Delivered by the SACP General Secretary Solly Mapaila
Bushbuckridge, 25 October 2026
Build people’s power on all fronts of the struggle in pursuit of the people’s needs
Brutal assassination of Comrade Ernest Fipaza
Dear comrades, friends and compatriots, to start on a sad note, the SACP has suffered a serious blow following the brutal assassination of Comrade Ernest Fipaza, our councillor candidate for Ward 10 in Ncumisa Kondlo District, Mbhashe Sub-District in the Eastern Cape. He was at home with his family yesterday when disguised assassins entered the family home and shot him after demanding a firearm, which he did not have.
Our SACP Provincial Secretary in the Eastern Cape, accompanied by a delegation of at least 100 Party comrades and community members, is at the family home to visit as part of our support.
We also received reports of comrades receiving threats in Ngqushwa Sub-District and Raymond Mhlaba Sub-District in the Eastern Cape. These cases have been reported to the police and are being investigated.
We strongly condemn the assassination and threats.
Over and above having reported these to the police, we will notify the Independent Electoral Commission, because these acts are rendering the elections in the affected areas unfree and unfair, as others use assassinations and threats to pave the way for the candidates they back to win. This is unacceptable.
Let us observe a moment of silence for our candidate who has been assassinated.
Comrades, workers, the unemployed, the working poor, women, youth, rural communities and all progressive South Africans,
We are gathered today during the Red October Campaign 2026-2027 main rally. This is a decisive moment in our struggle. This Red October Campaign takes place in the midst of the local government election campaign, in which the SACP is contesting independently and directly under its own banner for the first time since the democratic breakthrough of 1994. Our Red October Campaign therefore takes its cue from, and advances, the programme contained in our election manifesto: Build people’s power where we live: For the Right to Work, Water, Electricity, Roads and Safety for All.
The central question before our country remains unchanged: who owns, who controls, who decides and who benefits? This is a fundamental question, an economic, political and broader social question. It is, in short, a class question. The choice of millions of our people is between poverty and freedom from poverty. Whose class system is based on inequality and produces unemployment and poverty as the conditions for its existence, its results and levers of wealth accumulation?
South Africa remains a country of immense wealth, including minerals, arable land, biodiversity and marine resources, to name but a few, alongside mass unemployment, deep poverty and extreme inequality. Those who produce the wealth, the working class, continue to be largely excluded from ownership and control of the economy and the proceeds of production. The working class remains isolated or alienated from the ultimate surplus their labour produces.
Political democracy remains a historic achievement, although, as we shall highlight, it is increasingly being stifled and faces a real threat of capture by the dominant sections of capital. Economic power remains concentrated in the hands of the relatively small section of the capitalist class. The struggle for genuine social and economic emancipation therefore remains unfinished.
The solution does not lie in deepening neo-liberal policies, privatisation, deregulation, and transferring public assets and functions into the hands of private wealth-accumulation interests. The solution lies in building working-class power, strengthening public ownership, expanding and diversifying collective forms of ownership, such as co-operative ownership, advancing democratic control and placing production and development at the service of human need rather than private profit.
The right to work for all
The greatest crisis confronting our country remains the crisis of the capitalist economic system. Its features include, but are not limited to, systemic unemployment, poverty, corruption and crime. The common source of these problems is, inherently, a capitalist system, with production organised primarily for the profit of a few, rather than to satisfy human needs.
Being unemployed and poor is not inherently the result of individual failure. It structurally results from an economic system in which production is organised primarily for the profit of a few rather than to satisfy human needs. The SACP therefore places the right to work at the centre of its programme, including the election campaign.
We call for industrialisation, massive public investment, municipal decent work plans, expanded public employment based on decent work, support for co-operatives and local productive development, and a transformation of fiscal (budget, both revenue and expenditure), monetary (money) and trade policy towards maximum sustainable employment. Work must provide sustainable livelihood, social participation and decent living standards.
