31 October 2013, Cape Town
The South African Communist Party (SACP) Brian Bunting District condemns in the strongest possible terms the lumpenism that transpired during the legitimate mass action in Cape Town CBD yesterday, Wednesday, 30 October 2013.
We urge the communities to refrain from any unlawful act that dilutes their genuine demands when they protest against their inhumane standard of leaving. This has created an unnecessary negative publicity and as a result the capitalist media has found every reason to reduce their cause to rioting and looting, completely diverting the attention away from the failures of the DA government.
We call upon our people never again to allow the provocations by the DA government whose refusal to accept their demands has resulted to the reported chaos. In the same breadth, the DA government must stop playing cheap politics and making the genuine demands of our people a political football. Their paranoia about the ANC has become a smoke screen to hide their incapability to deliver services to the most marginalised communities of the Western Cape.
As the current leading party in its last days of governance, the DA must not shy away from the responsibility, it must respond to the genuine demands of our people. It cannot be correct that in a democratic South Africa, people are neglected for hours without any elected leader being availed to accept their memorandum.
This arrogance and unacceptable treatment of our people as "third citizens" in the same way that apartheid treated them exposes the true character of the DA as the "middle man of neo-colonialism".
As the SACP we are calling upon the DA government to take full responsibility of looting and chaos that resulted from the neglect and extreme arrogance by the DA government.
We believe the march was peaceful until it became clear to our people that the DA government was not interested in hearing their demands.
We are equally disappointed by the unbalanced reporting by the capitalist media. Instead of focusing their attention to the people’s plight which forced the masses to march to the Legislature, the media was only interested to the chaotic part of the march. Not a single media house has reported that our people were left for more than five hours without being attended by Helen Zille and her cahoots.
This, however, does not surprise us as we know that the DA and the media are in the same camp. This is the camp that represents the neo-colonial interests, with large sections of the media functioning as if they were assigned a responsibility of DA’s public relations. Thus, we caution the working class not to fall into the sword and the strategy of the Capitalist shop steward who sits in Whale Street. They must at all material times understand that the battle lines are clearly drawn and should exercise caution in waging their struggles. Any struggle that lacks discipline donates people’s struggles to the hands of these agents.
As a lesson from our past, people’s struggles will be reduced to the acts of criminality. The public will be persuaded to believe that theirs is an act of hooliganism. We have seen how leaders of our liberation movements were reduced to criminals when they were fighting for a good cause.
We are extremely dismayed and disappointed by the statements attributed to the ANC provincial Chairperson comrade Marius Fransman that seeks to donate working class people to reactionary EFF.
As the SACP in the district we call on our people to ignore these utterances, as we know who they are and we will never sell them out. Equally, we call upon Cde Marius Fransman to withdraw his statement as it is unfortunate, mischievous and ill-informed. This was purely as a result of his failure to apply tools of analyses in contextualizing struggles of the working class.
As the vanguard of the working class, we want to assure our people that we are among them and will continue to defend the National Democratic Revolution and this tendency of individualizing the people’s struggle shall be defeated. We also call upon the ANC, as the government in waiting to take note of these people’s demands.
As we intensify our struggles and our programme of de-racialisation and restoration of human dignity of the people of the Western Cape, the ANC Leadership should take a firm stand on the people’s struggle being guided by ANC’s historic role and revolutionary principles.
We say to the working class people of the Cape Metro, particularly the Cape Town Informal Settlement "the history of all hitherto society is the history of class struggle".
Issued by SACP Brian Bunting District
Benson Ngqentsu - 0827966400
District Secretary
Or
Masonwabe Sokoyi - 0741772068
Western Cape Media Liaison