10 April 2020
The novel coronavirus pandemic and Hani commemoration
Friday, 10 April 2020 marks the 27th year of the day on which SACP General Secretary, Comrade Chris Hani, was assassinated on Saturday, 10 April 1993, on the Easter weekend. When he was brutally assassinated, Cde Chris Hani was the General Secretary of the SACP and member of the National Executive Committee of the ANC. He had earlier served as the Chief of Staff of uMkhonto weSizwe, the MK, military wing of our liberation movement jointly founded by the ANC and the SACP. Hani served our movement with distinction.
Every year on April 10th we hold the annual Chris Hani commemoration at the Thomas Nkobi Memorial Park, in Ekurhuleni, where he lies buried. We do so in collaboration with the Ekurhuleni Municipality where Hani also lived and was granted the freedom of the city.
We had planned for a mass commemoration ceremony as we always do. However, in consultation with the Hani family, represented by Mama Limpho Hani, and also through her advice, we collectively decided to not proceed with the commemoration plan of Friday, 10 April 2020. This decision was made in order for us jointly to fall in line with the requirements of the national state of disaster law and nationwide lockdown as part of our contribution to fighting the deadly novel coronavirus, Covid-19 pandemic. The discipline of the Communist Party and its members must be exemplary and beyond reproach!
Humanity is now in the midst of a global public health emergency caused by the deadly novel coronavirus. In South Africa, President Cyril Ramaphosa had to declare a national state of disaster. As in many countries across the world, our government has further declared a nationwide lockdown, which applies during this period. The nationwide lockdown was on Thursday, 9 April extended to 30 April.
We support the measures to protect life and save humanity. This is one of the reasons why we are against assassinations, murder, violence and abuse. Cde Chris Hani was killed mainly because he valued life for millions of our people and struggled so that they would not just have life, but a better life free from hunger and disease. The murder weapon that was used to end Hani’s life and the assassination were meant to ensure that our people remain in perpetual hunger and exploitation. It was meant to throw our country into civil war, with more bloodshed, where after the likes of the assassins and their ilk would emerge as perpetual slave masters continually frustrating the birth of a democratic South Africa. We resolutely stand for human rights, and the right to life is second to none!
We want to make use of this moment to warn those involved in acts of domestic, emotional and gender-based violence. During the first week of the lockdown the help line to report gender-based violence had received about 87 000 calls. Such despicable actions are both against the law and also a hindrance in our struggle to defeat Covid-19.
By Thursday, 9 April more than 1.5 million people across the world had contracted the highly contagious disease. A day before, on Wednesday, 8 April there were over 1 700 confirmed positive cases of novel coronavirus and 13 deaths attributed to the disease in South Africa. Globally, on that day there were over 83 000 deaths attributed to Covid-19.
In order to properly understand the nature of the struggle and challenge before us, it is important that our cadres are armed with the appropriate theoretical and political understanding of the political economy of Covid-19.
Some of the contemporary analysis of pandemics point to these being a product of the continuing destruction of the global environment by the rampant globally dominant regime of capitalist accumulation and consumption, especially its neoliberal version. The epidemiological outlook of the disease is already looking extremely disturbing.
There is also strong evidence that the difficulties that are facing even advanced capitalist countries in dealing with Covid-19 also have to do with the privatisation of health-care and the running down of public health systems.
Therefore the challenge before us is clear – the struggle against Covid-19 must simultaneously be a struggle against capitalism and its greed. It must be a struggle to intensify access to quality health-care for all, especially the workers and poor who are excluded by the profit-based private health-care sector as it is interested not in human life per se by in profit making from ill-health.
The outbreak of Covid-19 as well as the current crisis of capitalism shows how Hani was right to choose socialism as the only sustainable solution to solve the problems experienced by humanity as a result of capitalist production, exchange, appropriation of the wealth of society and associated greedy consumption patterns. It is also worth-noting that as humanity is grappling with Covid-19, we hear more about the necessity for solidarity, common and collective effort, and the need to care – all of which are basic socialist concepts that Chris Hani stood for. Talk of the role of the market has completely disappeared in the current period as we talk about how to defeat Covid-19.
The HHH campaign
Hani fought for the right to quality health-care for all. Shortly before his death, he led an important SACP campaign called the HHH campaign. The objectives of the campaign were to fight against Hunger, Homelessness and for access to quality Health-care for all hence the HHH. This campaign was visionary. It underscored the necessity for a public health system offering quality care to all. That is why, as we remember Chris Hani today, we must intensify the HHH campaign with a strong focus vigorously pushing the National Health Insurance (NHI) to make available access to quality health-care for all.
On this note, the SACP once more calls on all people in our country to observe the national disaster law and nationwide lockdown regulations and contribute to victory against Covid-19.
Economic and social policy
As we remember Hani, we are also faced with a deep economic crisis in our country and the Southern African region. This crisis is also a global crisis and is affecting different countries to varying extents. It is indeed shameful that as we seek to grapple with Covid-19, the rating agencies do what they are good at – pushing for the creation of conditions to intensify labour exploitation by capital. To these rating agencies it does not matter that we are facing a life and death struggle against Covid-19. It does not matter that their decisions to downgrade us may worsen the social and economic conditions of our people. To them we must always be made to remember that we must take decisions that favour capitalist accumulation and foreign monopoly-finance capital. These rating agencies are heartless. They do not care about the situation of the overwhelming majority of our people.