Reliable public services
People have a right to functioning municipalities. Communities should not live with dry taps, overflowing sewage, collapsing roads, dysfunctional streetlights, unreliable refuse removal and decaying infrastructure. Public money must be directed towards maintenance, repairs and service provision. Municipal technical capacity must be rebuilt. Essential functions must be brought back – through in-sourcing – into public provision. Public institutions must serve public needs, not consultants, not outsourcing and privatisation interests, not networks of tenderpreneurs.
By developing the struggle for the in-sourcing of outsourced, therefore privatised, municipal functions, we are advancing the struggle for re-municipalisation of the essential services that municipalities were established to provide to the people. This is to advance the struggle for municipal productive and service provision capacity, which has been weakened by outsourcing and privatisation in favour of a few.
Electricity for development, not profit
Electricity as energy is and must remain a public good. The SACP rejects the neo-liberal restructuring and privatisation agenda in the electricity sector. We return to this matter by highlighting key points from our initial response to the Medium-Term Budget Policy Statement.
Decisive action must include a thorough forensic investigation into the actual costs of transformers, cables and other electricity generation, transmission and distribution components, compared with the prices Eskom is paying for them. Under the leadership of the SACP, this will be among the top priorities in confronting the systematic milking of Eskom by unscrupulous actors operating within governance, management, administration and supplier networks.
The SACP will extend this forensic investigation to municipalities across the country. Our councillors must treat this as an immediate priority upon election. We will co-ordinate this nationally to expose corruption, recover public resources, eliminate inflated pricing and strengthen the capacity of public entities to serve the people. Public resources must be used for public development, not private enrichment.
Beyond this, the SACP’s vision, a working-class vision with no interests apart from those of the working class, includes establishing additional public utilities to complement Eskom and diversify public electricity-generation capacity with an expanded transmission network. This must include investment in carbon-capture technology, storage infrastructure and environmentally sustainable use as part of the means of production. This must go hand in hand with ensuring that the green energy transition remains anchored in public ownership and democratic control.
The SACP rejects agendas that use the green transition to privatise energy generation, commodify it and turn it into a field for private wealth accumulation. Public ownership must be the mainstay of the public pathway to a green energy future. This must be accompanied by the protection of workers, the creation of new productive opportunities and a genuine just transition that does not sacrifice workers and communities in the name of environmental sustainability.
The diversification of public electricity generation capacity must also include establishing and expanding public entities involved in manufacturing electricity generation, transmission and distribution network components. South Africa must not remain dependent on imported technologies, equipment and procurement while possessing the resources and capabilities to build domestic publicly owned industrial capacity. Public investment in these strategic industries can strengthen industrialisation, expand productive capacity, advance technological development and support the right of all to work through the creation of socially useful and sustainable productive activity. In the here and now, local content requirements must be adopted and enforced.
Land, homes and food for the people
Land must serve life. It cannot be accepted that people remain landless, homeless and food insecure while vast resources remain concentrated in a few hands or are treated primarily as instruments of private accumulation. If South Africa indeed belongs to all who live in it, black and white, as the Freedom Charter and the Constitution declare, then, as the Freedom Charter states, land must be redivided and, as the Constitution states, towards equitable access for all. This must benefit housing, food production, co-operatives, schools, clinics and community facilities. The redistribution of land remains an essential requirement for overcoming the legacy of colonialism and apartheid and advancing social justice.
Safe communities and human dignity
Every person has the right to live, travel and return home safely. Working-class communities bear the heaviest burden of crime, gender-based violence, substance abuse and social instability. Safety cannot be reduced to private security for those who can afford it. Safety requires effective public institutions, well-resourced law enforcement authorities, organised communities, youth development, functioning criminal justice systems, and programmes that tackle unemployment, poverty and inequality. We reaffirm our commitment to the struggle against gender-based violence and femicide and call for sustained action and accountability.
End corruption and tenderisation
Corruption steals from the people. Every stolen rand is a stolen clinic, a stolen classroom, a stolen road repair, a stolen water connection and a stolen opportunity for development. The SACP demands and will struggle to achieve full transparency, community oversight, protection for whistle-blowers, recovery of stolen resources and decisive action against corruption. Public institutions must serve society and not become instruments for private enrichment.
