Tribute to Comrade Sechaba Aloys Cosmas "Charles" Setsubi, A fine revolutionary; People`s liberation soldier, Commissar par excellence, Communist to the end!
Delivered at the funeral service of Cde Sechaba "Charles" Setsubi by Cde Blade Nzimande, SACP General Secretary
24 March 2018, Ekurhuleni
On behalf of the South Africa Communist Party (SACP), I would like to express our heartfelt condolences to the Setsubi family for the mountainous loss the family has encountered. While we have all lost, there can be no dispute that the departure of Comrade Sechaba Setsubi from the world of the living is weighing heavier on the family than on all of us combined.
In the SACP we have lost a Communist, one of the most outstanding and dedicated cadre, whose whole lifetime at least from the age of 22 has been life in the revolution. Comrade Charles, as he was fondly known within the ranks of our people`s liberation army, the joint SACP and African National Congress (ANC) military formation, uMkhonto weSizwe (MK), and the entire liberation Alliance and formations of the Mass Democratic Movement, was a full-time professional revolutionary, a vanguard cadre of note, yet and unsung hero.
Comrade Charles carried the flag of the Party right to the end of his day.
He was among those to who subordinated everything - their time and energy - to the cause of our struggle for liberation and complete social emancipation, to the national democratic revolution and the struggle for socialism. Indeed he was one of the finest revolutionaries.
Always combat ready
Comrade Charles is one of many comrades of his generation who was always available when the revolution calls.
When our broad movement suffered serious setbacks during the 1960s and called for rebuilding of its underground network and comrades to swell the ranks of the MK, the call found in Comrade Charles a cadre ready to abandon everything for the cause of the revolution. He joined the underground network of our struggle, and because he was prepared to pay a high price of his own life for the liberation and social emancipation of our people, he also joined the ranks of the MK and dedicated his attention to its operations since the 1970s.
The day he left for exile, 2 August 1975, after completing his Senior Teacher`s Diploma at Fort Hare University and teaching for at least three years from 1972, was the day his second daughter, Moelo, was born. That was Comrade Charles. He understood that a better future for Moelo, for all his children, for his entire family, depended on a free South Africa, where the state is not used as an instrument of oppression by the minority over the majority, exploitation of workers by capitalist bosses, and domination of females by males. He fought for that future with an outstanding dedication and a resolute degree of dedication!
Comrade Charles made himself available when our movement needed a political core of MK officers to be highly trained in political and ideological work and perform such work among its growing number of cadres in exile from and after 1976. This is the work he continued to perform with excellence after returning home from exile.
Our struggle is a class, national and gender struggle, but the role played by individual cadres such as Comrade Charles with immense sacrifice must not go unnoticed. It is because of that role, played within the context of collective leadership and properly guided division of work that we finally achieved our democratic breakthrough in 1994.
Political education and Party Building
Consistent and organised political education is an ongoing revolutionary task. By fulfilling this task Comrade Charles helped build a growing SACP, the second largest political formation in South Africa by audited membership, the second oldest political organisation in South Africa after the ANC, the oldest Communist Party on the African Continent.
His contribution helped the SACP built political confidence within the ranks of the working class, particularly among the young people as reflected by their growing number joining the ranks of the Party. His educational attainments, a Senior Teacher`s Diploma, an Advanced Diploma in Education, a Master of in Education, a Master of Arts in Political Science and a Programme in Civil Management, and for that matter all of them acquired by the people`s soldier during a heated line of duty, should serve as an inspiration to the youth.
Our Party is poorer without Comrade Charles, an anti-colonial, anti-apartheid, anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist, advanced and resolute cadre, an unsung hero of our struggle for democracy and its highest form - socialism. As result of his contribution, hundreds of thousands of activists have been attracted to a Marxist-Leninist inquiry into society and revolutionary theory to change the world through properly guided action on all fronts - in the workplaces, the communities, in the state, on international front, and in the battle of ideas.
To the militant youth in the Young Communist League, to the generations and veterans of the MK, to all SACP cadres and class conscious workers, the SACP says:
Let the revolutionary memory of Comrade Charles Setsubi always be a living example, an inspiration of Communist dedication, political education and self-discipline.
Revolutionary moral high ground
In his political education work amongst organised workers and the youth, Comrade Charles always asked the question: "What do we mean by a revolutionary today?" He will remind us that: There can be no revolution without revolutionaries, that to be a revolutionary is to be involved in making a revolution happen, that this requires revolutionary - without which there can be no revolutionary movement.
