To: The National Treasury, Minister of Finance

In this 2024–2025 Red October Campaign, we, the South African Communist Party (SACP), deliver this memorandum as a call to action.

We demand urgent and resolute steps toward tackling the cost-of-living crisis and implementing the National Health Insurance (NHI) – both crucial imperatives reflecting the collective will of South Africa’s working class, the majority of our nation.

For too long, undue capitalist influences have obstructed the economic emancipation of the working class, prolonging hardship through deepening economic exploitation of labour and resisting radical structural transformation and progressive change.

This memorandum marks our unequivocal warning against the unjust elevation of such greedy influences by the class minority to the status of our national interests and against institutionalising the associated delays. We are calling for immediate state action.

1. Tackling the cost-of-living crisis: The current economic landscape is marked by an ever-rising cost of living, pressing down on the majority. We demand:

• Expansion of VAT-exempt basic goods: An expanded basket of zero-rated basic goods to alleviate the daily burden of food insecurity and household care, social reproduction.
• A decisive advance towards a comprehensive social security system: including doubling and then improving the Social Relief of Distress Grant towards the upper-bound poverty line and advancing its transformation into a Universal Basic Income Grant. In the same vein, adequate improvement of the value of other social grants, to roll back the inflationary impact of the years when their adjustments were below inflation, is imperative. 
• Comprehensive poverty eradication strategy: This must tackle root causes and offer a sustainable pathway out of poverty, including through adequate support for co-operatives and productive activity grants to increase the population of self-employed people.
• State oil and refinery revitalisation, including urgent strengthening of trade and investment relations with oil-rich countries, whose governments are willing to help, based on principles of solidarity, such Venezuela, Iran and others, to secure affordable oil for South Africa. The National Treasury must fund or mobilise resources for an immediate programme to rebuild domestic refineries to lower fuel prices and reduce the prices of goods and services that require oil and its byproducts to produce and transport. 
• Fair pricing in retail: Despite lower production and transportation costs as a result of fuel price reductions and other factors, retailers continue to exploit consumers. We demand swift regulatory intervention to stop the exploitative pricing, including import parity pricing. 
• The government must intervene to ensure that cost reduction benefits in production, transportation and storage, among others, are immediately passed to the consumers through lower prices. On this score, the Competition Commission must conduct further investigations on how cost reductions in production, distribution and storage can be passed to the consumers and must hold price-exploitative retailers accountable through maximum fines.  

2. Comprehensive implementation of the National Health Insurance: The NHI Act is now law.

• Further delays in the implementation of the NHI, disguised as consultation, are intolerable. The state must now act to deliver universal quality healthcare for all by decisively implementing the NHI comprehensively,  as well as, equally important, by adequately resourcing the public healthcare sector, including by training and employing more healthcare professionals and specialists, ensuring the availability of medicine and medical equipment, and developing and maintaining the public healthcare infrastructure across the entire value chain – primary, secondary and tertiary – with a strong emphasis on primary healthcare.
• We reject all the mechanisms aimed at justifying exorbitant medical fee increases, including – to the extent that it does so – the introduction of the so-called “Medical Practitioner Inflation Index”.
• The wider effort to make quality healthcare for all a reality must include a more decisive advance towards establishing a thriving state pharmaceutical sector and domestic medical equipment manufacturing industry.
• President Ramaphosa and the government at large must remain steadfast in the imperative to take the NHI forward. Our country cannot afford to continue with the unjust two-tier healthcare system characterised by private monopoly-dominated healthcare provision catering for a minority of the population, between 14 per cent and 16 per cent, based on wealth, income and exorbitant access, on the one hand, and exclusion of the millions of the workers and poor who cannot afford, on the other hand. Private health insurance in South Africa claims a higher share of our country’s total health expenditures, 41.8 per cent (based on data from 2013 and 2015) than any country globally. That is equivalent to 3.7 per cent of our country’s Gross Domestic Product. In this unjust context, the public healthcare sector, which caters for the overwhelming majority of our population, at least 84 per cent, is under-funded, under-resourced, overcrowded and overwhelmed. This injustice must end through the NHI principles, including social solidarity, free access to healthcare at the point of service, universal access, the NHI Fund and capacitated public administration.
• Community healthcare workers: the government must absorb community healthcare workers on permanent employment contracts based on the Decent Work Agenda.  Community healthcare workers are essential to our country’s public healthcare system, more so in still underserved and rural areas. They provide frontline care by delivering healthcare services directly to communities, including preventative healthcare, health education and disease management for different health conditions. Their work has a great contribution in the national imperative to reduce the burden on hospitals, improvement of early diagnosis and treatment and fosters trust and engagement in healthcare. Despite their invaluable contribution, community healthcare workers face work insecurity because of the precarious conditions under which they are treated. This is also a function of austerity.

