Friday, 02 June 2006
The SACP Politburo held a four hour bilateral meeting with the National Working Committee of the ANC Monday 19 June 2006 whose aim was to discuss the challenges facing the national democratic revolution and the respective roles of our formations in this regard. The SACP formally tabled and presented its Central Committee Discussion Document on its relationship to state power and possible future electoral options.
The SACP welcomes this engagement and the planned further bilateral which is to take place within the next four weeks to continue these discussions. We also welcome the fact that our allies are engaging with our document, and the ANC presented its own initial response to our document at this bilateral. We of course do welcome critical engagements with our document, including disagreements with it.
We also agreed at the bilateral that we should try by all means to avoid debating these important matters and our respective documents through the media. The SACP is strongly committed to this. However for this debate to be carried out in a principled, comradely and constructive manner, we only wish to make the following observations and clarifications, as they are already in the public domain:
We are rather disturbed by the tone and thrust of the ANC response to our document. We had long agreed to a certain set of protocols in the Alliance for purposes of engagement, including the fact that in our engagements we should not question each other?s bona fides. The calling into question of the credibility and intentions of the SACP leadership is completely unacceptable and unwarranted. We wish to reiterate the importance of conducting debates in a manner that respects the integrity of all our organisations and their leaderships. This in fact serves to confirm what our discussion document points to - the emergence of a dominant project within our movement, whose style of engagement seeks to delegitimise critical debates and relies on labelling rather than substantive and comradely engagement.
The ANC response also tends to focus on the intentions of our discussion document in a conspiratorial fashion rather than engaging the substantive issues raised therein. For instance, instead of substantive engagement with the issues the response attributes our document and the issues it is raising to ?opportunistic infiltration? of SACP structures, ?part of it possibly aimed at destabilising the Alliance as a whole?, ?where the ANC cannot launch branches?, but ?the SACP and YCL has been able to launch branches?. Debating through such innuendos and insinuations is foreign to the traditions of comradely debates within our movement, and it doesn?t do the image of all our formations, individually and collectively, any good.
We also emphatically reject the unfounded and untruthful allegations about mysterious ?donor agencies? funding the campaigns of our Young Communist League. The campaigns of the YCL are funded from the same pool of funds raised by the SACP, principally through its membership levies and our collective fundraising campaigns. The YCL is not funded by any donor agency.
The tone of the document seems to be a reflection of the mindset of the author of the document than a substantive engagement with its contents. The SACP remains hopeful that, as the ANC Secretary General said at the time of the release of our document, we are still going to have a principled and honest debate on these matters guided by Alliance protocols. We remain committed to open, frank but comradely debate to strengthen our Alliance, and we look forward to continued engagements within our Alliance structures and through our internal publications.
Issued by:
Malesela Maleka
SACP Spokesperson
Tel: 011 339 3621
Fax: 011 339 4244
Mobile: 082 226 1802
Email: malesela@sacp.org.za