Human solidarity and value of life: SACP General Secretary Dr Blade Nzimande

13 April 2020

It would not be inappropriate to characterise the novel coronavirus (Covid-19) as the most immediate threat to the consolidation and advance of the national democratic revolution, our democratic transition. Covid-19 is indeed a threat that will test our revolution and its resilience on a number of fronts and at different levels. For us to defeat the scourge of the virus need maximum possible unity, in the first instance, within our movement. Most importantly, we need to forge widest possible national unity, perhaps unseen in the recent history of our country, if ever. Unless our movement is itself united, it would be incapable of leading the effort of uniting widest possible sectors of the South African society. The ongoing Alliance engagement is therefore very important.

President Cyril Ramaphosa has played a hugely important role in leading the country in what so far has been one of its most difficult periods since our radical democratic breakthrough of 1994. However, the ability of government to hold the country together must be buttressed by the unity of our movement as a whole. Besides some minor factionalist sniping on social media, there has been an important display of unity in our movement. This, the unity, we have to build upon moving forward and beyond Covid-19. 

As the saying goes, every cloud has its silver lining.

Never in the history of the post-1994 South Africa did our government manage to communicate so consistently and directly with our people. The media itself, maybe out of having no other choice, has fairly carried the message in a much more direct manner, with hardly any ‘independent’ political analysts or opportunistic posturing by sections of the opposition.

Complicating the challenges of the period is that we are now faced with the now deeply interrelated and interlinked challenges of Covid-19 and the economic crisis in Southern Africa. In South Africa the economic crisis that the Covid-19 pandemic found underway took the form of a technical recession in the context of a long period of stagnation and persistently high rates of unemployment, inequality and poverty.

Moreover, and as a direct result of economic crisis, Covid-19 found Southern Africa in a deep crisis of social reproduction – increasing inability of families and whole communities to make ends meet or feed themselves. Some of the worst features and manifestation of social reproduction crisis, like gender-based violence, are being worsened by their perpetrators opportunistically within the framework of the very measures aimed at combating Covid-19, like the current nationwide lockdown in South Africa.

It is also not unthinkable that one of the unintended consequences of the lockdown may be a dramatic increase in incidents of sexual abuse and unplanned, including unwanted, pregnancies. These type indicators might likely worsen, with possibly higher rates of unemployment. In addition, it is true that there will likely be significant differences between the pre- and post-Covid-19, and that is certain aspects what has been an extremely bad socio-economic situation might worsen.

Our approach to the challenges facing our revolution, and especially the role of the SACP, remains as valid, that neither the state capture networks nor a neoliberal regime of measures will solve that we are faced with as a our country. It is clear to us that unless we are absolutely vigilant, the very necessary measures needed for disaster management, might be used for corrupt ends by certain sections of society. This does not only refer to corruption, and within government – but also in the private sector. It includes price gouging by supermarkets and shops. We must not lower our guard in the struggle against corruption.

At the same time, we must mobilise the widest possible sections of the workers and poor of our country to emphatically reject any attempts by those seeking to push neoliberal policies at exploiting this current crisis in order to achieve their ends. Temptations to subvert our policy and democratic national sovereignty to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) or World Bank whatsoever must both be avoided and rejected.

If anything, this period requires, in earnest, a second radical phase of our transition characterised by radical structural transformation of or economy with determined state interventions to systematically eliminate stubborn colonial features persistent in our economy. Neoliberal measures can only sink our country further into an economic abyss, as these would seek to place the burden of Covid-19 and the economic crisis on the shoulders of the workers and the poor.

Surely it cannot be that whilst a country like Spain has taken over public hospitals, and in the United Kingdom the state has taken over the train systems, and with the United States having inadequate Covid-19 testing kits as the private sector is failing that country, that in South Africa we can even dream of placing our hope on the capitalist market to rescue us from the interlinked challenges of economic crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic.

Necessity for human solidarity

As we are facing now an extended lockdown in South Africa and the Covid-19 pandemic across the world, we as people are showing both our good points and our bad points.

A South African woman chose to stay in China, rather than risk contracting virus on the way and bringing it home to a country less well equipped to deal with it than she estimated China to be.

A tourist family visiting this country had to be compelled by a court of law to be tested and quarantined.

Cuban doctors, despite personal anxiety, have travelled across the world in an act of solidarity with the Italian people.