In the here and now, the SACP wants to take this opportunity to reiterate the statement of the Alliance Secretariat released on Monday, 6 April 2020. In particular, we want to caution against any decision that may surrender our right to determine our own economic policy and direction. As the SACP we are in full agreement with the Alliance statement to reject going with a begging bowl to the International Monetary Fund or World Bank. Our democratic national sovereignty is not for sale! It is non-negotiable.
We need to unite to defend our democracy and strive for collective national, regional, continental and world prosperity and peace. We need to wage the struggle for liberation from inequality and the debt trap that many countries have been plunged into deeper and deeper. The SACP joins the calls for the write-off of the entire unjust and unsustainable debt, interest rates and penalties that stand in the way of development in many developing countries. The international financial institutions must be compelled to uphold democratic national sovereignty, the fundamental right to self-determination. They must give the countries affected by Covid-19 support in the form of grants, which must be properly managed.
The SACP also wishes to strongly condemn the threat by President Trump of the United States to withdraw funding of the World Health Organisation. This is indeed very reckless. We must rally behind the WHO as it is doing important work in confronting the many pressing health problems globally.
The SACP is calling for the prioritisation of mobilisation of our domestic financial and other resources, including the R8 trillion rand in pension and provident funds. We are not calling for reckless use of such funds. On the contrary, we are against recklessness. What we stand for is for these domestic resources to be invested into infrastructure and other productive sectors of our economy that have an employment creating impact and will in turn benefit the funds and the workers.
In the immediate context the SACP also calls for priority to be placed on co-operatives, small, medium and micro enterprise to manufacture protective clothing like masks as part of dealing with Covid-19. The SACP also calls for the private health-care sector not to stand aside but to make available its huge resources to fight the pandemic on purely humanitarian grounds and therefore without placing profit before human life.
In memory of Chris Hani, let us deepen the struggle to protect our democracy, expand and develop it further.
Let us emulate Chris Hani
Hani served as a long standing member and leader, in various capacities, of the SACP, ANC and MK.
A resilient liberation soldier, Hani was involved in all the pillars of our struggle against the apartheid regime – the armed struggle, underground organisation, the mass struggle and in international isolation of the apartheid regime.
Hani was involved in SACP, ANC and MK operations to bring oppression in our country to an end. He was arrested while pursuing our struggle for liberation and social emancipation. Despite that and the other difficulties that he experienced, he never abandoned the struggle for liberation and social emancipation – which he staunchly believed would be possible under socialism.
Hani was arrested in South Africa in 1962, and was charged under the apartheid regime’s Suppression of Communism Act. A year later, in 1963, he was arrested in Zambia, where he was released shortly after the arrest to continue with his revolutionary mission. He was arrested when he tried to enter Botswana in 1966 and was sent back to where he had come from, Lusaka, Zambia. A year later, in 1967, he was arrested again in Botswana, where he had retreated in the course of the Wankie Campaign. In all these he was not alone. He was a man of the people and he worked with the people.
Hani was part of the Luthuli Detachment. He was with other stalwarts of our struggle for a democratic and free South Africa. He also worked with combatants from the Zimbabwe People’s Liberation Army (Zipra). The difficulties that he experienced, and his emergence and strategic continuity after each one of them, show that he was unbreakable. He was characterised by an undying revolutionary determination for peace and collective prosperity.
Yes to full disclosure of the truth – No to parole for the unrepentant assassin
Taking our cue from Hani, we will not abandon our fight for justice, for the whole truth and circumstances surrounding his assassination to come out. Janusz Walus, the assassin who pulled the trigger, is still in jail, but he is continuing his consistent attempts at being released on parole. Walus is unrepentant. Except for the pretence he plays out like a dramatic character seeking parole, the hard fact is that Walus has not renounced the anti-communist motive he himself said was the basis and his reason for assassinating Chris Hani. We will continue to seek full disclosure of the truth and oppose his attempts at being placed on parole. The other convicted assassin, Clive Derby-Lewis, died of a natural cause of death.
Hani’s assassination was of a big magnitude. It could not have involved only two elements to initiate, plan and execute from the beginning to the end.
For instance, the murder weapon that the assassins used to carry out the assassination was taken from military armoury. To this day the whole truth about who took the gun from military armoury has not been disclosed.
The whole truth about whose hands the murder weapon passed through in its relay destined for Hani’s assassination has not been disclosed.
The whole truth about who supplied the silencer associated with the testing and use of the gun has not been disclosed.
The whole truth about where the silencer was first tested on the murder weapon and who else was involved has not been disclosed.
The whole truth about the hit list associated with the assassination has also not been disclosed. The list comprised the names of Nelson Mandela and Joe Slovo as well as information about their places of dwelling, among others.
It is clear that there were other individuals who had knowledge of the assassination before it was carried out and others who were more involved. What we want is for every person in the entire chain of Hani’s assassination to be brought to book. We want full disclosure of the truth and justice to take its course. We want closure for the entire Hani family and all of us who care about the truth and justice.
ISSUED BY THE SOUTH AFRICAN COMMUNIST PARTY | SACP
EST. 1921 AS THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF SOUTH AFRICA | CPSA
Dr Alex Mohubetswane Mashilo
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