30 November 2004
The SACP has been dismayed and even puzzled by the personalised intensity of attacks directed, in particular, against COSATU and its general secretary, cde Zwelinzima Vavi. The SACP welcomes robust inter-Alliance debate on the strategic and tactical challenges confronting us.
How best do we contribute to democratisation in Zimbabwe? How do we ensure that black economic empowerment is, indeed, broad-based? How should workers? savings be deployed to maximise development and transformation? We all agree on the desirability of these objectives, but how do we achieve them in practice? These are not simple questions, and no one has a monopoly of wisdom.
Debate on such matters is important for our members, for our millions of supporters, and, indeed, for the broad South African public. There is nothing wrong with such debates, and there is absolutely no reason why senior ANC leaders should be silent while everyone else polemicises. But ad hominem interventions, whether public or private, that are directed at the speaking rights of a colleague, and not at the substance of an argument, are another matter entirely. Interventions that are full of menace, threat, allusions to collaboration with ?outside? forces, and of personal ridicule are worrying. It is a style that, unfortunately, characterises much of the official discourse in Zimbabwe, contributing directly to the climate of intolerance and political stagnation in our neighbouring country.
ANC culture, by contrast, has been steeped in the nurturing of unity in diversity. The ANC has survived and flourished because of its confident and principled accommodation of difference and debate and the ability to build and lead, out of this diversity, unity in action.
The heated exchanges of recent days occur in the immediate context of two major challenges confronting our alliance ? Zimbabwe and the shape and character of BEE. The SACP calls on its members and all comrades in allied formations to remain focused on the real substance of these challenges.
The possibility of elections in March in Zimbabwe creates an important window of opportunity. A March date-line must be used as leverage to ensure the essential constitutional reforms and other democratisation measures are put in place well before elections. These measures should lay the basis, not just for free and fair elections in three months time, but for getting Zimbabwe back on to a national democratic trajectory to address the all-round crisis of social and economic under-development.
However, this window of opportunity is fast disappearing. March is desperately close. All the indicators from Harare point, for the moment, in the direction of increasing polarisation, diminishing democratic space, and growing intolerance. How, as an Alliance in South Africa, can we most usefully contribute to assisting our Zimbabwean colleagues move towards a resolution? What are the complementary roles our different alliance components should play, and how do we all support our government?s interventions? These are the immediate challenges confronting us on Zimbabwe. We must stay focused on these matters of substance. We owe it to the Zimbabwean revolution, and we owe it to our own NDR.
In regard to Telkom restructuring, the SACP believes that, however problematic the PIC purchase of the 15,1% Thintana share may originally have been, it is a reality that now presents us with another important opportunity. Should this 15,1% share simply be ware-housed on behalf of the Elephant Consortium for six months until the Consortium can come up with an adequate financing arrangement? Is the Elephant Consortium really broad-based? How will the Consortium use its share-holding to drive more effective and affordable access to telephony for the poor? Will the Consortium defend existing jobs and commit to create new ones or will it simply be parasitic on the continuing job-loss bloodbath at Telkom? Will the Consortium contribute meaningfully to lowering the cost of doing business in South Africa? Could the PIC not simply hold onto the share in its own right and on behalf of the interests of hundreds of thousands of workers whom it should be representing? Could the state not take back some of this share-holding, considering the strategic importance of Telkom to our overall economy?
Instead of hurling personalised insults at each other, instead of falling into a trap of diversionary tactics, let us have a rational and sober discussion about how best to proceed with the PIC 15,1% share. (And let us also, by the way, ensure that the trade union representatives are indeed convened with other commissioners so that decision-making at the PIC is finally regularised.)
As the SACP we reiterate our serious discomfort with the use of workers? money to fund narrow BEE. The debate must however be broadened to examine the whole of BEE thus far. Has it been anything but elite? Can BEE be broad-based if our broader economic trajectory is premised on the primacy of the capitalist market, without serious developmental interventions to roll back this market? These debates are of course fundamentally linked to the broader question of the interventions needed, state and mass based, to transform the current capitalist accumulation regime.
Asikhulume!