13 September 2020
The SACP Central Committee met on Friday and Saturday, 11-12 September 2020. Owing to the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic, the meeting convened virtually. Extensive political and organisational reports were tabled by the national secretariat and discussed over the two days.
The Central Committee noted the devastating impact the Covid-19 pandemic has had on lives and livelihoods in our country. The impact of the pandemic comes on top of a pre-existing crisis of extraordinary levels of poverty, inequality, unemployment, deepening challenges of social dislocation and distress in many households, including unacceptable levels of inter-personal, and particularly gender-based violence.
The CC reaffirmed the Party’s position that a pandemic of this kind was both predictable and predicted. It is directly linked to an aggressive, profit-maximising, capitalist system that has destroyed vast stretches of natural habitat, knocking ecological systems out of kilter, and bringing humans into contact with new pathogens. The globalised ‘value-chains’ across which capitalism extracts profit have also become the vectors through which pandemics spread rapidly back-and-forth between the developed north and under-developed south. The Covid-19 pandemic is a foretaste of an even greater, possibly terminal, crisis approaching human civilisation, the climate crisis. Underlining this point, as the CC was meeting, devastating climate fires in the West of the United States were raging.
Here in South Africa, government and wider health and social responses to this hitherto unknown and unresearched Covid-19 virus have been relatively commendable, certainly when compared to the denialist and back-to-business at any cost demagogy of leaders in the US, Brazil and the UK, among others. However, the impact of the pandemic and the necessary lock-down measures undertaken exposed all the existing fault lines in our society - crowded townships that make social distancing impossible, informal settlements without basic sanitation and water, weak public transport that exposes millions to unsafe commutes, households that even before Covid-19 were experiencing food insecurity, and a public health-care system that has been chronically under-funded.
In the face of all this the CC salutes the heroic work of healthcare and other frontline workers, as well as numerous Community Action Networks (CANs) and similar community-based volunteerism that emerged organically. This popular activism based on solidarity must be deepened and resourced as a critical response to what will now be a long-haul struggle against our multi-dimensional socio-economic crises.
The public health-care sector and the National Health Insurance
The SACP will be intensifying its campaign for the full introduction of the National Health Insurance (NHI) to make quality healthcare available to all, especially the working-class and poor. The majority of our society have long been excluded by the profit-driven private healthcare sector because they do not have money to buy healthcare as a commodity. The intensification of the NHI campaign will go hand in hand with the intensification of another important campaign-a campaign against neoliberal austerity. Without the introduction of the NHI and tackling austerity, the public healthcare sector will remain under-resourced and will not be strengthened. The public healthcare sector is expected to take care of the needs of the overwhelming majority of our population. However, it is under-resourced, and this has been worsened by austerity measures, and the absence of the NHI. The problem is also a result of the fact that the lion’s share of our healthcare expenditure is captured by the profit-driven private healthcare sector that caters for a tiny minority.
Dedicated frontline workers in the overburdened yet under-funded public healthcare sector did and continue to do their best in the war against Covid-19. Their efforts, serving the people wholeheartedly under hard conditions, contributed immensely to South Africa avoiding more loss of life because of Covid-19, while certain private hospitals became an epicentre of the spread of Covid-19. The SACP salutes the frontline workers, of whom others contracted the deadly disease on duty saving the lives of patients, and others later lost their own lives.
It was against this background and wider considerations that the SACP supported the recent action by the National Education, Health and Allied Workers Union (Nehawu). The CC congratulated the union for taking up the issues affecting workers. The SACP calls on the government to engage with Nehawu and other public service unions and address the demands and concerns of the workers. It is the SACP’s firm belief that determined engagement by government on this front can lead to common agreement and approaches to the pandemic by all involved. It is very important to protect frontline workers to serve the people without exposing their lives to occupational health and safety hazards.
The South African Statics (StasSA) report ‘Mortality and causes of death in South Africa: Findings from death notification’, shows that an overwhelming number of deaths across all age groups in South Africa occur as a result of natural causes of death. In the past two decades from 1997 to 2017, the minimum number of deaths caused by natural causes of death per annum was 83 per cent in 1997, while the maximum was 91.3 per cent (2006). There can be no doubt this situation persisted beyond 2017, and that Covid-19 worsened it in 2020. According to the Covid-19 South African Resource Portal, Covid-19 caused 15 378 deaths by Saturday, 12 September 2020, since the first positive case of the virus was detected in the country on 5 March 2020. Other natural causes of death caused the other high number of deaths that occurred during this period.
