SACP Central Committee Press Statement
The Central Committee of the SACP met in Johannesburg over the weekend of 21 - 23 August. The SACP used the occasion of this scheduled CC meeting to assess progress made since the April 22nd elections towards the implementation of our ANC-led alliance election manifesto in the context of the current global capitalist crisis.
The CC took forward the SACP's analysis of this crisis and its impact on our own society. Some mainstream commentators , building their case on several days of stock market performance here, or a business confidence survey there, are trying to convince themselves and the rest of us that "we have seen the worst", that "the global economy has bottomed out", and that there are "green shoots" beginning to pop out. We believe that the deep systemic problems within the global capitalist economy have not been resolved. While there might be a marginal and sluggish return to growth for a while, the global economy will remain deeply enmeshed in crisis over the medium term.
This means that it is probable the new administration in SA will be confronting a challenging period for the larger part of its five-year term. Our response as a country and as a government needs to combine defensive measures (essentially to protect jobs and livelihoods as best as possible), while at the same time actively implementing transformational measures. We cannot afford simply to hold on and hope to return to where we were in mid-2008.
We need to ask ourselves why, even before the recession hit our economy in the last quarter of 2008, and despite major state-led endeavours over 15 years, we had not fundamentally transformed the deep-seated racial, class and gendered inequalities of our society. Why, for instance, despite a major global commodity boom in the last several years, did we succeed at best in returning our unemployment rate to the crisis-levels at which it had been when we started out in 1994 (over 20%)? Why, after estimating the "housing backlog" to be some 3 million in 1994, and after building an impressive 3,1 million low-cost houses in 15 years, do we find the housing backlog to be pretty much what it was?
The persisting dominance of apartheid spatial patterns in our rural and urban settings, and the reproduction of racialised and class inequalities in critical areas like education and health-care all point to one fundamental conclusion - there is the imperative of thorough-going structural transformation. The current recession and revenue constrictions on government make this structural transformation more (not less) important.
We cannot continue to cram workers and poor into over-crowded and under-resourced dormitory townships and rural backwaters. We have to address rural transformation and we have take on the narrow profit-maximising agendas of agro-industry, property developers and well-to-do rate-payers. We have to transform our countryside and re-build local economies. We have to build towns and cities in which there is much greater spatial democracy through mixed-income, mixed-use and higher density settlement patterns. We cannot sustain a health-care system in which 14% (down from 25% in 1994) of our population on medical aid consume 60% of all health resources.
What else has to be done? We have to place our economy on a different, development path that is job-intensive. We have to sustain the current R787-billion state-led infrastructure programme, ensuring, as we do, that it contributes dynamically to the spatial transformation of our society. We need to align an industrial and skills development policy with this infrastructure programme, ensuring that we gear up our manufacturing sector to actively support the infrastructure programme. We need to lessen our reliance on the importation of machinery, technology and luxury goods. We need to transform our education system. We need to ensure that there is affordable and quality health-care for all, which will require, amongst other things, the introduction of a National Health Insurance programme.
Critical to the achievement of all of this is a coherent, strategically disciplined developmental state. In this regard, the political report tabled before the CC highlighted two major (and interrelated) threats to the achievement of an effective developmental state - the fragmentation of the state and corruption.
There has been a significant fragmentation of the state, with the proliferation of a myriad of agencies, regulators and parastatals, not just at the national but also sub-national levels. Many of these entities have been spun out of government departments. Many of them have overlapping responsibilities. Most of them possess boards of directors, CEOs, fancy head-offices and all the bells and whistles associated with major private corporations. While these might be justified in some cases, the rationale for the very existence of many others is unclear.
To make matters worse, many of the boards of these entities are populated with private capitalist interests and, in particular, by individuals associated with narrow BEE empowerment deals. Many of these individuals serve on dozens of boards simultaneously. All of this contributes to the fragmentation of strategic discipline within the state, and the possible loss of public interest priorities.
Further contributing to the challenge of consolidating a strategically coherent developmental state are problems related to the roles and functions of the different spheres of government. While the SACP supports the principle of a single and strategically united state in the constitutional context of cooperative governance, we have never understood a developmental state to be top-down, overly centrist and authoritarian.
On the contrary, one of the problems in our current system is a lack of sufficient resourcing and capacity at the local government level. Housing, for instance, is not a local government competence, but when there are challenges around housing, it is local councillors and mayors that bear the brunt of popular frustrations. Local government is a critical sphere for consolidating vibrant popular participation in planning and budgeting - but ward committees and other legislatively envisaged institutions for participation are barely functioning, if at all.
Many municipalities lack even the minimal revenue base. Ward councillors, the critical connection between localities and governance, are the least resourced of councillors and their stature is not acknowledged. The SACP will engage actively with the policy discussion process around the future of provinces and local government - with a view to ensuring that, where appropriate, there is an effective devolution of powers, resources and responsibilities to the local sphere.
National government needs to assist municipalities, for instance the Department of Economic Development must see it as a key role to assist local government to develop effective Integrated Devlopment Plans. The SACP will also be proposing to its alliance partners the imperative of an alliance summit on local government, with the possibility of similar alliance summits at the district and metro levels. The key objective must be to ask ourselves how we ensure local government is able to take forward our election manifesto priorities.
