The SACP condemns the Guptas newspaper’s toxic concoction
3 June 2016
The Party is holding a Central Committee meeting and will announce its outcome on Sunday at 12h30.
The Gupta mouthpiece, The New Age newspaper, has concocted a toxic gibberish in its Friday 3 June front page propaganda headlined “SACP ‘must self-correct’”. The New Age is obviously defending the brazen smash and grab accumulation agendas of the Guptas that the SACP robustly disagrees with and condemns in the strongest terms possible. The story by The New Age is unethical and contains violations of the ethics prescribed in the ‘Press Code of Professional Practice’.
The Code sets out the standards of good practice, and is categorical that the press must report news fairly, must be accurate, truthful and balanced. The New Age must retract the entire unethical content of the story. The SACP strictly reserves its rights in law; to deal with the matter should the Gupta newspaper remain intransigent and fail to retract such content.
In the story, The New Age claims that: “The SACP has registered its own candidates to contest the elections in the Eastern Cape’s Alfred Nzo district municipality. They went against our advice and refused to cooperate”. The newspaper attributes this gibberish to ANC Secretary-General Gwede Mantashe, who knows where to contact the SACP, how to engage with the Party including necessity of validating with it any information that comes to his attention concerning the SACP. The SACP outright dismisses the claim as a BIG LIE.
The Gupta newspaper should have contacted the SACP if it was interested in the truth and in offering readers fair and balanced news. The New Age did not so but instead chose to push the baseless allegation in violation of the ‘Press Code of Professional Practice’.
As the SACP we do not intent re-writing here all other malicious contents of the Gupta newspaper story. The New Age must follow the ‘Press Code of Professional Practice’ and retract all of them!
An attack on the SACP 2nd Deputy General Secretary Solly Mapaila is an attack on the Party – the SACP will not fold its arms on it.
The SACP wishes to put it in record that an attack on our 2nd Deputy General Secretary Solly Mapaila, who has consistently and correctly expressed the views of the Party on the behaviour of the Guptas, factionalism in our movement and the state, corruption and corporate capture, is an attack on the Party as a whole. There is nothing so-called populist and so-called opportunistic about the views expressed by Mapaila on the behalf of the SACP. Instead, he has been telling the truth as determined by the SACP and has the full backing of the Party. As the SACP, we will not back down!
The SACP started its Central Committee meeting today and will on Sunday 5 June announce the outcome on these and other issues characterising the political situation of South Africa!
The Political report going into minute details is scheduled to be presented by the General Secretary Dr Blade Nzimande by noon. The report will be discussed the whole day today, and tomorrow morning, given the density of its analysis on the challenges facing the SACP, our alliance and movement as a whole, the South African state and society in general, as well as the options available to the Party under the circumstances and going forward into the future.
Pravin Gordhan, the Minister of Finance and Andries Nel, the Deputy Minister for Cooperative Governance are among others scheduled to address the Central Committee in line with the SACP’s now firmly established culture of engaging with ministers and government officials in Central Committee Plenary Sessions on matters of governance.
Issued by Alex Mohubetswane Mashilo, National Spokesperson, Head of Communications, SACP, 3 June 2016
