SACP welcomes pro-poor and pro-worker interventions announced by President Ramaphosa on Tuesday night, 21 April 2020, calls for protection of our hard-won democracy
22 April 2020
The South African Communist Party welcomes the pro-poor and pro-worker state interventions announced by President Cyril Ramaphosa on Tuesday night, 21 April 2020, as part of a package to fight the war against the novel coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic.
The President announced a social relief and economic support package amounting to R500 billion, about 10 per cent of our gross domestic product. The package will cover an extraordinary health budget to respond to Covid-19, the relief of hunger and social distress, and support for workers. The package includes a temporary, six months Covid-19 grant, directing R50 billion towards relieving the plight of those who are most desperately affected by the pandemic. In this regard, the child support grant will be increased by R300 in May and, from June to October, an additional R500 each month, while all other grant beneficiaries will receive an extra R250 per month for the next six months. ‘In addition, a special Covid-19 Social Relief of Distress grant of R350 a month for the next 6 months will be paid to individuals who are now unemployed and do not receive any other form of social grant or UIF payment’, said the President.
The SACP is waiting eagerly waiting for the further measures that the President offered to announce on Thursday, 23 April 2020.
In particular, we cannot go back to the crisis before the crisis – that is our stance as the SACP.
In order to turn our economy around, we need a massive investment in public infrastructure, stronger role and capacity of the state, its participation, through well managed and thriving state-owned enterprises, and intervention in the economy on behalf of the people as a whole. The outbreak of Covid-19 and global responses to it underline the important role of the state in leading development and serving the people as a whole, the majority of whom comprises the working class and poor.
Domestic mobilisation of funds
The SACP reiterates its call for a thoroughgoing mobilisation of investment from domestic sources of funds both in order to win the war against Covid-19 and turn our economy around. In the spirit of the principle ‘Whatever it takes’ that the President has endorsed, all existing policy instruments should be re-examined and strengthened, and new ones developed to bring the domestic investment to fruition. This should be co-ordinated in a way that will be balanced, sustainable and mutually beneficial to both the domestic funds and the national imperative of the absolute necessity to win the war against Covid-19 and turn our economy around in the interest of all the people.
International financial institutions
Correctly, and both publicly and internally in the Alliance consultative process, the SACP placed emphasis on the absolute importance of protecting our hard-won democracy, our fundamental right to self-determination, our democratic national and policy sovereignty, our independence, as matter of principle, as non-negotiable.
We waged our liberation struggle, our struggle for freedom and social emancipation, not in order to hand over control of our country and policy determination to foreign finance monopoly capital or international financial institutions through conditionalities whatsoever, but in order to give profound expression to the Freedom Charter’s clarion call on the will of the people: The people shall govern.
As part of our continuing anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggle, the struggle for freedom and social emancipation, the SACP is correctly pushing transformation of multilateral bodies and international financial institutions.
Accordingly, we called for, and reiterate our call for debt relief and the scrapping of the unsustainable debt, interest and penalties that stand in the way of development, employment creation, poverty eradication and advances in other human development indicators in formerly colonised countries, not least in Africa. We also call for aid that is without conditionalities aimed at debilitating the sovereign decision making and the economies of developing countries.
Our concern about seeking loans from the Washington consensus based International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank quarters was not based on some ill-informed visceral dislike of the ‘acronym’ IMF or name World Bank, but on the reality that from the late 1970s these institutions rejigged their earlier, post-World War II role of helping to rebuild war-torn economies, principally in Western Europe, initially. The two international financial institutions were now redeployed to squeeze the last drop of debt repayment out of Third World countries that had become enmeshed in debt crises to private Western banks. In the mid-1970s, these private banks, awash with petro-dollars following the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) induced oil price hike, had lent lavishly and unwisely to many countries, including newly independent countries in Africa. The debt on these loans was simply unsupportable.
The fight against Covid-19 is not out of charitable concern, including in the case of international financial institutions, but a strategic imperative. In a highly globalised world economy the impact of the pandemic in the periphery and semi-periphery threatens the whole system.
The SACP agrees with the President, that we cannot and must not go back to the pre-Covid-19 economic and social reality. We need to advance, in particular, and both in theory and practice, the second, more radical phase of our national democratic revolution, our democratic transition.
Issued by Alex Mohubetswane Mashilo, Central Committee Member: Head of Media & Communications, SACP, 22 April 2020