In other occasions he expanded on this same theme, recalling what Comrade Chris Hani, who he worked closely with in the 1980s, said in 1986, that "revolutionaries are special; they are patriots and committed people. They are committed to transformation of the country and the building of a new life. In order to justify confidence people are placing on our shoulders we have to get rid of the inherit habits we have acquired from the system of apartheid."
He will emphasise the importance of revolutionary morality. A revolution requires a revolutionary moral high ground second to none in order to defeat oppression, exploitation, domination and counterrevolution. This is what we need in order to dismantle and finish off the parasitic networks of corporate capture both of our state and sections of our movement.
The SACP called for, and welcomes the increasingly visible, action against those implicated in acts of pervasion within our state, in corporate state capture and other forms of corruption and wrongdoing. Now fugitives are on the run. Law enforcement authorities must hunt them down wherever they vanished to. Their collaborators must be pursued with the same strength of the law and both must be brought to book. Those refusing to appear before Parliamentary inquiries into governance decay must be subpoenaed. No stone must be left unturned. In memory of Comrade Charles, the SACP will deepen its programme of mobilisation against the rot that drove our country to the brink of overall collapse. Already major state owned entities and agencies had been hollowed out. They were looted and corruption had become endemic.
It was the SACP - with Comrade Charles in its Central Committee and Political Bureau - that exposed the existence of corporate state capture, expressing its deep concern about the corruption. The words "corporate `state capture`" characterising the endemic corruption and abuse of authority that had gained control of the commanding heights of our state, were brought to the centre stage of our national discourse by the vanguard role played by the SACP to expose, fight and mobilise against the rot. The SACP carried out this work consistently, despite internal opposition from some quarters within the ranks of our own movement dismissing the existence of corporate capture both in the state and within the ranks of the movement. The efforts of the Party, within Comrade Charles in its leadership, led to South Africans in their majority, and from all walks of life, accepting and using, and many in their own ways, the terminology to describe the rot and to join the struggle to stop it.
In memory of Comrade Charles, the SACP will deepen the struggle to dismantle parasitic networks of corporate capture, associated forms of patronage and their entire web of factionalism. In the course of this struggle, the SACP will continue forging a patriotic front to defend our Constitution and deepen our democracy.
The struggle to move our democratic transition from our country`s colonial and apartheid past and its persisting legacy, to a complete South African freedom without racism and sexism; to a future without the exploitation of one person or social group by another; a future without class, race and gender inequality, unemployment, poverty and social insecurity; a future without imperialist domination, a future that Comrade Charles dedicated his entire revolutionary life to achieve, requires unity of purpose. To this end, in memory of Comrade Charles, the SACP will proceed with, and deepen, its efforts to build a popular left front.
In the same vein, the SACP will continue engaging with its allies to reconfigure the Alliance. When we call for democratic consensus seeking consultation within the Alliance, it is not because we are folding our arms and waiting to be consulted. If we were folding our arms and waiting to be consulted, the corporate capture agenda would have succeeded to sink our country. If we were folding our arms and waiting to be consulted, we would not have been the first within our Alliance to call for and mobilise for the removal former President Jacob Zuma from office. If we were folding our arms and waiting to be consulted, the reaction against our mobilisation against corporate state capture and for the removal of the former President would have succeed.
Our call for democratic consensus seeking consultation within the Alliance is guided by the revolutionary principles of collective leadership and accountability. The national democratic revolution is not a one party agenda. It is our shared programme, the foundation of our principled and programmatic unity! Verbal in words is not enough. The Alliance needs visible unity in collective leadership action. The Alliance must function, as agreed in May 2008 in its National Summit Declaration, as the political centre - both in theory and practice. The SACP welcomes the new signs of consultation that visibly emerged after the recent political changes. The whole Alliance, and across all levels, must deepen these encouraging signs into its operating system.
The internationalist of note
Our struggle for liberation and social emancipation is by its character an international struggle. It is a struggle against the world system of economic exploitation and imperialist domination, a system that assimilates national characteristics and manifests itself in every country according to its historical conditions. This is the system that produced colonialism and apartheid.
To list the countries that Comrade Charles crisscrossed in the struggle against colonial oppression and its apartheid rule in South Africa; to list the struggles of the people of other countries for justice, peace and freedom in which he actively expressed our solidarity, would be to risk excluding some of the many important roles he played in his revolutionary life.
The SACP will deepen the internationalist character of its programme, including solidarity work, in honour of this profound internationalist, Comrade Charles.
