Statement on the occasion of the Red October Rally, as delivered by SACP General Secretary, Cde Blade Nzimande, eMalahleni, Mpumalanga Province, 29 November 2015
South African Communist Party
Advance the second radical phase of our revolution:
Intensify the struggle for transformation of the financial sector and the media!
On 4 October we launched our Red October Campaign 2015-2016 at Lethabong outside Rustenburg in the Province of Moses Kotane. Comrade Moses Kotane was one of the great leaders of our liberation alliance and indeed of our own Party, the SACP. His remains, together with those of yet another great evolutionary leader of our liberation alliance and indeed also our Party, Comrade JB Marks, were repatriated from Russia early this year at the request of their families for reburial in their respective places of birth.
Both Kotane and Marks dedicated their lives to our struggle for political liberation and complete social emancipation, and were central in building our liberation alliance and its independent components – the ANC, the Communist Party and the progressive trade union movement. They died in the course of the struggle in exile, and were buried in the then Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (Soviet Union), in Moscow, Russia. Kotane and Marks therefore never lived to witness the dawn of our passage from apartheid in 1994 to our current democratic transition.
Our Red October Campaign is a critical platform to advance both the immediate and longer term interests of the working class. Our campaigning is a terrain to build momentum and elements of socialism in the here and now. Through our campaigns we must also consistently undertake a critique of capitalism and its evils. Through this campaign, our objectives are to intensify the Financial Sector Transformation Campaign and advance the rollout of our new Media Transformation Campaign – which we launched publicly on 4 October during the occasion of the launch of the current 2015-2016 Red October Campaign at Lethabong outside Rustenburg. Both these campaigns require a strong organisation on the ground and an ever expanding mobilisation of our people and their organised progressive formations, including the alliance.
Transform the Financial Sector and fight for the banks which will serve the people!
The SACP has for sometimes now been pushing through the Financial Sector Campaign Coalition for the convening of the Second Financial Sector Summit under the auspices of the National Economic and Labour Council (Nedlac). The First Financial Sector Summit was held more than a decade ago, in August 2002, convened under Nedlac as a multilateral social dialogue forum which brings together community, government, labour and business constituencies to approve social, economic and labour policies.
The 2002 Financial Sector Summit was itself a direct result of a call made to Nedlac by the SACP under the banner of the Financial Sector Campaign Coalition, then as a Campaign Forum to Make Banks Serve the People. Two years later, in January 2004, the Financial Sector Charter was adopted and came into effect as a direct result of the agreements reached at the summit.
Our call for the convening of the Second Financial Sector Summit is firstly based on the agreements reached at the First Financial Sector Summit in 2002. There must be an assessment on how far our country has progressed in implementing the agreements reached at that summit. We need a clear programme, emerging from the Second Financial Sector Summit, on expediting implementation on areas where it is lacking!
The second reason for our call for the convening of the Second Financial Sector Summit is that, as we all know, conditions are not static but dynamic and changing all the time. There are some achievements that emerged from the first summit in 2002 which were relatively advanced or reasonable under a set of circumstances that prevailed at that time. Today things have changed.
Some of the achievements or agreements reached in 2002 and associated advances such as the National Credit Act and the National Credit Regulator have been undermined by new methods of work being pursued by the financial sector among others through the phenomenon of financialisation which has since deepened. All the areas of weaknesses relating to our country’s financial system, including those contained in the 2002 Financial Sector Summit agreements must therefore be rectified!
For instance, recently the National Credit Regulator released a report that South Africa has reached its highest levels ever of impaired credit records. This is because of the drive to make profits at any cost by finance and financialised institutions, including through predatory and reckless lending practices.
It is estimated that there are 19 million credit active South Africans who have impaired credit records. More than 11 million South Africans were categorised as over-indebted. The loans and high interest rates that people owe means that they are working to pay banks, micro lenders and loan sharks more than they are working to look after themselves and their families and meet their basic needs.
As the SACP, we have made it clear and we want to reiterate that we are not opposed to credit to develop or expand production. Such a credit does not result in indebtedness and over-indebtedness. On the contrary, it creates a greater magnitude of value both to pay back the money and expand productive activity thus creating work to reduce unemployment, poverty and inequality. What we are opposed to as the SACP is the ideology of consumerist spending. This results in indebtedness and over-indebtedness because the financial sector and non-financial sector firms or corporations bombard people with credit through financialising the sale and purchase of virtually all products through credit.
The whole category of consumer products is now dominated by the phenomenon of financialisation through credit extension. Grocery, furniture, clothes, funeral products and services, cell phones and airtime, access to gym facilities, health care, and many more, have been converted into financialised products. There are basic products to which access is determined by, if not mediated through, credit only even if this is unnecessary. This because over and above making profit from the sale of the products concerned, more money is made through interest rates, admin fees, insurances on credit, and so on, based on and tied to the sale of those products.
