Editors Note
The SACP takes this opportunity to send greetings of the festive season to all our readers. We wish all our readers a happy festive season and a deserved rest.
We send this message just as our ally, the ANC, concludes its 53rd National Conference. We congratulate the ANC once more for holding a successful conference. We look forward to engage with policy outcomes from the conference.
What has been particularly disappointing for us has been the extent to which the South African media has lied with impunity in its coverage of the 53rd National Conference. This well orchestrated campaign we believe is with us till the 2014 General Elections.
The message is clear, don`t trust an ANC led by Zuma, thus effectively newsrooms have been turned into conveyor belts of the DA`s messages and innuendos. The Independent Group has been leading with spreading such lies. We hope the Gaye Davies resignation will unravel the extent of collusion and unethical conduct in various newsrooms. In fact we call upon experienced editors like Gaye Davies to tell all about some of these shenanigans in the newsrooms.
We wish the workers and the poor a deserved rest. Our activists must come back energized to continue the fight against the barbaric capitalist system.
This is our last edition of Umsebenzi On line for 2012. Publication will resume in January 2013.
SOCIALISM IS THE FUTURE!! BUILD IT NOW!!
SACP Message to the 53rd National Conference of the ANC delivered by SACP General Secretary, Cde Blade Nzimande
1.Let me start by once more congratulating the ANC on reaching the milestone of a hundred years in the same year as you reached a million members in membership. This is indeed no mean feat for any organization anywhere in the world today
2.Reaching a centenary and more than 1,1m members is not just a badge to be worn on the lapel, but brings with it additional responsibilities and challenges
3. It reaffirms the ANC as the largest political organization ever in the history of our country
4. But must remember that despite this the ANC has to earn its leadership daily through leading the mass of our people on the ground whilst at the same time leading government. Ours must be a combination of mass and state power to transform our country for the primary benefit of the workers and the poor.
The SACP fully supports the ANC`s organizational renewal programme. But in addition to consolidating organizational procedures and emphasizing political education, the SACP also believes that much greater emphasis needs to be placed on re-building a campaigning ANC and Alliance at the local level. We need ANC branches that are actively leading socials mass struggles on the ground and not just branches that meet for electoral or local government purposes.
We hope that this conference will discuss how we develop branch-level cadres who are community activists - active in SGBs, street committees, CPFs, co-ops, local sports and cultural activists, NGOs, including faith based formations and all local development initiatives. We dare not leave these important sites and arenas of struggle to opportunists, enemies and our detractors. This is how we build and reproduce real cadres and developmental activists, and this is how we build a campaigning ANC capable of being an organic strategic political centre in the full sense.
5.That is why out of this conference here are some of the things we expect as the SACP:
a.Reaffirmation of the conception of a second phase of our transition, principally marked by a more radical transformation of our economy to benefit the majority of our people. However, a second phase must embrace more than economic transformation, but to include deepening the struggle for a non-racial South Afica. This means, amongst others, that we must reaffirm the human dignity of all South Africans, in particular the African majority in our country.
As the SACP we are concerned that there are still too many racist violations and attacks on the majority of the African people - as domestic workers, as farm and factory workers. The second phase of our transition must also mean deepening the struggles for gender equality, especially the reaffirmation of working class and poor women. Our 50/50 policy shall remain meaningless unless the relations between men and women are radically transformed and there is palpable change for the better for the majority of the poor and working women of our country. National reconciliation rests on this, premised on a radical improvement on the socio-economic conditions of the majority of our people.
b.We are raising all these matters here because we believe it is only the ANC that is capable of leading this effort successfully, not the DA or any political formation in this country.
c.The organizational challenges confronting all our structures are not unrelated to two other critical considerations. The first is that of properly understanding the creeping counter-revolutionary threat to the deepening and consolidating our democracy. Such counter-revolutionary seeks to use the very same platforms we use to strengthen our democracy eg. The current court challenges to this conference is part of this offensive.
d.The other related challenge is that of dealing decisively with corruption as highlighted by both the President and the SG yesterday. It is the link between our political structures and potential they offer of access state power and positions that often pollutes our political structures themselves. This is why organizational renewal within the ANC (and indeed our Alliance formations) cannot be separated from the campaign to defeat the scourge of corruption.
6.That is why the SACP hopes is confident that this Conference will seriously consider, amongst other things, resolutions on the following:
a.That public representatives and all civil servants must not be involved in business actively. We are of the view that declarations of interests are not enough
b.To minimize tenders in the state by rebuilding the capacity of the state, including municipalities to perform services directly, whether it be clinics, public houses, cleaning, etc.
7.As the SACP we will continue to be a reliable and dependable ally of the ANC. Of course we are not the same organizations and now and again areas of disagreements will arise. We however commit to raise such issues with the ANC directly or within the structures of the alliance and not seek cheap publicity and to become media heroes by seeking to attack or discredit the ANC through the media. Genuine revolutionaries are not made by commercial media, but through principled struggle and defense of the liberation movement as a whole. Media heroes are not the same as people`s heroes.
8.In fact, if you notice media heroes are all those who have made it their past time to attack, ridicule or sought to present themselves as being above the ANC. That`s what independence has come to mean today. That is why every Tom Dick and Harry, including pseudo intellectuals and intellectual charlatans, who seek some publicity today must attack especially President Zuma, the ANC, the Alliance and government.
In fact the print media, with very few exceptions, has in the run up to this conference, attacked the ANC, its current leadership and the government it leads. Yet in Friday`s papers they all of a sudden pretend to be giving delegates to this Conference some seemingly sober advice. As the SACP we are tempted to say do not take this advice from the media as it is toxic and not good for the health of the ANC, our Alliance and indeed our revolution as a whole!
9.The SACP in July emerged out of a very successful congress. One of the key resolutions and commitments we made was that the working class, acting together with other progressive forces and the Alliance must take responsibility for the NDR. Taking responsibility for the revolution means taking responsibility for both the successes and setbacks of the revolution. To only take responsibility for successes and stand aside or even distance yourself from setbacks and challenges is not being a revolutionary, but it is sheer opportunism.
10. We wish you a successful Conference!!
Source: Umsebenzi Online, the weekly online journal of the SACP
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