Related to these challenges of fragmentation and weaknesses in the state is the danger of corruption. In SA, as in the rest of the world, the capitalist crisis has led to private capital turning to the state for help. If handled effectively and strategically, this presents important possibilities, for the longer term, to introduce in turn greater regulation, greater transparency, and the rolling back of previous market-dominated profit-taking and short-termism. But the greater reliance of capital on the state for emergency assistance and for tenders in the context of our infrastructure and industrial policy programmes also carries the risk of corruption in the state.
It is in the context of all of this that the CC has decided that this year's Red October campaign will focus on advancing, consolidating and defending the priorities of our ANC alliance election manifesto - and in particular we will focus on affordable and quality health-care for all, and on defeating the scourge of corruption.
In returning to our campaign on health-care, the SACP will high-light the crisis in our medical aid schemes, and the disturbing and continuing contracting out and casualisation of key services in our public health system. We will be campaigning for investment in our public health system to ensure that there is an effective base for the implementation of a National Health Insurance programme.
The CC noted and saluted the important work done by the Public Service Commission in exposing the large number of senior civil servants with private business interests. Many have failed to declare these interests, but declarations are not enough - the whole practice must be ended. So too must be the proliferation of double-dipping and all kinds of moon-lighting activities that occur through the ranks of the civil service.
The CC salutes the role played by COSATU and affiliates like SATAWU in exposing corrupt practices by senior executives in parastatals. We call on the union movement to intensify its activities in this regard. We know that our people will warmly support an aggressive attack on corruption in our communities, work places and in society at large. To set an example from our own side, the SACP will require that all of its CC members make disclosures to the Party of any financial interests. We call on the leadership collectives of our Alliance partners to do likewise.
The CC affirmed our Party's full confidence in and support for our comrades in the cabinet, including those in key economic portfolios. We are pleased to note the robust defence of the core non-racial principles of our movement by senior ANC leaders, and their forthright rejection of any opportunistic attempt to play an ethnic card. While ugly white chauvinistic attitudes persist in many places, sometimes brazenly and sometimes subliminally, and should be fought at all times - a counter, narrow Africanist chauvinism simply reproduces and feeds its counterpart. Such trends must be nipped in the bud as they have been throughout the history of the ANC.
The Central Committee agreed unanimously on the proposal that Political Bureau member cde Joyce Moloi Meropa should be appointed as the SACP's deputy chairperson to replace our late cde Ncumisa Kondlo. We take this opportunity to congratulate cde Moloi Meropa.
The CC joins millions of other South Africans in congratulating our IAAF World Championship medal winners, Caster Semenya and Khotso Mokoena. We share the sense of deep outrage at the inhumane, undignified manner in which Caster Semenya has been treated.
The CC further noted with deep concern that all legal channels have now been closed to the Cuban Five by the courts in the US. The five are Cubans who had been living in the US with the objective of monitoring the activities of Miami-based Cuban exile terrorist cells. Over four decades, including in relatively recent years, these cells have been responsible for tens of thousands of bombings, assassinations, biological warfare attacks on Cuban crops, and even the sabotage in mid-air of a passenger airliner. During their trials, there was absolutely no evidence whatsoever that the Cuban Five had spied on any US military or other US facility, or that they had carried out any acts of hostility against the US. Their sole focus was upon the terrorist activities of Cuban exile circles. Despite a great deal of rhetoric about the "war on terrorism", US authorities refuse to act against the real terrorists living in their midst, while sentencing the Cuban Five to long terms of imprisonment. The SACP strongly associates itself with the world-wide campaign of solidarity with these Cuban patriots. Release the Cuban Five!
In Swaziland, the suppression of democracy and political persecution, including the trial of PUDEMO president, cde Mario Masuku, continue unabated. Meanwhile the ruling elite squanders millions of rands on personal life-styles while the majority of Swazi citizens live in deepening poverty. The SACP condemns these realities and calls for solidarity across our Southern Africa region to isolate the undemocratic regime in Swaziland.
The CC noted with concern deepening anti-worker and anti-trade union developments in Mexico led by the state. One of the more brazen examples of this was the tragic deaths of 63 coal-miners. The response of authorities was simply to seal the mine without any concern to recover bodies. At the same time, the mine-workers leader, cde Napoleon Gonzalez has had to flee into exile in Canada.
In Europe one of the consequences of the global economic recession has been a resurgence of centre-right political parties shadowed on their right by extremist, xenophobic, ultra-right forces. These forces are stirring up several demagogic issues, including anti-immigrant and anti-left hatred. In regard to the latter, one aspect of this is a campaign of denialism about the historical role of the former Soviet Union and of communist parties and partisan and resistance forces in defeating fascism and Nazism in the 1940s. The SACP has joined communist and workers' parties around the world in condemning these history-distorting efforts. We will forever honour and remember the millions of communist and democratic fighters who gave their lives in the defence of human civilisation.
Statement issued by the South African Communist Party, August 23 2009
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