Problems in the housing sector remain unresolved. On 4 October when we launched the 2016-2015 Red October Campaign it was estimated that around 10,000 homes were being repossessed by the banks annually in our country. This level of eviction can only be comparable to apartheid-era Group Areas removals. The homes are then sold at auction, very often at a fraction of their market value.
Equally important, if perhaps not more important, the third reason why we want the Second Financial Sector Summit is that the scope of the agreements emerging from the First Financial Sector Summit in 2002 did not cover all areas where change is needed for our country to achieve a new, people-centred financial architecture and overall transformation of the financial sector to serve our country’s national developmental needs.
Let us make use of this opportunity as the SACP today to report back that the community constituency at Nedlac has secured agreement on the convening of the Second Financial Sector Summit by Nedlac. The summit will take place in the first quarter of 2016. This achievement must be welcome, especially after years of campaigning to ensure that the summit takes place.
Perhaps one of the demands by the community and labour constituencies at the summit must be that the Financial Sector Summit must be regularised to take place at least once every five years for purposes of monitoring and evaluation of implementation and of further improvements on both the scope and substance of the agreements reached toward overall transformation.
On Friday, 27 November the Financial Sector Campaign Coalition convened a consultative conference to start preparation for the summit.
Through this campaign, we want to do away with all unscrupulous housing evictions by the banks and their accomplices in the courts and collaborators in the whole eviction chain. We want to achieve greater regulation of evictions, including human rights requirements and requirements relating to ensuring an alternative home or accommodation.
No repossessed property must be sold under its market value in instances where evictions will ultimately happen. The banks must give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar in such instances by selling the property at its market price, taking only what is owed to them and giving the rest to the repossessed family or person. And there is no reason in principle why the banks must still claim an insurance in such a case when in fact they would have recovered what is owed to them. Such practices and insurance claims must be reviewed and regulated in law. This is what we will push for as the SACP.
We will also push for a review of the practice of compound interest and therefore any other practice that imposes interest on the interest of a primary loan. The interest that are demanded by the banks on houses are just unbearable. This exploitation cannot be left unchallenged.
Similarly, the entire structure of sky-high bank charges and fees must be reviewed and regulated.
Regulations to protect consumers must be strengthened rather than weakened. The National Credit Regulator and its role must be strengthened. This will form part of SACP’s comprehensive input both to the Second Financial Sector Summit in the first quarter of 2016 and to Parliament in considering public submissions on the draft Twin Peaks model of financial supervision and regulation. The Bill mainly concerns prudential and market conduct regulation of the financial sector – which is estimated to be 6 trillion in rand value terms.
The banking and insurance branches of the financial sector are dominated by private monopoly consisting of a handful of players. This needs to be addressed. Part of the sources of this skewed structure of the financial sector lies in some of the prevailing regulations. In fact this is one of the factors that are holding back our objective to build the capacity of and transform the Post Bank to offer full banking services on a developmental basis in contrast to the commercial banks that are interested in profit only.
There certainly must be differentiated regulation involving separate regulations for commercial banks and public or state owned banks whose mandate is developmental as well as for co-operative banks. Without this it will continue to be difficult to establish public and collective forms of ownership in the banking sector.
In this regard, we also want the state to redirect its financial transactions, including social grants, away from corrupt tenders such as the United States of America’s Cash Paymaster. All of these must be redirected and ultimately destined to the Post-Bank. South Africa needs a financial sector and banks which will serve the people!
Similarly, there must be differentiated interest rates involving separate regulation for productive use and consumption with capping requirements for both. In this way we can countervail the credit-driven consumerist ideology and encourage investment in productive activity to create work and reduce the persisting crisis levels of unemployment, poverty and inequality.
Through the Financial Sector Campaign, we want to change our financial system to encourage investment in creating productive work rather than speculative activities of the casino economy taking place through financial dealings in stock markets and computer aided operations without creating any work on the ground. This is why we are also pushing for prescribed asset requirements to encourage investment in productive activity as well as taxation on liquid cash of huge proportions that is held in an investment strike by the capitalist bosses.
In the same vein, we want capital controls, including international transaction taxes to protect our economy from the deleterious impact of volatile financial markets conditions as well as to reduce or cap risk in terms capital flight and the expatriation or outflows of huge amounts of money. The Constitutional Court ruling dealing a blow to Mark Shuttleworth, who moved billions of rands out of our economy to a tax haven and did not want it protected is an important instrument strengthening regulation in this regard!
Together, let us take the Financial Sector Campaign forward, let us build on the past gains of the campaign!
We have done it previously. This just struggle and the revolution it seeks to achieve will ultimately triumph over the evil of financial exploitation.
