Build people’s power where we live:
For the right to work, water, electricity, roads, land and safety for all
Delivered by SACP General Secretary Solly Mapaila at Qumrha, Eastern Cape Province, at Qumrha, Sunday 4 October 2026
RED OCTOBER IS A CALL TO STRUGGLE AND ACTION
Graya Komanisi Graya! Graya rhengqe lamaKomanisi Graya!
People of Qumrha, people of the Eastern Cape; Workers and the unemployed; Women and young people; Farmers, small traders and pensioners; Traditional and religious leaders; Community activists; Comrades and friends,
Revolutionary greetings!
We launch Red October here in Qumrha not Komga, the colonial name imposed by the British, because the soil beneath our feet carries the memory of conquest, dispossession and resistance. Near here, at Draaibosch, African resistance confronted colonial expansion in 1877. Across this region, African farmers struggled to hold on to land even as colonial law, the 1913 Natives Land Act and later removals tightened the grip of dispossession.
We therefore do not meet on neutral ground. We meet on land marked by blood, labour and struggle. Ilizwe lethu lisencangathi ligazi lookhokho bethu. We honour those who resisted conquest not by turning history into ceremony, but by completing the unfinished struggle for land, work, dignity and power.
And we launch this Red October in an historic election year. For the first time in the democratic era, the South African Communist Party is contesting local government elections independently and directly under its own banner across the country. We say clearly, VOTE SACP. But we also say something deeper: a vote can elect a councillor, only organised people can change the balance of power.
Karl Marx gave revolutionaries a permanent instruction: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.” Red October must therefore be more than a month of red T-shirts, rallies and speeches. It must organise the people to change the material conditions of their lives.
1. THE CLASS QUESTION: WHO OWNS, WHO CONTROLS, WHO BENEFITS?
Comrades, our campaign begins with the questions that confront working people every day. Is there work? Does the water flow? Is electricity reliable and affordable? Are the roads usable? Can families access land and decent housing? Can women and children move safely? Does public money serve public need or private enrichment?
These are not disconnected service-delivery complaints. They are expressions of class power. The worker produces wealth but does not own the wealth produced. The miner descends into the belly of the earth, and faces heat, dust, injury and death; yet the mineral wealth passes into the hands of those who never lifted a drill. The farm worker produces food but may remain landless and hungry. The municipal worker keeps communities functioning but is denied tools while consultants and contractors extract millions.
This is capitalism: social production and private appropriation. Political democracy has transformed our country profoundly, but economic power remains concentrated. A small capitalist class still exercises enormous power over investment, finance, land, minerals, energy and the commanding heights of the economy. Big capital then presents its own class programme as a neutral “business–government partnership”.
We reject the idea that privatisation, liberalisation, deregulation, outsourcing and the hollowing out of public capacity are technical necessities. They are class choices. They transfer social assets and public functions into the sphere of private accumulation. Whether the target is electricity, rail, ports, water infrastructure, the spectrum or other strategic assets, the working class is told: you are on your own.
Lenin insisted that Marxism lives through concrete analysis of concrete conditions. Our concrete condition is clear; mass unemployment exists alongside enormous social need; poverty exists alongside concentrated wealth; broken infrastructure exists alongside unemployed artisans and graduates; unused land exists alongside hunger; public resources exist alongside communities excluded from decisions. The task of a Communist Party is to connect these contradictions to organisation and struggle.
2. THE RIGHT TO WORK: PUT HUMAN NEED BEFORE PROFIT
South Africa is in an unemployment catastrophe. The draft launching statement records official unemployment in the second quarter of 2026 at 33.6 per cent, youth unemployment at 47.4 per cent, and expanded unemployment at roughly 44 per cent – about 13.1 million people when discouraged work-seekers are included. Behind every percentage is a household carrying the burden of a system that cannot provide work for millions who are ready to work.
