YCLSA statement on the dropping of charges against the Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan

31 October 2016

The Young Communist League of South Africa [Ufasimba] [YCLSA] notes and welcomes the decision by the National Director of Public Prosecutions to instruct the NPA to withdraw charges against the Minister of Finance, Pravin Gordhan. As we have been saying, the charges were in the first place politically motivated and therefore ludicrous. They were in no way going to hold water.

The YCLSA has always held a view that state institutions must not be used to settle political scores. When the current President of the Republic, Jacob “Gadl’eyihlekisa” Zuma, was politically persecuted and state institutions brutally unleashed against him, we vociferously raised our voice against the abuse of state institutions for political ends as a matter of principle, not of political expediency.

It is therefore no new thing for the YCLSA to have raised its concerns around the charges against the Minister of Finance by the NPA. Even under President Zuma’s administration we still consistentl – without any fear of redistribution – reject the abuse of state institutions to settle political scores; neither do we, as the YCLSA, seek to immerse ourselves in the ongoing battles of the political elite, but rather we struggle to secure space for democratic organs to carry out their developmental tasks without any interference, lest they suffocate in the buffeting winds of uncertainty and directionless. 

As the YCLSA we are in no way having any special relationship with the Minister of Finance Pravin Gordhan, it is more about respecting the office of the National Treasury than about defending an individual. It is for this reason that the YCLSA has never and will never abandon its struggle for the transformation of the National Treasury from a neo-liberal make-up to a working-class friendly institution that jealously safeguards the sovereignty of the country.

It is also important to emphasize that, the responsibility of state institutions is to fulfill their developmental imperatives, and this is only possible when they possess relative autonomy from warring political elites ceaselessly waging political battles antithetical to the National Democratic objectives of a developing country such as South Africa.   

As a result of the sheer carelessness and inconsistency of the NPA, the YCLSA calls for the immediate resignation of the National Director of Public Prosecutions Shaun Abrahams. The South African public can no longer withstand such inconsistency and mediocrity. Upon his appointment as the NPA boss he promised the South African public that NDPP would be a professionally run institution, he said at that time "...the days of disrespecting the decisions of the NPA are over", yet throughout his tenure the opposite has been the case and the charges against the Minister of Finance were but a tip of an ice-berg hence YCLSA says the institutional rot must be nipped in the bud once and for all. 

Issued by Malaodi Wa Sekake, National Spokesperson, YCLSA, 31 October 2016