People must govern
Democracy must not end on election day. Communities must actively participate in decisions affecting their lives. Councillors must account regularly to residents, seek mandates, report back and remain subject to democratic accountability. Participatory planning, participatory budgeting and organised community power are essential components of democratic governance. The people must govern not only through voting in elections but through continuous participation in public affairs, which must be anchored in democratic policymaking.
Defend democracy from capitalist capture
The democratic breakthrough of 1994 was a historic victory won through struggle and sacrifice. Yet political democracy remains vulnerable when economic power remains concentrated in the hands of a small capitalist class. While every political party, including the SACP, has the democratic right to contest elections, we must be honest about the reality that confronts us. Through millions of rands in party-political funding, dominant sections of capital finance right-wing forces and other parties committed to policies that use public power to advance private wealth accumulation.
In form, it is those political parties that contest elections, showered with millions of rands in “donations” by the dominant sections of the capitalist class. In substance, however, it is the dominant sections of the capitalist class, using wealth appropriated from the labour of the working class through exploitation, that actively enter the electoral arena through those parties. It is on the basis of the financialisation and monetisation of elections that bourgeois and other uncritical commentators assess the visibility and supposed strength of political parties, measuring them by the quantity of posters, printed campaign material, billboards and paid advertising across radio, television and digital platforms. In doing so, they often overlook the underlying class reality that access to financial resources, rather than the political consciousness, organisation and mobilisation of the people, becomes the dominant measure of political influence.
This poses a serious challenge to democracy. When economic power based on the exploitation of the working class by the tiny minority of the capitalist class translates into disproportionate political influence, democracy risks being reduced from the Freedom Charter’s “The people shall govern” democracy to the rule of money, controlled by the tiny minority of the capitalist class. This undermines real democracy and becomes the dictatorship of that minority over the immense majority in class terms.
The result is pressure to convert popular democracy into bourgeois democracy, where formal political equality coexists with profound inequalities in economic and political funding and power. This is a matter that the working class must confront openly and discuss thoroughly going forward. The struggle for democracy cannot be separated from the struggle against the concentration of economic power and economic exploitation. Political democracy must be deepened with economic democracy, fairness and social justice, organised people’s power and the growing influence of the working class in determining the direction of society.
A people’s economy
The economic crisis confronting South Africa is not an accident of history. It is the outcome of political and class choices. It is an outcome of the endemic crisis of capitalism.
The neo-liberal programme, including austerity, liberalisation, deregulation and the opening of strategic public sectors to private wealth accumulation, has failed to resolve unemployment, poverty and inequality. Together with associated corruption, concentrated in procurement, tenderisation and tenders, it has weakened public capacity while strengthening monopoly capital. The SACP rejects this trajectory.
We stand for a developmental state, industrialisation, public ownership of strategic sectors, democratic control of infrastructure and a people-centred economy directed towards meeting social needs.
Here the question of elections finds one of the underlying layers of the foundation on which the battle of democracy takes place. The elections we are contesting are fundamentally in class terms between capitalist greed and the crisis it inherently generates as its tendency on the one hand, and public ownership, ownership by the people as a whole to meet their needs and social justice on the other.
Build working-class power
None of these objectives will be realised automatically. Throughout history, progress has been won through organisation and struggle. In the final analysis, power is decisive. This is why the SACP makes no apology for mobilising to build independent working-class power in communities, workplaces, co-operatives, mass organisations, elected institutions and every other front of struggle and exercise of power. We seek not merely working-class representation in numbers or quantity but in quality, that is, in content and transformation.
Do not give your power away but be part of it through the SACP and its programme and campaigns. The SACP has a better and working plan, including the People’s Red Caravan. This has demonstrated its capacity without political office even.
