SACP Central Committee Meeting

5 December 1999

The Central Committee of the SACP met in Johannesburg over the weekend of December 4 and 5 1999. This is the last CC of this year.

The CC discussed a report of the Party's Red October campaign in which over 40,000 workers were addressed countrywide in a series of factory-place meetings. 1314 new members were recruited, and 14 new industrial branches of the Party were launched. In the course of the campaign the SACP also assisted two communities in the Free State to launch co-operatives one for chicken breeding, and the other for small scale farming. The focus of the campaign was the job loss crisis in our country. SACP campaigners found that throughout SA retrenchments, unemployment, along with casualisation, contracting out and other management devices to weaken the working class, are experienced acutely by our people. The CC also discussed and approved a programme of action for next year. The SACP is declaring year 2000 as a year for Building People'sPower for the Eradication of Poverty. Among the key themes of the campaign will be:

• The job loss crisis and its impact on poverty levels.We shall be campaigning for job retention and job creation. The SACP will also be taking forward its campaign around co-operatives, partly as a survival response for the unemployed. We believe that there is no reason why small and medium enterprises (SMMEs) should always be conceptualised as individually-owned enterprises. Co-operatives are an important alternative SMME route which, in many cases, will prove to be more viable and sustainable.
  
• Rural transformation emphasising the need for integrated development and land reform
  
• The campaign to ensure that the poor - rural and urban - have adequate access to loans and general banking resources. We are deeply concerned at the ongoing tendency for the poor to be "de-banked". The private sector in our country often boasts that we have one of the most sophisticated financial sectors in the world this sophistication is not obvious to millions of poor people in our country.
  
• The campaign against crime and violence, with special emphasis on white collar class crimes and on violence against women. Party cadres are playing an active role in many community policing forums, we shall be intensifying this work in the coming year. We reiterate our deep concern about the manner in which the Absa lifeboat was treated. This sent a negative message that irregularities by the powerful can easily be ignored.
  
• Local government transformation and the local government elections key to social and economic transformation is this sphere of governance. The SACP has hundreds of town and metro councillors, and many mayors (serving in their ANC capacity), we shall be calling on our cadres to play a leading and exemplary role in the transformation of local government in line with our RDP goals. In addition we are going to be mobilising all our structures to fully participate in the election campaign for another resounding ANC victory at this level. Running through our campaigns of the Year 2000 will be a focus on working with and appealing to all public sector workers. We shall be calling on teachers, nurses, police personnel, pension clerks, soldiers and municipal workers to see themselves as cadres in a major transformation struggle. The SACP is firmly of the belief that the public sector is, in principle, capable of providing public service that is otherwise neglected or distorted by profit-driven private sector operations. However, this potential of the public sector has to be implemented in practice, and that requires major political, moral and mobilisational work. Finally, the SACP CC discussed preparations for the forthcoming Alliance Summit. Amongst other things, we will be tabling our programme of action at this summit with a few to harmonising our alliance activity in the coming year.

Issued by the SACP Department of Information & Publicity
E-Mail: sacp1@wn.apc.org
South African Communist Party Head Office
COSATU House No. 1 Leyds Street
7th Floor Braamfontein 2001
Republic of South Africa
(Tel: 27 11 339-3621/2)
(Fax: 27 11 339-4244)