Red Alert: Reconfiguration from below: SACP takes responsibility, builds democratic popular power, contests elections in Metsimaholo
The SACP is actively contesting the municipal elections, in Metsimaholo Municipality in the Free State Province, for the first time since our 1994 democratic breakthrough. In the past, the SACP actively participated and campaigned in successive elections within the ANC-led alliance. The expectation has always been that the ANC-led government would use popular power to address the pressing challenges of inequality, unemployment and poverty by driving a radical phase of our national democratic revolution. However, in the Free State, more and more peripheral issues took the centre stage. Factional politics took the centre stage instead of progress on critical issues.
The ANC-led Metsimaholo municipal government dismissed 320 municipal workers, for political reasons. This took place following a SAMWU-led municipal strike declared to push legitimate worker demands. All these workers went for 9 months without work or pay, putting an unbearable strain on many families within the community. Workers’ efforts to be reinstated were undermined, until the SACP agreed to challenge the anti-worker and other anti-people tendencies through the ballot.
The suppression of workers and neglect of services, as well as disregard for democratic processes, have become the norm facing the people. These realities have led to calls by the community and workers for the SACP to contest the upcoming 29 November 2017 municipal elections. The municipal coalition government has subordinated community interests to narrow party political interests following the displacement of the ANC as the governing party. This added to the calls for the SACP to contest the elections.
Given the conditions prevailing in Metsimaholo, and the strong presence of the SACP in the area due to its independent campaigning and political work, the Party had to consider these legitimate calls and demands by the working class and our communities to stand for the elections and defend, advance and deepen a radical, second phase, of the national democratic revolution.