15 February 2004
Statement of The SACP Central Committee
The Central Committee of the South African Communist Party (SACP), chaired by cde Charles Nqakula, met on February 13th and 14th. This is the final CC before the April 14th elections, and much of the meeting was devoted to ensuring that the SACP's organisational structures and activists are ready to intensify the Party's contribution to ensuring an overwhelming ANC election victory. In particular, the SACP will target workers and the urban and rural poor.
The CC received and debated an extensive political report presented by the secretariat. In the run-up to the elections we believe it is important to celebrate the achievements and assess the challenges and difficulties of ten years of freedom. In particular the CC underlined two key aspects of our government's own assessment of the past 10 years. In its important ten-year overview ("Towards a Ten Year Review") government notes:
"The advances made in the first decade by far supersede the weaknesses. Yet, if all indicators were to continue along the same trajectory, especially in respect of the dynamic of economic inclusion and exclusion, we could soon reach a point where the negatives start to overwhelm the positives."
We note that others, like the DA's Tony Leon, have also quoted this passage for their own purposes and with some malign glee. However, what they have failed to quote is another critical insight contained in government's ten year review:
"From an assessment of the various themes, it can be seen that the government's successes occur more often in areas where it has significant control and its lack of immediate success occurs more often in those areas where it may only have indirect influence."
Taken together, these and other critical strategic insights go to the heart of the matter. This appraisal by government explains the ANC election manifesto's commitment to a strong, developmental state and parastatal sector. It explains the commitment to spend R100 billion of public money to drive a massive infrastructural programme. It explains the prioritisation of creating work and of mobilising millions of ordinary South Africans to work together with government to carry forward transformation.
As government's review correctly implies, wherever there has been a reliance on the private capital to drive transformation, there has been disappointment and frustration. In its elections campaigning for an overwhelming ANC victory, the SACP will point out how capitalists have systematically sought to undermine major gains. The very significant legislative and regulatory gains made by workers in terms of labour rights, safety regulations, minimum wage determinations for farm and domestic workers, or security of tenure rights on farms are often systematically undermined. Private capital has retrenched, casualised and outsourced -depriving workers of the hard fought-for gains they had made in terms of pensions, medical aid and other rights. Private capital has made solemn commitments to create jobs at the Jobs Summit and the Growth and Development Summit, but everywhere it is importing machinery and firing workers, or disinvesting. In the election campaign the SACP has every intention of placing the principal blame for many of the social and economic challenges that confront our people squarely where it belongs.
As we speak, there are a number of worker struggles going on. One strong thread that runs through these is the impact of casualisation and outsourcing, and of retrenchment. We condemn the stubbornness of Equity Aviation in persisting with its unilateral increase of working hours without increasing wages, and we call on Transnet to assume some responsibility. It was Transnet that privatised this function and reached an agreement with affected workers that there would be no downward variation of conditions for a period of about two years. This agreement has been flagrantly broken. The CC pledged to mobilise SACP structures in support of these worker struggles.
In the campaign, the SACP will be taking further its Red October campaign, focusing in particular on the most vulnerable sectors of the working class -rural workers, casualised workers, those in the "informal" sector. Vulnerability in these sectors often particularly affects women. We are broadening this campaign to focus on acceleration of land and agrarian transformation, with a particular focus on access to productive land for household-based subsistence farming. We will also be engaging all the role-players in this regard, including white commercial agriculture.
The Party, along with the ANC, will also be paying particular attention to two key provinces, KZN and the Western Cape. In these provinces in particular, there are sections of the working class that, for various reasons, have tended to vote for opposition parties. The SACP will actively engage with these sections of the working class, and we will ask them to consider the consistent anti-worker, anti-trade union, and anti-poor stance of the DA and the IFP. These parties are also the strongest advocates of whole-sale privatisation, outsourcing and casualisation. Dominated by grandees from the past, they have launched vicious attacks on working people, calling for less regulation of the labour market, and for poverty wages.
The CC also devoted considerable time to a discussion on the deepening crisis in Zimbabwe. The SACP sent a formal delegation to Zimbabwe in December, which met with senior ZANU PF cabinet ministers, the leader of the opposition, Morgan Tsvangirai, and the leadership of the ZCTU, amongst others. The SACP has continued to engage actively with our own government, with our alliance partners, and with our various colleagues in Zimbabwe.
The CC expressed cautious optimism that both ZANU PF and the MDC have committed themselves to formal negotiations in the coming weeks. The SACP agrees with our government that a negotiated transition offers the most probable and certainly the most desirable path to breaking the political impasse that is impacting with such devastating effect on the social and economic situation in Zimbabwe. However, the SACP is uncertain about the degree of commitment to serious negotiations, particularly from the side of the ZANU PF government. We are concerned that there might be a lack of urgency. We are also deeply concerned at the continued repression of workers, opposition activists and of journalists. Such measures do not help to create a climate in which serious negotiations, in which both sides assume full, patriotic responsibility for taking their country out of its crisis.
The SACP also believes that it is very important that we do not allow ourselves, as South Africans, to be manoeuvred into a position in which it seems that we, or at least our government, needs the negotiations to succeed more than the Zimbabweans themselves. The negotiations are, fundamentally, about Zimbabwe's needs. Successes should be Zimbabwean, and failures and delays should be blamed on the relevant Zimbabwean formations.
The SACP further believes that, for too long, the public debate in South Africa about Zimbabwe has been dominated by a conservative liberal paradigm. Zimbabwe is read as an allegory for South Africa, and it is supposed, if implicitly, to represent the inevitable outcome when "they" (a black majority government) "take over". In the course of this public discourse, human rights get opposed to national aspirations - for national sovereignty, for land reform, for overcoming the legacy of settler domination of the economy. The Freedom Charter of the ANC, and the longstanding values of our own movement have always understood the profound linkage between human and broader social rights and constitutionality on the one hand, and the struggle for national liberation on the other. We must not, as South Africans, allow the Zimbabwean reality to drag us into the trap of opposing these things.
The SACP agrees that the land question is very central to consolidating the Zimbabwean independence struggle. We agree that the continued monopolisation of this key sector of the Zimbabwean economy as late as 2000 (20 years after independence) by some 4 500 white farmers acted as a massive brake on transformation. However, a lawless, populist inspired land grab by an elite in the inner circles of government is a cruel caricature of the kind of land reform that the rural poor of Zimbabwe (and South Africa) so desperately require. The "fast-track" land reform in Zimbabwe has left hundreds of thousands of the poorest of farm workers displaced and without work.
In the coming period, the SACP will continue to engage our counterparts in Zimbabwe, we will continue to express our grave concern at human rights abuses, we will support all genuine attempts to take forward the social and economic struggle for full independence, and will do our best to foster negotiations.
In the course of our meeting, the CC learnt of the death of Catholic Archbishop Denis Hurley. Archbishop Hurley played a hugely progressive role in our country, particularly during the apartheid years. He urged Catholics to engage with the realities of our society, he encouraged defiance of racist laws by Catholic institutions, including schools, and from a perspective of compassion and Christian duty he consistently advocated taking the "choice of the poor". The SACP joins millions of other South Africans in expressing our sense of pride that our country nurtured such an outstanding human being. We dip our banners in his honour.