Statement on the response of the Cabinet to the report of the Commission of Inquiry into State Capture

24 October 2022

The South African Communist Party notes the announcement made by the President on Sunday, 23 October 2022, summarising the Cabinet’s response to the findings and recommendations of the Commission of Inquiry into State Capture. In particular, the state must go all out to recover the funds stolen or lost under the state capture corruption, seize the ill-gotten wealth, and hold those responsible to account, through among others prosecution, imprisonment and disciplinary processes.

While legislative and regulatory changes are necessary to clamp down on procurement corruption, the SACP wants the state to in-source the many functions that have been tenderised and to roll back privatisation. South Africa needs a capable democratic developmental state with its own organic planning and internal capacity to serve the people diligently.

Our April 1994 democratic breakthrough coincided with neoliberal globalisation. Instead of deepening the liberation and emancipatory path of our historic struggle, in 1996 the government went off on a tangent, adopted the neoliberal economic policy called Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) and subsequently followed the path of a version of New Public Management model. Under the neoliberal and New Public Management policy paradigm, the government actively pursued privatisation and outsourcing of many functions of the state, public entities and state-owned enterprises.

The tenderisation was also used as a policy instrument in pursuit of a reformist, narrow version of Black Economic Empowerment (BEE). This benefited a few individuals constituting the Black bourgeois elite with shares in untransformed ownership patterns in collaboration with established sections of capital at the expense of the masses. The Gupta family from India emerged within this context. Meanwhile, numbering millions and constituting the majority of our population, the masses continued to experience deepening economic exploitation and to live under conditions of starvation, impoverishment and growing levels of inequality, unemployment and poverty.

The neoliberal policy paradigm and the New Public Management and reformist, narrow BEE models interacted to pave the way for the state capture corruption, systematically expanding an enabling environment in which the state capture corruption became systemic at an industrial scale. The SACP made a detailed submission to the Commission of Inquiry into State Capture, detailing the analysis and observations that led to the Party taking a lead to become the first to expose the existence of state capture in South Africa and to call for the establishment of the commission.

The SACP will continue to pursue and enhance its proposals on holding those responsible accountable for the corruption of state capture and building a capable democratic developmental state that will serve the people diligently. This will be a key tenet in our comprehensive response to the report of the Commission of Inquiry into State Capture and the Cabinet’s response to it.

Issued by Solly Mapaila, the SACP General Secretary, 24 October 2022