After the launch of our financial sector campaign exactly 15 years ago in 2000, the campaign notched a number of victories which we must build upon and deepen.
We won a whole raft of legislative measures, including the establishment of the National Credit Regulator, the Co-operative Act, the Co-operative Banks Act, the regulation of the conduct and activities of the Credit Bureaux, Umzansi Account for the millions of the unbanked and the expunging of negative credit record from the credit bureaux system once payments on receipt of payments.
All Party structures must intensify mobilisation in the streets, in the communities and everywhere people are, in earnest. The Financial Sector Campaign Coalition must mobilise in earnest on the ground and consolidate demands for the forthcoming Second Financial Sector Summit. Without intensifying mobilisation on the ground nothing will be won at the summit.
In addition, we have now streamlined funding for post-school education and training at public colleges and universities to become a new objective in our Financial Sector Campaign. South Africa is producing sufficient monetary resources to make free quality college and university education and training progressively accessible for students from working class and needy families who cannot afford. The problem is, this money is appropriated by private capital, and the financial sector is dominant in this scheme of things.
As part of the Financial Sector Campaign, we must take the battle where it belongs most, that is at the door steps of capital – which is where the money produced by the workers of this country is. It is necessary for us to reiterate our rallying call in this regard: None of us who are committed to free quality post-school education and training for working class and needy students must develop cold feet in pushing for the rich and the wealthy to be taxed to make this progressively possible. Without mobilisation to this end, free quality higher, technical and vocational education and training for working class and needy students will not be possible! In the coming period such mobilisation will be of utmost important for the national democratic revolution and the struggle for socialism.
Free the media!
There are five key focus areas we have agreed to make our top priorities in pushing for the transformation of the media, that is: ownership; management control; media content diversity; robustly independent accountability; workplace transformation, employment equity, and skills development for media workers.
Ownership of South Africa’s media today is among the most concentrated in the world, despite the fact that all empirical research shows that ownership concentration negatively affects democracy, diversity of perspective and even digital access. An apartheid era company, Naspers, a company that refused to appear before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission concerning its complicity in colonial oppression and apartheid, is dominant in the media. It has also by and large virtually colonised the SABC, our public broadcaster, through its dealings with Multichoice.
Naspers’ Multichoice is also not paying re-transmission fees for the signals it receives from free-to-air TV channels such as the SABC, while the latter are paying transmission fees to deliver their signals to Multichoice’s DSTV. Multichoice is making a lot of money from re-transmitting SABC signals. People buy Multichoice DSTV Set Top Boxes and pay every month to view SABC and other channels. And now virtually all five SABC TV stations and 20 radio stations are transmitted to Multichoice which then re-transmits them.
It is part and parcel of our Media Transformation Campaign to rollback this private accumulation regime and exploitation of the public broadcaster: #MultichoiceMustPayRe-
Naspers, this colonial- and apartheid-era media monopoly has not received the news of our media transformation campaign very well. Naspers is already pushing a media coverage strategy through some of its Media24 titles and digital media to smear the Communist Party but first targeting the Party’s leadership ranks starting at the top.
The objective of this anti-communist palace media coverage strategy is to tarnish the image of the Communist Party and its leadership and then destroy any trust relationship that the masses have in the SACP with the aim of bringing down the Party’s media transformation efforts. Naspers is defending and therefore seeks to maintain and deepen its monopoly in the media. This is very dangerous to the diversity of perspective, cultural and artistic development, associated economic benefits and to democracy as a whole.
In addition, the palace media strategy that is being pushed against the SACP is part and parcel of a wider political campaign against communists and working class leadership who it seeks to eliminate toward 2017. It is therefore inconceivable to think that it is not being carried out with the involvement of some political collaborators who live on the crumbs that fall from monopoly dinner tables.
The SACP will not be threatened by any media reports smearing its leaders and the party published by any Media24 title and its digital media. Our rights in terms of the law are strictly reserved!!
We are forging ahead with our struggle to achieve de-monopolisation both of ownership and perspective in the media.
Naspers’ Multichoice has received in invaluable heritage of SABC archives for peanuts, with conditions that have the effect of denying millions of South Africans access to those archives unless they enrich Multichoice by buying its DSTV Set Top Boxes. All of this monopoly must come to an end!!
The SACP is aware of machinations to thwart any progressive advance with regard to the digital migration process in the interest of Naspers’ Multichoice monopoly. No stone should be left unturned in the struggle to ensure that the economic benefits of the digital migration process benefit the historically disadvantaged and empowers them rather than continue to be monopolised by Naspers’ Multichoice.
The media transformation summit that we held together with other progressive formations and media stakeholders on 1-2 October among others called for a multi-crypt digital broadcast platform and Set Top Boxes (digital decoders) and for all the Set Top Boxes to be subsidised by the state to be locally manufactured. The issue of encryption is far from over in this context!