Health workers continue to risk exposure to covid-19 to save the lives of others.

Some employers are not providing personal protective equipment to their workers. Others are forcing workers to use their leave days, while some are fraudulently claiming to be providing essential services in order to continue to generating profit for self-enrichment.

The disregard on Day Zero of the lockdown by many taverns, the middle class enthusiasm for dog walking and jogging despite the need for the nationwide lockdown, the mass exit to provinces on crowded public transport, the extent of some people approaching the lockdown as a joke that does not affect them, and the disregard of the confinement to our homes will ultimately kill many people if these behaviours continue and prevent us from flattening the curve.

As we start the third week of the lockdown, we already have 25 deaths attributed to Covid-19. Our numbers of confirmed infected people have just exceeded 2 100. As the Minister of Health Dr Zweli Mkhize has explained, these figures will more likely continue to increase, but we must flatten the rate at which they are increasing.

Fighting a pandemic, like fighting against devastating floods, tsunami’s, earthquakes, requires a number of layers of solidarity – at inter-country level, at government and social partner level, and down to person to person solidarity. The SACP calls on all of us, no matter how difficult this time could be, to find our ways of acting in solidarity with others and against Covid-19.

Every act to comply with the lockdown regulations, much as they are difficult and feel extreme, is in itself an act of solidarity. In a state of national disaster, laws, policies, and regulations are designed by experts to provide for the maximum good to the maximum number of people under difficult conditions. This involves each of us not being allowed to do things that we like to do.

The directions and regulations that have been issued are hard on all of us, necessary as they are in the fight against Covid-19. But they pose particular and almost unbearable challenges to people living in working class human settlements. The requirements to wash hands with soap and water, to keep physical (‘social’) distancing, to buy essential groceries as infrequently as possible, have brought to the fore the gross inequality in living conditions between the wealthy and the working class in our country.

The SACP calls on the working people of this country, the workers and the urban and rural poor, to approach the difficult conditions with all of the ubuntu/botho and humanity that our cultures give us. Government is putting in place emergency steps to redress some of these challenges. We all feel that this may be too little too late. But at this time, we need to meet each other in a spirit of collaboration and survival. 

Ubuntu is under an extreme test in this lockdown period. It is a time in which we as individuals, as families, as communities, as workplaces, and as a nation, will learn about our choices in life and their consequences. Now is the time in which we show our true colours and our character as South Africans. Can we come out of lockdown with the ability as people and nation to be responsible, law abiding, socially conscious, and driven by solidarity?

In order to address the inequality that makes this pandemic so dangerous for working class families and communities, who face this in crowded shacks and houses, without running water, without the money to buy food to cover the 21 days, we will need a real national effort to build the kind of society that our fore-parents shaped for us in the Freedom Charter.

We have a rich history of ordinary people mobilising in response to the calls of ANC exile and underground leadership. Now is a time for the manner in which we as ordinary South Africans heeded the clarion calls of our leadership during the liberation struggle must be re-established in our families, our communities, our organisations, our nation. 

Let us remind ourselves that we are engaged in a national democratic revolution, an ongoing process of struggle, transformation and development. At all times our actions and attitudes should be informed by what is necessary to remove the inequality that is so prevalent in every aspect of societal life, and to put in place economic and social and political systems and measures that promote the quality of life and quality of contribution of the majority of our people. The democratic transition requires every person to buy into making a contribution and possibly sacrifice for equality and quality of life for the majority. This call should be made a thousand times louder and stronger in this time of the devastating Covid-19 pandemic.

Comrades and friends, the Covid-19 pandemic will be defeated and defeated more effectively and more speedily if we as individuals rise to the expectations of necessary social activism and comply with what is required of us. After the Covid-19 pandemic has been brought under control, the infection rate slowed down, we will need to refocus the priorities of the national democratic revolution on addressing inequality and lack of access to essential social services and adequate planning and human settlement infrastructure.

We will need to increase the pace of democratic transformation to wipe out the excluding and marginalising structures, relations and systems. Interventions adopted now should actually lay the basis for a rapid advance of this transformation process. The post-Covid-19 society must be characterised by the strongest sense of social justice.  This is what it means to be human and a citizen of a nation, Southern African region, a continent and a planet.

Cde Blade Nzimande is SACP General Secretary and issued this statement on behalf of the Party. The statement was first published by Umsebenzi Online, Vol. 19, No. 11, 13 April 2020