Mpumalanga SACP holds consultative conference on the banks and land campaigns
18 September 2004
Following yesterday's successful address to the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Finance and mass action against Cape Town banks, the South African Communist Party in the Mpumalanga province is taking forward the financial sector campaign by holding a Provincial Consultative Conference to launch the Mpumalanga Provincial structure of the Financial Sector Campaign Coalition (FSCC).
The Conference will be held as follows:
DATE - Sunday 19 September 2004
TIME - 09h30 to 15h00
VENUE - SACP Mpumalanga Provincial Office, Hightech building, corner of Botha & Lukin Streets, Witbank CBD
The Conference will be attended by 80 delegates from Party districts and branches, the ANC, COSATU, taxi associations, stokvels, hawkers'associations, SASCO, COSAS, the Transvaal Rural Action Committee (TRAC) and other invited organisations.
The Conference will discuss a programme of rolling mass action to pressurise the financial sector to work co-operatively with other constituencies in implementing the comprehensive package of the August 2002 Financial Sector Summit Agreements. "We also demand that the Financial Sector Charter Council be finalised immediately and that the package of Summit agreements be implemented without any delay", said Judas Tsotetsi, SACP Mpumalanga Provincial Secretary. The meeting will receive input from SASCO on their free education campaign and 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 Conference will also focus on the 2004 Red October campaign whose theme is "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. The Mpumalanga meeting will prepare for tribunals, forums and mass meetings, and provincial plans for a culminating National Day of Action for Land, Food and Jobs on Saturday 30 October. The campaign will have three key thematic pillars:
a.. Access to and ownership of productive land for the poor
b.. Access to basic services and rights for farm-workers and their
families
c.. A National Land Summit
As a rural province, Mpumalanga has hundreds of cases of illegal deductions from wages of farm workers, continued illegal evictions and impounding of farm workers' livestock. The SACP 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.
CONTACT
Judas Tsotetsi
SACP Mpumalanga Provincial Secretary
Tel - 013-656 2045,
Fax - 013 690 1286
Cell - 0727205886,
email - jtsotetsi2004@yahoo.com