Our country needs to create an enabling environment for new and emerging, particularly historically disadvantaged, content producers to gain access in the pay TV market through the digital migration process without being compelled to go through Naspers’ Multichoice monopoly. They must also not be left on their own to face expensive investments that they can never afford. Signal encryption can play an important role in empowering the historically disadvantaged content producers and in protecting both content and state subsidised Set Top Box theft and therefore its illegal use.
Why must Naspers’ Multichoice encrypt its own signals but on the contrary push for the new public digital broadcasting platform signals not to be encrypted other than to maintain its monopoly, ruin down free-to-air broadcasting and prevent new entrants in the pay TV Market? Absolutely none!
The process of digital must be understood properly and accordingly be located in the context of advancing the second, more radical phase of our national democratic revolution. This phase of our struggle is essentially about ensuring radical economic and social transformation and deepening democratisation in all spheres of societal activity including social production.
These are part of the outcomes of our media transformation summit with regard to ownership and perspective de-monopolisation in the industry. We will not be threatened by a monopoly that served the role of apartheid ideological vanguard and mouthpiece and refused to appear before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for its complicity in that crime against humanity. To leave its interests intact will amount to irrigating the roots of racial supremacy and thus perpetuate inequality.
As the Communist Party we were the first to be subjected to apartheid banning and smear campaigning. The media propaganda by Naspers will not threaten us!!
Unite the working class, our communities, and our movement!
As the SACP we congratulate Cosatu for holding its National Congress this week. The Congress was successful. In many ways it managed to lay a strong foundation for Cosatu to focus on its programmatic tasks and historical mission. At the Congress, Cosatu gave play to freedom of discussion, including transparent voting in terms of its rules as a trade union organisation and a mass, elementary formation of the workers. This is the essence of worker democracy. Focus must now be on implementation – that is unity in action, unity of action!
The SACP does not take seriously the news story by the Mail and Guardian published on Friday, 27 November on some problematic comments (which do not deserve to be repeated especially in our statements) attributed to the newly elected Cosatu General Secretary Comrade Bheki Ntshalintshali. When the newspaper contacted us for comment, we followed our ordinary procedure to confirm with Cosatu whether those comments were valid. We were satisfied by the response we received from Cosatu and gave the Mail and Guardian a feedback which the paper did not bother to cover in the story.
The SACP congratulates the newly elected National Office Bearers of Cosatu and will continue to work with the federation and its affiliates in a proper and principled manner. We will continue strengthening our efforts to unite organised workers under the banner of Cosatu! We will organise the unorganised under the banner of Cosatu!
The relationship between the SACP and Cosatu is strategic and structural. It was built not in newspapers. It was not built by newspapers. The relationship between the SACP and Cosatu was built in the struggle against capitalist exploitation; in the struggle against colonial and apartheid oppression; in the struggle against privatisation, casualisation and labour brokers, and, above all; in the struggle for socialism. This relationship has outlived many newspapers and will continue to outlive others. The relationship between the SACP and Cosatu is also beyond any individual leaders. Undisputed history is there to prove it – we need not belabour this historical fact.
Rather than some news story that has the effect of sowing confusion and fermenting tensions (the so-called alliance tensions but which are trumped up in the media), we believe in Cosatu’s written and publicly spoken word. In this regard the federation’s declaration read out to its National Congress by the newly elected General Secretary Comrade Bheki Ntshalintshali as well as its resolutions on the relationship between the SACP and Cosatu speak volume about the depth of our relationship. The SACP welcomes these perspectives of Cosatu!
The SACP says, let cement the unity of Cosatu and the Party as well as our alliance and the rest of our broad movement. We need this unity perhaps more than ever before as we move forward.
Comrades, whatever challenges and difficulties we may have in the alliance in this province, let us not walk away from the ANC. The ANC is no private property of anyone, but is a people's movement. Let us join the ANC and fight gate keeping as agreed to at our last Alliance Summit.
We also urge the ANC to find a smoother and more effective way of managing leadership transitions. Surely it cannot be that each time there is a leadership transition the ANC and indeed the alliance as a whole suffer strain. And the common denominator in such periods of leadership transition is an intense attack on the SACP and the working class by elements who position themselves as the so-called kingmakers.
Let us take our cue from uMalume Moses Kotane and Uncle JB Marks:
Let us advance and defend the unity of the working class, and that of the working class and other progressive forces as well!
Our Augmented Central Committee held from 20-22 November made a clarion call that we must go out and build an activist, larger, but quality SACP.
Only the working class is best capable to defend and advance its own interests. No other class will perform this function!
Issued by the SACP Headquarters, from eMalahleni, Mpumalanga Province, 29 November 2015