Response to the Medium-Term Budget Policy Statement
Following the tabling of the Medium-Term Budget Policy Statement by the National Treasury in Parliament each year, typically in October or November, we issue our initial response. We did so on Friday, responding to the 2026 Medium-Term Budget Policy Statement tabled on Wednesday. The Political Bureau and the Central Committee build on the initial response when they convene. This year will be no exception. We do not issue these statements for the sake of commentary.
We do so to guide immediate, medium-term and long-term mobilisation towards policy change, which evidence convinces us is the only way to solve the problems facing the majority of our people, including the working class, employed and unemployed, and sections of peasants and the middle class negatively affected by the dominant yet failing policy paradigm. To emphasise, in the final analysis, power is the decisive factor. That is why, to reiterate, we make no apologies for mobilising to build independent working-class power on all fronts of the struggle and in the key centres where society’s power is consolidated, institutionalised and exercised.
The 2026 Medium-Term Budget Policy Statement confirms that the National Treasury remains trapped in the failed neo-liberal paradigm that has characterised economic policy for three decades. While the Treasury celebrates fiscal consolidation, primary surpluses and debt stabilisation, 13.1 million people in our country remain unemployed, impoverished and excluded from ownership and control of the means and ends of production.
According to Statistics South Africa’s “Poverty Trends in South Africa: An Examination of Absolute Poverty Between 2006 and 2023”, based on data from the “Income and Expenditure Survey 2022/23”, also conducted by Stats SA, approximately 41.5 million South Africans lived below the Upper-Bound Poverty Line, 23.5 million below the Lower-Bound Poverty Line and 13.5 million below the Food Poverty Line in 2023. Using Stats SA’s rebased 2025 poverty thresholds, these poverty lines correspond to monthly incomes of R2,846, R1,415 and R855 per person, respectively.
The continued restraint of public expenditure in the midst of a deep unemployment and poverty crises is austerity by another name. It sacrifices industrialisation, associated employment creation and social development in pursuit of fiscal targets, increasingly using rising debt-service costs to justify the restraint or budget cuts even though the Treasury’s shift towards reliance on foreign currency-denominated borrowing has itself contributed to inflating those costs. The working class cannot eat fiscal consolidation, nor can the unemployed find work and associated income security in budget surpluses.
The shift towards reliance on foreign currency-denominated debt must be reversed in favour of rand-denominated bonds to mitigate the adverse effects of currency depreciation and restore greater control over interest-rate determination. Borrowing is not, in itself, a harmful practice. What matters is how borrowed resources are used. They must be deployed strategically to drive industrialisation, expand total productive capacity and achieve maximum sustainable employment, with the realisation of the right of all to work serving as a central objective of fiscal, monetary and trade policy.
Corruption, through which borrowed funds and resources from other sources of public revenue are stolen or squandered through fruitless and wasteful expenditure, must be dealt a decisive blow. This is not, however, a historical mission that can be accomplished by those who have been captured by the liberal and neo-liberal ideology of using public power to advance private interests.
Not only have some of them, through mere rhetoric, previously committed themselves to in-sourcing unnecessarily outsourced public functions while failing to do so in practice, but they are also actively advancing the opening up of public infrastructure, sectors and functions that were previously wholly under state ownership, control and operations to private wealth-accumulation interests. This includes the transfer, and therefore the privatisation, of associated productive and other value-generating operations within these networks, such as electricity generation, rail freight operations, passenger rail services and ports operations, to private wealth-accumulation interests that stand to benefit from them.
Under the guise of structural reform, electricity generation and transmission, rail operations, ports and other key economic functions are increasingly being reorganised to privilege profit-seeking interests rather than developmental objectives. Industrialisation receives no meaningful impetus, despite South Africa facing a persistent wave of de-industrialisation and crisis of mass unemployment. To reiterate our position, SACP rejects this trajectory.
South Africa needs a developmental path based on developmental public ownership, democratic control, large-scale industrialisation, including a vibrant co-operatives sector, across the economy, employment creation and social investment. The right of all to work, the Freedom Charter’s vision that the people shall share in the country’s wealth, including through ownership of monopoly industries by the people as a whole, and the imperative to place the economy at the service of the people must take precedence over austerity, outsourcing, privatisation and market-driven restructuring.
