10 April 2019, Thomas, Titus Nkobi Memorial Park, Elspark

Today, 10th April 2019 marks the 26th year since Chris Hani was assassinated. An assassination of such a magnitude cannot be an act only of two individuals. The gun that was used to murder Chris Hani was taken from the military armoury, for instance. It was taken neither by the Polish immigrant, Janusz Walu? who pulled the trigger, nor by Clive Derby-Lewis who supplied Walu? with the murder weapon. The truth about who took the gun from the military armoury, whose hands it passed through and how many hands formed the transmission chain until it reached Derby-Lewis has not been disclosed. The SACP stands against the release of Waluz.

We want full disclosure of the truth. We want justice to be done in respect of holding to account every person who was involved or who had prior knowledge of the plan to assassinate Chris Hani and did nothing to stop it.

The controllers who planned the murder, the assassins and whoever else was involved knew exactly from their class point of view why they targeted Chris Hani. Although right-wing extremists who supported the racist apartheid regime carried out the assassination, the capitalist ruling class was fully aware that apartheid could no longer continue. South Africa was at a nodal point of change.

On the one hand our struggle for liberation and social emancipation had advanced. The struggle had tilted the domestic balance of forces in favour of the masses, the majority of whom were not only black but working class. Capitalism in South Africa could no longer rule in the same way - the way of apartheid.

On the other hand the Soviet Union, which supported our struggle, was collapsed by a combination of internal contradictions and externally driven counter-revolution. Therefore the international balance of forces was tilted in favour of imperialism in its neoliberal form. South Africa was faced with the option of either following the path of national democratic revolution, the most direct route for advancing to socialism in our country's historical context, or following the neoliberal agenda spearheaded by the axis of imperialism under the United States, the United Kingdom and their imperialist allies.

A single assassination cannot change the course of history, unless there is a delicate balance between the contending class forces. There can be no doubt that the planners of the Hani assassination wanted to direct the future course of South African history in the direction demanded by imperialism, and those who stood to benefit from the crumbs that would fall from the imperialist dinner table. They were prepared to plunge South Africa into civil war. But things did not happen as simply as they hoped.

The blood of Chris Hani expedited the setting of a date for our first non-racial democratic general election. Instead of accepting the invitation by the extreme right to a ruinous civil war with far reaching implications, the leadership of our movement intensified our call for the election date to be set with immediate effect. The assassination of Hani made the masses of our people extremely angry. As a result it took a lot of effort to convince them that retaliatory violence would be counter-productive and play into the hands of the enemy. Ultimately the masses accepted the direction advanced by the leadership and in turn intensified the struggle for a democratic transition. The date for our first non-racial democratic general election was consequently set for April 1994, one year after the cold-blooded murder of Chris Hani.

The history of the democratic breakthrough that South Africa achieved in April 1994 will be incomplete without remembering the blood of Chris Hani, and that of other revolutionary martyrs, and the role they played within the struggle. We must never forget. Freedom is never for free. Even the one step forward we attained in 1994 towards freedom came at a great cost. This brings us to what we believe are the key tasks our Alliance and our country are faced with today.

What is to be done?

In 1969 Chris Hani and other uMkhonto weSizwe combatants made one of the fiercest critiques of our leadership and liberation movement as a whole. This was produced in the form of what came to be known as the Hani Memorandum. In response there was extreme anger from within the ranks of the leadership. What we must remember here is that the critique by Hani and others took place within the liberation movement. This was done in a manner aimed at strengthening both the movement and the struggle to achieve victory over the apartheid regime. There was never any suggestion of the creation of a splinter formation.

The key challenges facing our revolution today are both inside and outside our movement. These include the tasks of cleansing our movement of factionalism and corruption, and simultaneously advancing and deepening a second radical phase of our national democratic revolution. The two tasks are mutually reinforcing and deeply intertwined.

Without a strong unified movement the second radical phase of the national democratic revolution cannot be advanced and deepened. Without a radical national democratic revolution there can be no programmatic - especially revolutionary - unity within the Alliance and broadly the historical support base of our struggle. It will not be possible to defend the hard-won democratic gains of the people without a radical national democratic revolutionary movement. It will not be possible to further advance the course of liberation and social emancipation to its logical completion.

An important immediate task that we are faced with is therefore to defeat the splitters of today and the corporate state capture 'fight back' agenda from which their splinters emanate. The central aim of the splitters is to weaken our capacity to defend our hard-won democratic power and gains. It is to weaken our capacity to advance and deepen the national democratic revolution in its proper context. We must not allow them to either succeed or establish a single ground of bargaining in pursuit of their deeds. The forging of principled and programmatic unity is a key lesson we should draw in this battle from the role played by Chris Hani, other revolutionary martyrs and stalwarts of our struggle for liberation and social emancipation.

The Hani Memorandum for instance played a considerable part in the convening of the ANC Consultative Conference held in Morogoro, Tanzania. The conference adopted the first ANC Strategy and Tactics which set the ideological, political, military, economic and social policy tone for the defeat of the apartheid regime. If there is one document every person needs to study in depth in order to appreciate the revolutionary ethos of the ANC, it is arguably the Morogoro Strategy and Tactics. This was not simply an ANC document. Like the Freedom Charter, its revolutionary essence was endorsed and articulated by the entire Alliance in the course of the struggle. Mass democratic formations associated with our liberation movement did likewise.

The results included the strengthening of our Alliance and revolutionary activity in all pillars of the struggle, most importantly the link between the leadership and the masses. Not only did the masses have increased confidence in the leadership, the leadership also had to solicit the views of the masses. To this end engagement in the intensified mass mobilisation that played a key role was therefore not a one-way transmission belt. In memory of Chris Hani, we must cement the ties between all Alliance formations and the masses. We must build an inviolable bond with the masses. This brings us to another important immediate task we should carry out with distinction:

That is to win the battle of democracy through a decisive victory in the forthcoming 8th May 2019 general election in the interests of the people as a whole.

