29 August 2004
The SACP Central Committee met in Johannesburg on the 27th and 28th August 2004. The main purpose of the meeting was to prepare for the Party’s Red October campaign which will focus on the challenges of land and agrarian reform, with a particular emphasis on mobilising farm-workers and the rural poor. The CC discussed an overview analysis of the current political and economic situation in our country, and the financial sector campaign was also reviewed.
As part of the preparations for our Red October campaign the CC invited Minister of Agriculture and Land Affairs, cde Thoko Didiza and her senior officials to address the meeting. We were briefed on the Agri-BEE Charter Framework and on the two departments’ perspectives on land restitution, land reform and the Communal Land Rights Act. The CC also interacted with a report on the prospects for small-holder agricultural production presented by the Programme for Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS). The CC expressed its appreciation for these engagements which have assisted us to deepen our understanding of the challenges we jointly confront.
The CC has endorsed the plan to launch our 2004 Red October campaign with the theme of “Mawubuye umhlaba: Land, Food, Jobs!” The month-long programme of action will involve ongoing networking with a range of progressive forces, consultation and popular mobilisation. SACP branches will be conducting household surveys in targeted rural and farming areas. We will hold tribunals, forums and mass meetings, and we plan for a culminating National Day of Action for Land, Food and Jobs on Saturday 30 October.
The campaign will have three key thematic pillars:
Access to and ownership of productive land for the poor Access to basic services and rights for farm-workers and their families A National Land Summit
In our election manifesto, the ANC together with its alliance partners has undertaken to “speed up land reform, with 30% of agricultural land redistributed by 2014.” In the course of our mobilisation campaign, the SACP will seek to add impetus to this commitment to speed up the process. We will also seek answers to the question of whether we are spending enough on the process and whether the present willing-buyer willing-seller approach with its inevitable patch-work consequences is an effective means for achieving the objective of substantive land reform. The SACP believes that land restitution and land reform need to be very substantially underpinned with effective infrastructure, agricultural extension programmes and ongoing assistance. The SACP also believes that the principal beneficiaries of land reform must be the rural poor, with the emphasis on ensuring household food security, cooperatives for inputs and marketing, and sustainable rural communities. The campaign will be connected to our financial sector campaign, to ensure that micro-credit is available for effective land reform. The Party will also focus on the release of unused and underutilised land, and on the problem of absentee landlords.
Notwithstanding the minimum wage sectoral determination for farm-workers, and security of tenure legislation, the conditions of workers and their families on the 55,000 commercial farms remain, generally, little changed. We have an abundance of evidence coming in from our rural branches of illegal deductions from wages, of continued illegal evictions and impounding of workers’livestock, and of the general abuse of this sector of the working class and women in particular. We will be campaigning for an end to all forms of violence, victimisation and abuse; and end to child labour, and for fee education and health-care for the children of farmer workers. We will also campaign for the extension of Justice Centres into rural areas, and for an increase in Department of Labour resources to more effectively monitor farms.
The SACP will also campaign for the convening of a National Land Summit that will bring together government, farm workers, landless people and agribusiness. The objectives must be to review land and agrarian reform since 1994; to agree on specific measures and policies to accelerate reform. Workers and the rural poor must also be afforded a much greater opportunity to input into the Agri-BEE Charter, to ensure that its stated “broad-based” approach is translated into relevant policy and programmes.
The Central Committee received a report on the Financial Sector Campaign. The CC expressed its concern at the way in which the banks and insurance sector are continuing to procrastinate, and are continuing to run the Financial Charter process as a closed board-room affair. This comes at a time when not only communities and trade unions but government is increasingly impatient with the lack of effective transformation in the sector. This week the National Treasury and Reserve Bank released a report on the Concentration in South African Banking. The report notes that more than half of our population do not have access to effective banking, that the four largest banks in South Africa control 80% of the market, and that there has been an average 29% increase in current account service charges between 1999 and 2003. The report found that these four large banks were more profitable than any other of the international banks surveyed and that the client charges were amongst the most expensive.
The SACP has played a leading role in the broad-based community financial sector campaign. Together with our partners in the campaign we will continue to engage with the NEDLAC process, and with government on the elaboration of the Charter and on the assessment of progress (or lack of) in implementing the Financial Sector Summit agreements. We are also pleased to note the tertiary student formation, SASCO, has joined the campaign, and we will be supporting them in their demand that banks should play a much more active and developmental role in ensuring that tens of thousands of students have some prospect of advancing their studies. The CC also noted critically the flurry of narrow, so-called “BEE” deals in the banking and insurance sector. This is not black empowerment, and we will not allow it to become an excuse for failure to address the underlying transformational challenges. Banking resources must be made available to all, and the substantial resources in the sector must be released to achieve sustainable growth and developmental objectives, including job creation. The campaign structures are preparing for mass action in the coming months.
The SACP reiterates its condemnation of the stubborn persistence of Telkom management’s pursuit of profits and outrageous management perks at the expense of jobs. We believe that this is precisely the outcome of ill-considered privatisation of this key national asset against which we have consistently warned over several years. However, we salute the recent statements by the Minister of Communications and we call on government, which is still a significant share-holder, to crack down on the anti-worker gluttony of the present Telkom management.