be demoralised by such things. If there is anything, we must intensify the struggle against factionalism, corrupt and divisive elements within the ranks of our movement and society at large.
Let us combat a partisan political agenda that seeks to hijack our independent democratic institutions!
Recently, and latest this week, we have seen unelected non-governmental organisations or companies such as "Corruption Watch" and "Freedom Under Law" seeking to assert private control over the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA). The retired Constitutional Court Judge, Johann Kriegler, is reportedly "behind Freedom Under Law". Judge Kriegler called 702 radio station last Wednesday, 19 August, to denounce an independent decision arrived at by the NPA.
Last Tuesday, 18 August, the NPA withdrew charges of perjury against the Deputy National Director of Public Prosecutions (DNDPP), Advocate Nomgcobo Jiba. The NPA said there was no prospect for successful prosecution. In addition, the authority said that the Prevention of Organised Crime Act indemnifies prosecutorial actions taken in good faith, such as the decisions made by the DNDPP. The charges were partly brought against the DNDPP based on disagreements on those decisions.
The hypocritical agenda represented by the retired judge and the unelected non-governmental organisations that want to assert their authority on our independent state institutions runs in parallel to another strategy. There is a move to have the DNDPP struck off the roll of advocates by the General Council of the Bar.
Our people must not fall to the deception that this agenda is about the law and a fight against corruption. We must all understand this for what it is, a partisan agenda and a politics of opposition to our democratically elected government!
We all know that retired judges remain on the payroll of the state for the rest of their lives, and this for good reasons. Their conduct should therefore be no different from that of the rest of the other judges. A retired judge, for instance, may be appointed to perform a judicial function as and when it becomes necessary. The conduct of some of the retired judges therefore leaves much to be desired.
We also know that many of the unelected non-governmental organisations, which are mostly made up by few individuals operating under the name of civil society, were established to pursue partisan political agendas by other means. Many of them, especially those pretending to be fighting against, and honest about, corruption, do not hesitate to actively turn a blind eye on any corruption, perceived or real, directly or indirectly associated with them.
Imperialism has found useful partners in many of such groupings. Not only does imperialism sponsor many of them the world over, in pursuit of its economic and political interests, it has actually been behind their formation.
It is important therefore to recognise that the scope for political activity has long been widened beyond formal political parties in the name of being "non-political". It is important for all of us to see when such political action is being played out. All progressive people and revolutionaries must therefore not fold their arms. We must expose such a politics for what it is in practice!
We must also intensify, as the working class, our own programme to build working class power and hegemony in all terrains of struggle!
This is our key to success!
But the hostile agenda against our struggle is not only embedded in small groupings operating in the name of "civil society".
Such a partisan agenda has a backing in the media, where, it is pursued in the name of the principle of objective, balanced, accurate and fair reporting. These principles have by the way long been discredited by that very same biased media content.
In a country such as ours, where the media, especially the press, is constituted by private monopoly capital, such partisan agendas can prove to be very dangerous.
In particular, the whole of the government, and democratic state institutions which have not been annexed by private corporate capture or by the influence of oppositionism masqueraded as independence are consistently branded as corrupt. This toxic news is being repeated over and over again. The reader is bombarded with it all the time, risking to be believed as the truth - already it is being believed by a number of unsuspecting people as the truth.
The basic content of this agenda is to discredit national liberation movements that remain anti-imperialist, or that have at least not derailed from the historical mission of the national liberation struggle. The aim is to make people lose confidence in those movements, such as ours as led by the ANC, and then elbow them out of government by "democratic means". The immediate objective is to reduce their electoral support, to a point where they are unable to govern without coalition partners which are in the opposition.
We must defeat this agenda!
As the working class we are faced with many challenges that we must overcome in order to advance our struggle to complete national liberation and social emancipation.
Let us push forward with media transformation!
Our immediate strategic tasks include vigorously advancing the struggle to achieve transformation and diversity in the media, and to de-monopolise the industry. The voice of the people - as defined in the Freedom Charter - must find space in the media, regardless whether they are the working class, poor, township or rural. Presently, this voice is marginalised.
In addition, there is no independent media accountability to offer any meaningful recourse to those who are negatively affected by media content. We cannot subject other institutions that exercise power to independent regulation and leave out others such as the media. If you want to understand what is happening in the media in the absence of independent regulation, think about what would happen should we replace independent regulation by the so-called self-regulation in all the institutions that are presently exercising power under the auspices of independent regulation!
Which is why our struggle to achieve media transformation correctly includes independent regulation!
Another key centre of power our liberation struggle and its second, more radical phase of democratic transition will not succeed without its transformation is the financial sector.
Transform the financial sector to serve the people!
The financial sector exercises enormous amount of power over the affairs of the rest of society. This through control over and management of our resources.
Presently, there is an estimated 20 billion rands of unclaimed pension or retirement funds which are in the hands of the financial sector. Beneficiaries and their dependents find it very hard to claim their fair or deserved share of this resources. Some have in fact given up, while others are not even aware that they are entitled to claim their money. By the end of 2013, close to 4 million people were owed their apportionments.
Yet, wherever the money has been kept or invested over the years, it has been exploited by the private interests that exercise control over it or its administration.
It is important to go all out in social mobilisation among our people to build awareness about the resources, for our people to claim their apportionments. Meanwhile, as the SACP we reiterate our call for public administration of the unclaimed retirement funds. These resources must be invested in ways that make them available for the advancement of national development.
Similarly, there are hundreds of millions of rands in unclaimed policies held by insurance companies. This must, likewise, be dealt with!
The SACP reiterates its call to the National Economic Development and Labour Council to convene the second financial sector summit to review progress since the first summit was held about a decade ago.
South Africans need affordable financial services, as opposed to the astronomical charges imposed by the banks. The life sentence of 20 years and its structure of compounded interest rates on mortgage bonds must come to an end! So are unscrupulous and mostly corrupt evictions.
South Africans need a new financial architecture to drive both transformation and development. Presently, the financial sector is like a vampire that acts as a predator on our people as its preys!
Ironically, the banks, for example, use our deposits as a people to make a lot of money for themselves, while our majority remain impoverished. Our country will not become prosperous while it remains under the yoke of the prevailing financial sector and its predatory practices.
Without democratic public control on the financial sector, we will find it difficult to direct investment to the productive sector of the economy to create jobs. Without the overall transformation of the financial sector, our second, more radical phase of democratic transition will not become successful.
Let us intensify our struggle for socialism; for there is no other solution to the problem of capitalism!