The neoliberal economic policy called Growth, Employment and Redistribution (Gear) imposed in 1996 comprised cuts in social spending, among others affecting health. The government maintained the neoliberal approach with varying extents affecting different areas of broader social transformation and development. The finance policy called fiscal consolidation, another neoliberal austerity approach to social spending, played a key role in that regard. The postponement of the NHI by many years was a direct result of neoliberal opposition to the policy of quality healthcare for all. The opposition to the NHI was driven from inside and outside the government and reflected in budgeting.
Yet the high number of deaths caused every year in South Africa by natural causes of death, as documented by StatsSA, shows the need for the NHI to make quality healthcare available to all.
A red card to corruption
But if there are many positive features to our collective South African response to the pandemic, there have also been outrageous negative features as well. None more so than the looting of public resources intended for dealing with the health crisis—like the up to eight hundred per cent mark-ups on health equipment by rent-seeking tenderpreneurs in a number of instances, or the theft of personal protective equipment. These are actions that the World Health Organisation director general has rightfully described as ‘akin to murder’.
Unfortunately, these wanton acts of corruption are just one more, particularly awful, example of the rampant scourge of corruption and unethical behaviour across much of the public and private sectors.
Another dimension of this wanton pillaging of public resources is the theft and destruction of public infrastructure. The CC denounced the looting and vandalising of public infrastructure. As things stand, many kilometres of the South African railway network-copper and aluminium parts and components, including cables and tracks, and other metal parts and components have been looted. Replacement components and parts at Eskom are also stolen. There is also a strong relationship between this and the exports of ‘scrap metals’ and the tenderisation of the state. Also, many schools have been vandalised, computers and other equipment and materials have been stolen. Roadside pavement construction materials are stolen even before the construction can begin. The list goes on.
More worryingly, the looting and vandalism of public infrastructure have been unabated, judged by the astronomical damaged caused and the fact that the rot is still going on. This portrays South Africa as country where lawlessness or anarchy rules in certain areas of the society, a territory where the rule of law is either weak or the there is something fundamentally wrong with the state system, or a state that is demonstrably incapable of enforcing the rule of law and protecting public property. An urgent turnaround is essential. There must be accountability by the relevant public entities, government departments and law enforcement institutions. So must our own Alliance lead a campaign for mass education and conscientisation on the need by our communities to respect and protect public property.
Over several years now the SACP has campaigned together with the trade union movement, community and faith-based organisations and even organised business formations against the scourge of crime and corruption. In several provinces, SACP and other Alliance anti-corruption activists have been murdered.
The CC welcomed the decisions of the last ANC National Executive Committee to intensify the campaign against corruption and deal decisively with all the culprits, including instructing all those charged with fraud, corruption and other crimes in the courts of law to step aside. Much as the struggle against corruption must be waged on all fronts, it is important for the ANC as the governing party, to take a lead in this regard, including a determined effort to confront all manner of fight back campaigns.
The fight against corruption and crime must also be waged in communities, inside all non-governmental organisations, political parties, churches, educational institutions and other social formations. Within this framework, the CC adopted an extensive declaration of interests’ policy, amending all previous approaches. The policy will be implemented with immediate effect within the SACP. The CC mandated its Political Bureau to appoint a Revolutionary Morality Committee, in line with the SACP Constitution, to discharge its responsibilities in relation to the standards of revolutionary morality.
The SACP welcomes recent decisions from the side of government that include building greater alignment between the work of investigating and prosecutorial agencies, and the amendment to the Commission of Inquiry into State Capture, that will now allow evidence uncovered by the commission as well as personnel working for the Commission to be used by other arms of the criminal justice system.
The CC also welcomed President Ramaphosa’s letter to ANC members, drawing a clear line in the sand, ‘we might not be alone in the dock, but we are accused number one’. He spoke for a great majority of ANC and Alliance members and supporters. He has the full support of the SACP in driving a firm anti-corruption line within our movement.
But how do we explain the levels of corruption within our society, and how, then, do we roll-back this scourge?
No to a tenderised state. Towards a democratic developmental state
The SACP is not in denial that corruption reached its height during the 2009–2018 years, more so in the second half of that decade, almost turning our country into a mafia state. But we reject the simplistic commonplace argument, embedded in the ‘nine wasted years’ narrative, that it all began during that period. There was the doleful legacy of the late-apartheid years when sanction-busting criminal networks flourished and then infiltrated the post-apartheid institutions, playing a not unimportant role in the first post-1994 major corruption scandal, the ‘strategic defence acquisition’ widely known in the media as the ‘arms deal’.