3. Public employment programmes: Every worker deserves dignity and a living wage. Public employment programmes should be expanded to serve as part of the wider effort to create large-scale employment towards ensuring the Freedom Charter’s right of all to work in practice and to further serve as part of the skills training spaces to prepare workers for opportunities in other sectors.

4. Get rid of austerity budgeting: Austerity is not only a failed economic doctrine but an active assault on the working class and the most vulnerable in society. Its history worldwide – from Greece to Brazil, from elsewhere to South Africa – reveals a grim legacy of deepened poverty, skyrocketing unemployment and widening inequality.

• Far from producing the promised fiscal stability or growth, austerity has led to economic stagnation, dismantling or weakening of public services and state capacity, and has fostered social crises that cripple development. In South Africa, austerity has become a straitjacket on the aspirations of our people, blocking funds that could revitalise national industrial capacity, strengthen our infrastructure and support the millions left to fend for themselves in a high-cost economy. This approach has not only abandoned but actively suppressed the possibility of structural economic transformation, showing contempt for the majority in favour of satisfying a capitalist agenda hostile to the public good.
• Empirical evidence from across the globe illustrates austerity’s inescapable outcomes: reduced social spending, diminished public sector capabilities and capacity, and pervasive economic degradation. Greece, for example, saw its economy shrink by a quarter under austerity, with public health care in tatters, poverty exploding and youth unemployment reaching crisis levels. Brazil, too, implemented severe cuts, which only worsened inequality and stifled the economy, sparking waves of protest from those devastated by retrenchments and reduced access to basic needs. Even the UK, one of the wealthiest capitalist economies, experienced an erosion of social welfare, soaring homelessness and stagnating wages, with growth rates falling far below projections.
• The working class in many austerity-devastated economies, like in South Africa, now bear the scars of austerity – a vicious cycle of poverty and inequality that no working-class household can escape. This is evidence enough that austerity serves no one but those clinging to financial monopolies, whose profit-driven interests depend on a weakened state and a vulnerable workforce.
• Abandoning austerity is not a mere option – it is the only viable path forward. South Africa requires a radical shift to a developmental, people-centred approach that actively prioritises large-scale employment creation, public services and economic transformation. This means redirecting public spending to empower communities, advance localisation and industrialisation and reduce inequality in practice, not just in rhetoric.
• We demand that the government abandon its allegiance to failed neo-liberal strategies, for our history shows that austerity will continue to deepen, not resolve, South Africa’s crises. The people have no tolerance left for empty promises or policies that benefit the wealthy few as the outcomes of one election after another has showed. Instead, the time has come for decisive, militant action that puts the workers and the poor at the centre of economic power, enabling an economy that works for the majority, not the elite.
• The crisis-high unemployment, poverty and inequality that the paradigm intransigently followed for 28 years since the government imposed the neo-liberal economic policy called Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) in 1996 are among the key factors that have contributed and continue to contribute to the high rates of crime that have now worsened in certain categories. Under the circumstances, the capacity of law enforcement authorities, such as the South African Police Service, has faced crippling restrictions as a result of austerity, with far-reaching implications. We call for adequate funding and resourcing of law enforcement authorities to improve their conditions of work and enhance the national imperative to successfully fight against crime and corruption.     

5. Transformation of monetary policy and the Reserve Bank: The Reserve Bank’s mandate must abandon the restrictive neo-liberal inflation-targeting policy. Instead, we call for a monetary policy that prioritises transformation with maximum sustainable employment and shared growth as part of its goals and the accountability of the Reserve Bank. We reject the stranglehold of high interest rates that impede industrialisation and lock out unemployed workers, keeping them unemployed.

6. Industrialisation and sectoral policies: Only through a whole-of-government approach to industrialisation will South Africa secure food sovereignty, domestic minerals beneficiation and sustainable livelihoods. Fiscal austerity has long undercut our industrial policy; we demand an end to this neo-liberal sabotage. Insourcing of all unnecessarily outsourced operations in the entire state organisation and all the spheres of the government must become the norm, and localisation must drive the remainder of public procurement.

7. Revitalisation of state-owned enterprises and public development finance institutions: State-owned enterprises, alongside public finance institutions like the Industrial Development Corporation, Development Bank of Southern Africa, Land and Agricultural Development Bank of South Africa, must be transformed to thrive and serve as part of the engines of and support base for industrialisation and large-scale employment, respectively. The government must empower Public Development Finance Institutions to break monopolistic strongholds that have kept our economy stunted and inhibited diversification.

8. Financial Sector Transformation: We demand implementation of the establishment of a public banking system that meets the financial needs of the people, of whom the working class is the majority. This includes developing state sectoral banks, aligned with industrialisation and infrastructure development imperatives, a public retail banking sector, creating space for co-operative banks to thrive as a sector, and establishing a sovereign wealth fund to drive transformation.

In this Red October Campaign, the SACP calls on the government to act decisively against neo-liberalism and serve the will of the majority.