The capitalist system treats labour as a cost to be reduced. Each capitalist is driven to increase output with fewer workers, to mechanise where profitable, to retrench where profitable and to shift the social consequences to families and the state. We fight for every existing job and for decent wages, but we refuse the fantasy that the profit motive alone will solve mass unemployment.
There is work everywhere! Roads must be repaired. Water systems must be maintained. Waste must be collected, sorted and recycled. Wetlands must be restored. Alien vegetation must be cleared. Schools, clinics and public buildings must be maintained. Food must be produced. Houses must be built and retrofitted. Renewable-energy systems must be installed. Public transport must be reconstructed.
The work exists. The people who need work exist. The social need exists. What is missing is political power and a developmental mechanism that brings them together. That is why we call for Municipal Decent Work Plans: ward-by-ward identification of socially useful work; public employment; apprenticeships and internships; in-sourcing; municipal enterprises; co-operatives; support for informal and platform workers; and procurement that builds local productive capacity instead of feeding tender networks.
We must ask in every municipality: How many potholes? How many leaking pipes? How many kilometres of road? How many unemployed artisans? How many unemployed graduates? How much unused public land? How many hectares can produce food? How much waste can become productive material? How many co-operatives can be built? Then cost it. Put it in the IDP. Put it in the budget. Link it to district, provincial and national industrial policy.
Nelson Mandela reminded the world: “Like slavery and apartheid, poverty is not natural.” It is made by human arrangements and can be overcome by human action. We therefore reject the politics that treats unemployment and poverty as weather conditions. They are produced by political economy, and political economy can be changed.
3. PUBLIC SERVICES ARE A CLASS BATTLEFIELD
Our first manifesto priority is reliable public services, proper maintenance and prompt repairs. Water, electricity, roads, sanitation and public transport are not luxuries. They are part of the social wage and part of the productive infrastructure of society.
People should not beg for water. A burst pipe should not run for weeks. Sewage should not flow through streets. A dangerous pothole should not become a permanent landmark. Municipalities require properly staffed technical departments, permanent maintenance teams, ward-by-ward infrastructure audits, published backlogs and rapid-response capacity.
Municipal workers must have tools, training, equipment and permanent posts. Where essential work can be performed by public workers, bring it back into public provision. Stop converting municipalities into tender-distribution centres. Public money must meet public need!
Electricity shows the class character of the crisis. Our draft records that Eskom tariffs have risen by 937 per cent since 2007. A connection means little if a family cannot afford to switch on the lights. High electricity prices crush households, co-operatives, small workshops, food processing, cold storage, farms and productive industry. We defend and rebuild public electricity. We demand investment, maintenance, technical capacity, democratic accountability, affordable tariffs and decisive action against corruption and criminal networks. We oppose the neoliberal logic that weakens public capacity and then uses the weakness it created as the excuse for privatisation.
The same applies to monetary policy. When interest rates rise, workers with bonds pay more, co-operatives borrow at higher cost, productive investment is discouraged and household income is transferred to finance. We continue to demand a developmental monetary framework orientated to moderate long-term interest rates, industrialisation and maximum sustainable employment.
4. LAND, WATER AND FOOD, MAWUBUYE UMHLABA!
We cannot speak in Qumrha without speaking about land. Colonial conquest took land not merely as property but as the material basis of African independence. Land meant cattle, food, family, community and power. Dispossession forced Africans into labour markets on terms set by mining, agriculture and industry. Land dispossession and labour exploitation are therefore one history.
The 1913 Natives Land Act did not begin dispossession: it codified and intensified centuries of conquest. Later removals destroyed African farming communities and consolidated racial capitalism. That history remains visible in the geography of South Africa today.
Twenty-two years ago, the SACP's Red October campaign raised the call, Mawubuye Umhlaba, Land! Food! Work! That call remains unfinished.
We demand open audits of municipal and state land; release of suitable public land for housing, food production, co-operatives, schools, clinics and community facilities; transparent municipal leases; participatory land-use planning; protection against unjust eviction; and accelerated redistribution and restitution. Expropriation must serve the constitutional imperative to redress racial dispossession and achieve equitable access to land and natural resources.