But there was also, in the mid-1990s, the misguided and unnecessary neo-liberal repurposing of the new democratic state as a procurer of goods and services, a tenderised state with key developmental public utilities now corporatised and either wholly or partially privatised. The capacity of the state has been deliberately and drastically reduced. We now have private security companies guarding police stations and the courts of law, basic municipal services are outsourced, and much of government is reliant on over-paid consultants (some of them former public servants) for policy-development.
A huge part of the civil service is, accordingly, engaged not in providing services or producing goods, but in tendering, with all the moral hazard that is now so apparent.
The CC reaffirmed the SACP’s stance against the tenderisation of the state. Besides measures that coalesced around hollowing out of the strategic capacity of the state, tenderisation of the state has directly led to curtailing of the role of the state in the economy and productive activity, in favour of economic control by the private wealth accumulation sector. Hence the weakening of State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) and other public entities. This is now accompanied by measures aimed at exposing (‘opening’) the assets of the SOEs and other public entities to private sector exploitation for a greater share in private wealth accumulation competition. The working-class need to unite to stop the manoeuvres to convert South Africa into a full-blown capitalist tender state.
The CC further called for an urgent release of the funds as committed by the government to rescue and restructure the South African Airways (SAA) towards a viable, growing and thriving national airline. The SACP is acutely aware of attempts by those who want to feed and profit from the carcass of the SAA to work towards the liquidation of the national airlines, for nothing else but their greed. A national airline or an airline in which the state has a significant stake is crucial as part of our aviation industrial strategy, wider industrial development and support for the economic sectors linked to the aviation industry, such as the air cargo industry-an important sector in international trade-and tourism, among others. A well-managed whole-of-state guided national airline is also crucial for a post-Covid-19 crisis turnaround. The SACP will continue engaging with the formations of organised workers and the Alliance on this score.
The tenderisation of the state has led to the creation of many unnecessary tenders. While corruption is wider in scope—the reality is that the corruption pandemic is concentrated in tenders, procurement, supply chain management, outsourcing and privatisation. These and other measures are used to convey the functions of the state and the public to private wealth accumulation interests. In this regard the neoliberal and parasitic networks are pushing in the same direction. The difference is in the methods of their work. The neoliberal networks use policymaking as a lever to push their agenda, while the parasitic networks use brazen smash-and-grab tactics. Neither the neoliberal nor the parasitic networks are the solution for South Africa’s transformation and development challenges.
A first key priority is to rebuild an effective criminal justice system and related institutions to deal with corruption, but also with other grave social crimes, like gender-based violence. But we will not roll-back corruption systemically if we do not also look at the wider state.
We need to re-build state capacity to provide goods and services, to lessen the amount of outsourcing, and where procurement is required to ensure that it is done transparently, without all manner of intermediary rent-seekers, and that the state is a price-maker, not a price-taker in the process. Building a capable state, in our context, must mean building a democratic developmental state.
We are frequently told that we do not have the resources to build a National Health Insurance, for instance, or that we cannot expand the public service. But those who argue this position are very silent about the massive drain of resources out of our country by monopoly capital, through capital flight, both legal and illegal, through the use of tax havens, transfer pricing, false invoicing, profit shifting and much more. One academic study suggests that an equivalent of some 20 per cent of our GDP was lost in this way in 2007. Let alone the silence about a hugely wasteful government system based in Pretoria and Cape Town, a colonial inheritance, that continues to waste bullions of rands.
A key feature of a democratic developmental state must therefore be the capacity to discipline capital. Since the mid-1990s we have thrown away many of the instruments for achieving such a capacity with excessive trade and financial liberalisation and the failure to apply prescribed asset requirements, something the apartheid regime had no hesitation in doing. At a minimum, the agreements of the 2002 Financial Sector Summit on, amongst others prescribed assets, must now be implemented without delay.
As the recently released StatsSA’s GDP statistical release indicates, and expectedly, the South African economy, like many others across the world, has plummeted in the second quarter of 2020 due to the impact of Covid-19. The pandemic has deepened the capitalist system’s pre-existing chronic economic crisis, with serious implications for social reproduction—the sustenance of life by households.
There is no other way forward except to drive the Alliance’s shared strategic perspective of the second radical phase of our democratic transition. To drive the second radical phase of our transition, South Africa needs a capable democratic developmental state buttressed by popular power, the democratic power of a united working-class and other progressive strata.
No to corruption - no to austerity
Standing in the way of addressing the systemic features that underpin our corruption pandemic are, therefore, those forces that continue to cling to an increasingly discredited neo-liberal fundamentalism, those forces in our country that are more IMF than the IMF of 2020. Unfortunately, these include some in the National Treasury and the South African Reserve Bank.