The electoral victory of the ANC-headed Alliance and democratic forces should not be a victory of only one organisation; the ANC. Neither should it be a victory only of one party over other parties. We should remain mobilised even after the general election to ensure that the victory we are campaigning for becomes the victory of the masses of our people in material terms. In memory of Chris Hani, we must use the victory that we are campaigning for to build a people's economy, with decent work and a comprehensive social security system, and to irreversibly intensify the programme to root out corruption both in the state and the economy as a whole.

Today we recall what Chris Hani had to say shortly before he was killed. He pointed out that there was a danger of our movement being hijacked by self-serving interests once we ascend to government. In memory of Chris Hani, we must deal these self-serving interests a decisive blow. The clean-up of the state that we fought for, the clean-up momentum that has started under the leadership of President Cyril Ramaphosa, must now be consolidated and accelerated. The crooks and traitors must go to jail. The billions of rand that have been stolen, the billions that have been illegally exported to Dubai and elsewhere must be returned!

In voting for the ANC on 8th May 2019 that is the message we must send.

In the same way, we must ensure that our capacity in governance improves at the top and at all levels. We must socially mobilise the people as a whole to meaningfully participate in the process of governance. This is what the Freedom Charter calls for. It is no longer necessary to make the country ungovernable in order to move forward. We must stop the destruction of public property and infrastructure in the name of service delivery protests. Even in the struggle against colonial and apartheid oppression, we never saw the levels of public property and infrastructure destruction that we see today. It is important however to underline that the government at all levels must not wait for communities to protest in order to listen to them and respond to their needs.

In addition we must do away with dependency on private companies through the corruptible regime of tenders to carry out the mandate of the state. Private companies are solely established for the purpose of private profit. They should not be given the role of quasi state organisations to usurp the functions of the state in social delivery. Related to this point, the concentration of corruption and corporate state capture in the regime of tenders is nothing but a part of strategies for self-enrichment at the expense of the masses. It is now necessary for the whole people to be involved in developing South Africa in the interests not of any elite, Black or White, but of the masses who must now take ownership of the process.

Equally important, the state has a major role to play in the process of production. The opposition has called for the privatisation of Eskom and other state-owned enterprises. This would be nothing but a logical completion of corporate state capture through the policy space and governance. Privatisation is a means by which the rich take over control of productive state assets.

In any case the near destruction of Eskom, and other public entities which were plunged into crisis, was driven by the same private sector which the opposition is saying should now take over everything. Privatisation is a policy of the rich as the workers are the producers of capital but not its social owners. It is only the rich with capital who benefit from privatisation in economic terms as opposed to the workers and the poor who have to pay the price.

The victory we are campaigning for in the 8th May 2019 general election must be a victory for the resuscitation of the entire productive sector of the state that was plunged into multiple crises by private interests. We want vibrant state-owned enterprises and public entities. We want the productive sector of the state to expand, grow and diversify, to become effective and increasingly efficient to serve the needs of the people. We want state-owned enterprises and public entities to serve as a base for developing a people's economy. That is a thriving national democratic economy characterised by growing social participation and control. This is what we mean by transformation. State-owned enterprises and public entities must therefore be transformed in order to prosper, preserve the jobs of the hard working rank and file workers and create decent work.

Let us go all out to intensify our campaign for a decisive victory with and for our people in the 8th May 2019 general election. As the SACP, we call on workers in shops, factories, warehouses, in mines and on farms. In our overwhelming majority, on 8th May 2019, let us:

VOTE ANC!

Our support for the ANC should not be mistaken as support for factions, or for individuals who violated the values of the revolutionary moral superiority of our struggle. Our alliance is with the ANC and not with factions. The ANC must therefore rid itself of factions and renew itself organisationally. It must deal anti-intellectual tendencies a blow, fight populism and arrest other forms of intellectual, moral, political and ideological degeneration.

The fellows for instance who have a problem with the book that has just been released about the ANC Secretary-General Ace Magashule have a right to disagree with its contents. However, they do not have a single right to disrupt the launch of the book and threaten to burn its copies in our name. As the SACP we strongly condemn the misconduct and are glad that the ANC has condemned it. The ANC should deal decisively with the misconduct.

The ANC must unify itself and the people as a whole. It must contribute to the unity and reconfiguration of the Alliance - to play its role effectively as the strategic political centre of our revolution and fulfil its historical mission.

We want an ANC-led government that places the interests of the people first and serve the people selflessly. Our campaign for the victory of the ANC on the ballot in the 8th May 2019 general election is a campaign - essentially - for the victory of the people. It is a campaign for an ANC-led government of the people that will, to name but a few national transformation and development imperatives:

• Decisively implement the much needed investment in Eskom in cleaner and renewable energy, and turn around both Eskom and all other public entities.
• Preserve the jobs of the hard working rank and file workers and create decent work.
• Determinedly expand and diversify the productive sector of the state, support the growth of social ownership and develop national production to grow employment.
• Firmly deal with corporate state capture and other forms of corruption in the entire public sector, as well as in the economy as a whole.
• Resolutely implement the National Health Insurance to eliminate inequality in, and thereby provide universal access to quality healthcare.
• Industriously develop a public transport system that is safe, reliable, affordable and accessible, including in particular to people with disabilities. We must support this national development imperative by forming transport forums in our communities.

The importance of forming progressive fronts cannot be overemphasised. These include a widest possible patriotic front to defend our hard-won democratic transition, and a popular left front to advance, deepen and defend the second radical phase of the national democratic revolution.