But land reform must be judged by what it changes. Does it produce food? Does it create work? Does it strengthen women’s land rights? Does it open opportunities for young people? Does it build community assets? Does it repair apartheid spatial patterns? Does it democratise natural resources? Does it change the balance of power? And land without water cannot produce. Who controls water infrastructure? Who receives agricultural water? Which settlements receive reliable household water? A democratic land programme requires democratic water governance. Water is life, and water is also a means of production.
5. THE PEOPLE'S RED CARAVAN: FROM NEED TO ORGANISED POWER
This is why the People’s Red Caravan is central to Red October. The Caravan must never become charity delivered to passive communities. Its purpose is to organise communities to identify their own resources, capacities and needs and to act collectively.
Do not begin only with: What do people lack? Ask also: What do people know? What skills exist? What land exists? What buildings, water resources, associations, informal businesses, machinery and traditions of collective action already exist? Poverty is real, but working-class communities must never be defined only by deprivation.
The PRC connects household food production, co-operatives, communal economic activity, skills, infrastructure and popular organisation. It connects food security to food sovereignty: who owns the land, who controls seed and production, who processes, who distributes, who sets prices, who owns the shops and who benefits?
Our experience from Motlhabe, Matibidi, Mqhekezweni, Hlokozi, Gladstone, Bushbuckridge and other sites must become a school of revolutionary practice. We must study what worked and what failed. Which projects survived? Which developed local leadership? Which became dependent on outside support? What makes a co-operative viable? What skills are missing?
A Communist Party does not hide mistakes. It studies them. It corrects them. It advances. The municipality must strengthen organised popular initiative; it must not replace it. People’s power begins before the municipal budget arrives.
6. WOMEN'S FREEDOM AND COMMUNITY SAFETY
There can be no people’s power where women live in fear. Gender-based violence and femicide are not marginal social questions. They concern whether half of society can exercise elementary freedom to walk, work, study, travel and live at home without fear.
A total 5,170 murders, 6,104 attempted murders and 6,596 rape counts were recorded in April to June 2026. We also record the horror of women killed in Ekurhuleni. These are not numbers for ceremonial outrage. They are lives destroyed and communities terrorised.
We demand effective policing and investigation; functioning forensic and justice systems; accessible survivor-centred services and Thuthuzela Care Centres; safe public transport and public spaces; working streetlights; enough trained social workers; schools that confront misogyny; community safety structures; and relentless action against extortion, infrastructure crime and stock theft.
But we reject both state neglect and vigilantism. People's power is not lawlessness. A democratic safety strategy must be community-driven and constitutionally grounded, combining prevention, intelligence, investigation, prosecution, environmental design and mass mobilisation.
Women's unpaid and underpaid labour sustains households and communities. Capitalism depends on social reproduction while routinely treating the safety and care of women as secondary. We say: no more. The liberation of the working class is impossible without the emancipation of women.
7. FIGHT CORRUPTION, TENDERISATION AND ELITISM
Corruption steals directly from the working class. A contractor is paid, but the road remains broken. Money is allocated, but the clinic is unfinished. Consultants are paid while public technical capacity disappears. Tender corruption takes water from taps, electricity from homes, books from libraries and work from the unemployed.
We demand maximum transparency, community monitoring, protection of whistleblowers, consequence management and recovery of stolen public funds and assets. Every rand must be traceable. Chris Hani warned of the danger that “the liberators emerge as elitists” and use the resources of the country to gather riches. That warning must live inside the Communist Party itself. A red T-shirt is not immunity from corruption. A Party card is not a licence to tender. A council seat is not a career ladder. A Communist councillor must be a servant, organiser and fighter of the people.
Councillors must report back. They must explain their votes. Communities must participate in planning and budgeting. Public representatives must remain subject to democratic accountability, including recall. We are not fighting to replace one political elite with another. We are fighting to shift power towards organised working people.