In court papers the National Treasury has even gone so far as to say that it would be ‘immoral’ to honour government’s public sector wage agreement. In the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic and huge economic and social distress, the South African Reserve Bank has been prepared to inject significant liquidity into the private banking oligopoly but declined to provide a stimulus liquidity into public financial institutions like the DBSA and IDC. President Ramaphosa’s well-intentioned ‘stimulus package’, thanks to Treasury’s austerity fixation, is barely a stimulus at all-but largely represents the re-jigging of existing budgets by de-funding many existing government programmes.
While the SACP commends the consultative approach undertaken by President Ramaphosa, particularly through Nedlac, in preparing an economic turnaround plan, we fear that many excellent ideas ranging from a Universal Basic Income Guarantee, a major social and economic infrastructure programme, to a massive expansion of public employment programmes, will either not take off, or will be so constrained by fiscal austerity, that they will fail to have the necessary strategic transformational impact.
Support to progressive workers action
The CC denounced the National Treasury’s characterisation of the government’s compliance with the public service wage agreement as ‘immoral’. The SACP reiterates its call on government to honour its public sector wage agreement.
The CC expressed overwhelming support for the socio-economic action called by Cosatu. The action will take place on 7 October 2020. Its objectives include anti-corruption objectives. The action is part of the International Decent Work Day.
The crisis of social reproduction, scourge of gender-based violence and racism
The CC reiterated the statement released by the SACP on 6 September 2020 strongly condemning the racist advert by Clicks (https://www.sacp.org.za/content/sacp-condemns-racist-advertisement-clicks), and calling for decisive action by the South African Human Rights Commission, among others. The CC further expressed solidarity with the non-racial and non-sexist workers employed by Clicks. However, it is important that we do not allow such struggles to be hijacked by populists, opportunists and anarchists. The working-class must be at the centre of the struggle against racism and all other forms of discrimination.
The SACP has been actively involved in the struggle to tackle gender-based violence and racism. The work includes joint campaign activities with our Alliance partners and other social formations. The Jack Simons Party School and the launch of the Josie Mpama Gender Equality series have contributed positively to the efforts. The SACP will continue deepening the efforts against gender-based violence, patriarchy and racism, towards a fully non-sexist and non-racial society.
Red October Campaign - Triple H plus Water
The CC endorsed the plan to re-launch an earlier SACP campaign, the Triple H Campaign - Human Settlements, Healthcare and Hunger (plus Water). Further details will be announced closer to the campaign launch. The Covid-19 crisis on top of an existing economic and social crises, has given particular urgency to campaigning around the intersecting human settlements, health, food security and food nutrition, and lack of water and sanitation as some of the key challenges affecting the working-class and poor.
International solidarity
The CC expressed solidarity with the people of Zimbabwe, many of whom found themselves with no other option but to leave or flee the country. South Africa is host to most of them, and is, in many ways, directed impacted by the crisis in Zimbabwe. The assertions that there is no crisis in Zimbabwe are nothing but a denial of the self-evident truth. The people of Zimbabwe should independently solve the problems affecting their country, yes, but help by the SADC and the AU is important. International solidarity is also crucial.
Swaziland is also facing a crisis. The absence of democracy in that country and consequent problems remains a key challenge. The CC expressed solidarity with the people of Swaziland struggling for democracy.
The SACP expresses solidarity with the people of Western Sahara, Syria, Palestine, Cuba, Bolivia, and others across the world in the face of imperialist aggression. The CC welcomed the emergence of progress indicators towards a resolution of the long-standing Sudanese crisis.
Tribute to our fallen comrades
The CC expressed sincere condolences to the families of its members, frontline workers in the war against Covid-19, and all South Africans that lost their loved ones since its last plenary held on 29 May 2020.
The CC paid tribute to its members and the stalwarts of our liberation struggle who passed away since its last plenary held on 29 May 2020. The names include John Dlamini, George Bizos, Achmat Dangor, Peter Dambuza, John Nkadimeng, LT General Vejay Ramlakan, Andrew Mlangeni, Ronald Mofokeng, Joyce Pekane, Siyabulelwa Siswana, Papadi Kose, Lucas Peter Nchabeleng, Mbuyiselo Jacobs, Ntsikelelo MacCollen Jack, Hishaam Mohamed, Shaheed Rajie, Zindzi Mandela, Fred Kona, Thomas Manthata and many others, most of whom are unsung heroes.
ISSUED BY THE SOUTH AFRICAN COMMUNIST PARTY | SACP
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