As things stand, the growth projections contained in the Medium-Term Budget Policy Statement, 1.2 per cent for 2026, down from 1.6 per cent projected in February, 1.6 per cent for 2027, and only a gradual rise to 2 per cent by 2029, together with the capitalist character of this growth path, will not overcome the crises of high unemployment, high poverty and high inequality confronting millions of our people.
The neo-liberal reform agenda was promoted on the promise of annual growth of around 3 per cent, a rate itself insufficient to overcome the crises. Today, however, even that limited, miscalculated promise has collapsed, with the National Treasury effectively admitting through its own projections that the country will remain trapped on a path of stagnation while doing nothing to change course but persisting with the very same or more of the same policy thinking that produced this outcome.
For the record, the SACP stands firmly opposed to the neo-liberal structural reforms agenda and will continue to mobilise the working class against its implementation and consequences.
International solidarity
The SACP reaffirms its unwavering solidarity with all peoples resisting imperialism, occupation, domination and aggression.
We stand with the people of Palestine, Western Sahara, Sudan, Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, Yemen, Kurdistan, Lebanon, Swaziland and all oppressed peoples struggling for self-determination, sovereignty, peace and justice. The struggle against exploitation and oppression is international. The cause of working people everywhere is one.
We strongly condemn the genocide perpetrated against the Palestinian people by the apartheid Israeli settler regime and the political, military and diplomatic support it receives from the United States. Equally, we condemn the blockades, illegal, unilateral sanctions and regime-change interventions imposed by the imperialist United States and its allies against sovereign nations, together with the plunder of their resources and wealth.
We strongly condemn any military attack that the imperialist regime of the United States may be planning against Cuba. The SACP calls on the world democratic people to take a firm stance and practical action to stop the imperialist regime of the United States from attacking Cuba and other nations, and to intensify the struggle to end the entire system of imperialism.
Today, more than ever, we reaffirm the historic call: Workers of the world, unite. The international working class must strengthen its solidarity and common struggle against imperialism, exploitation, war, occupation and all forms of oppression.
We reiterate our condemnation of the racist fabrication of a non-existent “white genocide” in South Africa by the president of the imperialist United States. This fabrication serves reactionary purposes, including support for Israel in the genocide case. It is part of a broader agenda to pressure South Africa, undermine and usurp our sovereignty, and subordinate our country to foreign and domestic policy directions set by the United States.
Call to action towards, on 4 November and beyond
Let us pull all the stops to intensify what we are introducing in our country’s elections: a Vote SACP Campaign with and for the working class. This is essential to reaffirm the connection between the national democratic revolution and socialism in elections as a front of struggle. The absence of the campaign to advance, deepen and defend this revolutionary connection in elections has proven to be a great disadvantage for the working class.
By asserting the SACP’s independence, we are addressing that exclusion, in favour of building working class power and transforming it into the working class organised as the state to become and act as the ruling class.
Our campaign is not a narrow party-political electoralist campaign. It is part of the broader political struggle. Elections are a front we are now using actively, independently and directly to take forward the class struggle.
Let us go all out on 4 November to Vote SACP and its candidates, who include a significant number of community candidates who are not SACP members but accept its campaign and leadership in the struggle, thus building their firm connection with socialism. This campaign belongs to the people, and the SACP is acting as their organisational and political vehicle.
Over and above that, the SACP has developed a deployment and accountability framework, with, at its centre, service to communities as a key performance area. All our candidates accept this unconditionally. This is principle, not the opportunism that has engendered the corruption that has become synonymous with the conduct of organisational affairs in some organisations and governance by their unscrupulous representatives.
Forward to people’s power! Down with capitalist greed! Down with the exploitative capitalist system! Forward to the victory of a genuine national democratic revolution. Forward to socialism!
ISSUED BY THE SOUTH AFRICAN COMMUNIST PARTY
FOUNDED IN 1921 AS THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF SOUTH AFRICA.
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