8. AGAINST AUSTERITY, DEMOCRATISE THE BUDGET
Municipalities do not operate outside the national economy. Austerity, intergovernmental transfers, municipal debt, interest rates, unemployment and poverty all shape local government. If households have no income, municipalities cannot solve financial crises by squeezing more money from the poor.
The Conference of the Left identified austerity, privatisation, inequality and unemployment as common terrains of struggle. We must turn that unity into mass action and an alternative economic programme based on public investment, industrialisation, democratic planning, redistribution and social ownership.
A budget is never merely technical. A budget tells us whose needs are urgent and whose can wait; who pays; who receives; what is built; who is employed; what is privatised; what public service expands and what deteriorates. A budget is condensed class politics.
Therefore, participatory budgeting must become real. Communities must learn to read allocations, track expenditure, understand procurement, expose underspending and interrogate municipal debt. Working-class democracy requires political power and technical capacity to exercise that power.
9. SKENJANA ROJI AND THE REVOLUTIONARY PARTY WE NEED
Here in the Ncumisa Kondlo District we remember Skenjana “Ike” Roji, soldier, organiser, communist and Marxist intellectual. From Black Consciousness and Fort Hare activism, through detention, MK, underground work, the Communist Party and political education, his life joined national liberation to class struggle.
Roji’s importance is not that he could repeat Marxist formulas. It is that he treated Marxism as a method for investigating changing reality. He challenged bureaucratisation and mechanical thinking. That lesson is urgent.
Marxism-Leninism is not a catechism. It is a revolutionary science and guide to action. We must ask relentlessly: What are the concrete conditions? What has changed? What remains? What mistakes have we made? What is the balance of class forces? How must organisation adapt without surrendering principle?
A Party that cannot criticise itself becomes bureaucratic. A Party that cannot learn becomes ritualistic. A Party that loses contact with workers and communities loses its revolutionary purpose. Our 105-year history gives us pride, but history does not give us immunity from error. The future of the SACP will be secured by ideological clarity, disciplined organisation, ethical conduct, rootedness among the people and the courage to act.
Fidel Castro described revolution as “changing everything that must be changed.” That is the spirit required of us: not worship of inherited forms, but fidelity to revolutionary principle through fearless renewal and practical struggle.
10. SOCIALISM MUST LIVE IN THE EVERYDAY LIFE OF THE PEOPLE
Chris Hani put our socialism in a language no worker needs a dictionary to understand: “Socialism is not about big concepts and heavy theory.” He spoke of shelter, safe water, health care, dignity for the old, decent education and rolling back the tyranny of the market. That is precisely why our manifesto begins with work, water, electricity, roads, land and safety. Socialism cannot live only in books, congress resolutions and speeches. It must become material power in everyday life.
Can a person who wants to work find productive work? Can a child eat? Can a woman walk safely? Can a family open a tap and receive clean water? Can workers afford electricity? Can young people acquire skills and build a future? Can people access land? Can communities determine priorities? Can public money serve public purposes?
These immediate struggles do not distract us from socialism. Properly organised, they are schools of class struggle. They expose the limits of capitalist property relations. They develop organisation, confidence and collective capacity. They teach the working class that society can be governed according to need rather than profit.
Our strategic task is working-class hegemony: the capacity of workers, together with the poor and other popular strata, to lead society intellectually, politically and organisationally. Elections are one terrain. Trade unions are another. Communities, co-operatives, schools, campuses, cultural work, struggles over budgets, land and public services are all terrains on which class power is built.
11. PROLETARIAN INTERNATIONALISM
Red October also reminds us that the working class has no interest in imperialist domination. As the old unipolar order weakens and new centres of power emerge, imperialist powers intensify militarisation, sanctions, coercion, proxy wars and destabilisation. We reaffirm proletarian internationalism and the right of peoples to sovereignty and self-determination. We stand with the Palestinian people against occupation and destruction; with Cuba against the illegal US blockade; with Venezuela against regime-change intervention and for sovereignty over its resources; with the people of Western Sahara; with the democratic struggle in Swaziland; and with peoples resisting imperialist domination across Africa and the world.
