SOUTH AFRICAN COMMUNIST PARTY

Political Bureau statement, 13 May 2017

SACP calls for decisive action to reverse irregular re-appointment ‎of former Eskom CEO Brian Molefe and bring an end to a reckless, parasitic network within government...

The SACP Political Bureau met on Friday, 12 May in Johannesburg in an ordinary session. The Politburo noted with deep concern the growing evidence of a reckless, parasitic network within government and within the ANC that operates outside of any collective discipline of either cabinet, or of the ANC’s National Executive Committee and other constitutional structures. What is more, this network appears to enjoy the support, tacit or otherwise, of President Jacob Zuma himself.

Hardly a week goes by without further evidence of structures gone rogue. In the past week Northern Cape Premier Sylvia Lucas fired members of the provincial government's executive council in a blatant (and futile) effort to influence the outcome of the ANC’s Northern Cape conference.

In the same week, having correctly stepped in to stop Eskom’s outrageous plan to gift former CEO Brian Molefe a R30-million pay-out package, Lynne Brown, the Minister of Public Enterprises inexplicably did a U-turn and announced that it made “fiscal sense” to irregularly re-appoint Molefe as Eskom CEO. 

Molefe was hurriedly smuggled into Parliament a few months ago with the clear intention of making him Finance Minister. When this failed thanks to robust opposition from the SACP amongst others, Molefe is now to be returned to a position which he disgraced in the first place. The dark cloud of the highly suspect Gupta Tegeta coal deal still hangs over him.

The original intention to controversially deploy Molefe as Finance Minister was surely to drive a nuclear deal that our country neither needs nor can afford. Back at Eskom he will still pursue that same ruinous agenda.

This is the context in which we once more re-assert the call, originally made by the SACP, for a Judicial Commission of Inquiry into corporate state capture. This was the principal (and mandatory, subject to legal challenge) remedial action recommended by the former Public Protector’s “State of Capture Report”.

At least one prominent constitutional expert has argued that given the fact that President Zuma is deeply conflicted in the matter, with one of his sons featuring prominently in the Tegeta matter, an alternative approach to appointing such a Commission must be considered. The lawyer argued that the Constitution provides for the Deputy President to appoint a Judicial Commission Inquiry in cases where the President is unable to. This is surely an angle that must be considered by the ANC.

The SACP commends the ANC for formally condemning both the actions of Premier Lucas and Minister Brown. But the ANC needs to take matters further, as a governing party. The ANC’s major partners the SACP and COSATU have called on President Zuma to step down – in the interests of the ANC itself, of our movement, and indeed of our country and our hard-won democracy. President Zuma has said he will not go unless asked to do so by the ANC. The ANC NEC needs to convene as soon as possible to address the challenge that the ANC, and by extension all South Africans, now confront.

The SACP re-affirmed the Party’s decades-long commitment to a radical national democratic revolution which deals, amongst other things, with the extraordinary high levels of monopoly concentration in our economy, and the doleful legacy of a colonial and apartheid past that continues to reproduce crisis levels of black poverty and unemployment, along with racialised inequality. It is precisely for this reason that we reject the false “radicalism” of those whose intention is radical looting.

We cannot deal with the skewed, racialised and monopolised realities of our society if public resources in Eskom, Transnet, Prasa, Denel, the social grant system, and the PIC are looted by a parasitic elite. The first step in advancing a second, more radical phase, of our national democratic revolution, including real radical economic transformation, is, therefore, dealing decisively with parasitic state capture.

Statement issued by the SACP, 13 May 2017