We oppose imperialist aggression against Iran and the widening of war in West Asia. Working people everywhere pay for war through death, displacement, higher energy prices, food inflation and diverted social resources.
Internationalism is not an optional foreign-policy paragraph for Communists. Capital is international. Imperialism is international. Our solidarity must therefore also be international.
12. RED OCTOBER MUST BECOME A SCHOOL OF PRACTICE
A campaign month is easy. Transformation is difficult. A rally is easy. Organisation is difficult. A slogan is easy. Building institutions that survive is difficult.
Thus, the test of this Red October is not how many banners we hang today. The test is what remains when the banners come down. What organisation is stronger in November? What community has gained power? What land has gone into production? What co-operative has become viable? What woman is safer? What street is lit? What young person has entered productive work? What public service has improved? What corruption has been exposed? What councillor is reporting to the people? What new organiser has emerged?
This is the meaning of revolutionary practice. We investigate. We organise. We educate. We mobilise. We build. We evaluate. We correct. And we advance. Our election campaign must therefore be a campaign to win, not to become an appendage of the politics of permanent coalition. We seek a mandate to implement a working-class programme. Where collaboration is necessary, it must be principled, transparent and subordinate to the interests of the people, not a market for positions.
Every branch must become a campaigning centre. Every Communist must become an organiser. Every candidate must become a servant of the people. Every ward must have a concrete programme around work, water, electricity, roads, land and safety. Every campaign structure must connect the ballot to organisation beyond election day.
BUILD PEOPLE'S POWER NOW!
Comrades and people of Qumrha, The land question is not finished. The struggle for work is not finished. The fight against poverty is not finished. The battle against patriarchy and violence is not finished. The fight against corruption and tenderisation is not finished. The struggle against austerity and privatisation is not finished.
The National Democratic Revolution is not finished. And the struggle for socialism has not disappeared from history. The capitalist class wants us to believe there is no alternative. We answer, there is an alternative and it will be built by organised working people.
They say leave the economy to the market. We say, put the economy under democratic social direction.
They say privatise. We say, rebuild public capacity.
They say the unemployed must wait. We say: the right to work.
They say land is a commodity. We say land must serve life!
They say communities must vote and go home. We say, organise, govern and hold power accountable!
They say politics belongs to elites. We say, BUILD PEOPLE’S POWER WHERE WE LIVE!
Marx told us to change the world. Lenin taught us to analyse concrete conditions and organise for power. Mandela reminded us that poverty is human-made and can be overcome. Fidel taught that revolution means changing what must be changed. Chris Hani taught that socialism must mean water, shelter, education, dignity and the defeat of the tyranny of the market. Now history places the task in our hands.
From Qumrha to every township! From every village to every informal settlement! From every mine, farm, factory and workplace to every ward! From the unemployed youth to the organised worker! From the household food producer to the municipal worker!
ORGANISE! MOBILISE! BUILD! FIGHT! WIN!
No councillor above the people! No tender above public need! No profit above human life! No retreat from the struggle for socialism! This Red October, let every street become a site of organisation.
Let every ward become a school of struggle. Let every vote become a mandate for people’s power. Let every Communist become an organiser of the future.
VOTE SACP! BUILD PEOPLE’S POWER WHERE WE LIVE!
FOR WORK! FOR WATER! FOR ELECTRICITY! FOR ROADS! FOR LAND! FOR SAFETY!
FOR THE WORKING CLASS! FOR SOCIALISM!
Graya Komanisi Graya! Graya rhengqe lamaKomanisi Graya!
AMANDLA!
ISSUED BY THE SOUTH AFRICAN COMMUNIST PARTY,
FOUNDED IN 1921 AS THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF SOUTH AFRICA.
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