SACP End of the Year and New Year Message
The SACP takes this opportunity to wish all South Africans a happy and productive New Year. As 2012 comes to an end we particularly wish the workers of this country a peaceful rest, for without their sweat the wheels of our economy will grind to a halt.
During this year we held a highly successful Congress out of which we emerged with an even stronger SACP and very firm resolutions that aims to change the conditions of the workers and the poor for the better. One of the key decisions we took was that, together with our Allies, the SACP would take responsibility for our national democratic revolution. This means that we must take joint responsibility for both the successes and challenges of our revolution.
As the SACP we will refuse to be goaded by liberals and its media to attack any of our Alliance partners in order to prove that we are an independent organization. We will seek to preserve the unity of our Alliance and protect the integrity of each of our Alliance, for the sake of uniting the broadest possible progressive forces to advance the interests of the overwhelming majority of our people. Whilst we will continue to independently express our positions in public, we will refuse to play a reckless and populist game in order to become heroes of the media and our detractors. It is this attitude that we, as South African communists, are carrying into 2013.
The SACP also wishes to congratulate the ANC for a highly successful 53rd National Conference held in Mangaung. We commit to work together with the newly elected leadership of the ANC. We are also pleased about the many progressive resolutions adopted by this conference. The outcomes of the 53rd National Conference mark important continuity in the implementation of the 5 priorities as adopted in the Polokwane Conference in 2007.
The year 2012 has seen a number of advances in our country. One of these is the fact that government has increased life expectancy by more than five years, since the inauguration of the current administration led by President Zuma. This is attributable to decisive action and leadership to deal with the HIV/AIDS pandemic, thus taking us out of the disastrous period of HIV/AIDS denialism that led to the death of hundreds of thousands of people, whose lives could have been saved. We also welcome the piloting of the National Health Insurance.
The SACP also welcomes the many advances being made on the education and skills front. Despite many challenges, the steady improvement in matric results over the last 2 to 3 years is welcome, as well as the high participation rates at least up till grade 9. We also welcome the steady increase in post-school enrolments, especially in the public college sector, and the expansion of financial aid to poor but deserving students.
The year 2012 will also go down as an important in which government committed to the largest ever infrastructure spend programme, especially infrastructure for rural areas and development. This has the potential of creating hundreds of thousands of jobs. The SACP calls upon the progressive trade union movement to ensure that none of the companies that use workers supplied by labour brokers get any of the government infrastructure tenders. This is a practical way of defeating the scourge of labour broking in our country, and promotes our agenda for decent work.
Ours is to build on the above and many other advances in order to tackle the challenges of poverty, inequality and unemployment. The SACP calls upon all South Africans to partner with the ANC-led government to build on these advances so that we can together overcome the many problems still facing our society. We particularly call upon the working class to take a lead in this regard, as it is ultimately the main class custodian for progress and transformation.
Whilst we welcome government's New Growth Path and the National Development Plan, the SACP will continue to fight for our macro-economic policies to be better aligned to these important micro economic interventions. The SACP will, during 2013 revive and revitalize its financial sector campaign in order to ensure that monies in this sector are redirected towards investment into the productive sectors of our economic, including investment into our infrastructure.
The SACP is concerned about the continuation of reckless lending by the financial sector as shown by the growth of unsecured lending. We want to reverse the tendency to lend for consumption rather than for productive purposes.
The SACP also calls for appropriate lessons to be learnt from the Marikana tragedy. The most important lesson from Marikana is that capitalism is an exploitative system and that capitalists will always cut corners in order to exploit workers and maximize their profits. The will do all they can to undermine our hard-won labour laws, like through labour-brokering, outsourcing and casualization of workers. The Marikana tragedy underlines the SACP's belief that only socialism will be able to look after the interests of the majority in our country.
While we do not intend to pre-empt the findings of the Farlam commission, there are obvious lessons for the progressive forces. These include strengthening and supporting COSATU and its affiliates by remaining vigilant that the gains made at the shop floor level are not easily stolen; by a combined force of the bosses and their sweetheart trade unions like AMCU.
Marikana also shows the extent to which we need to intensify the struggle for the transformation of the South African workplace. Whilst many gains have been made in transforming the capitalist and apartheid workplaces, we still have a long way to go. That is why the SACP also calls upon COSATU in particular, and the progressive trade union movement in general, to prioritise the struggle for the transformation of the workplace in 2013. This must include prioritization of trade union recruitment of more workers, including the more vulnerable workers. Special attention will have to be paid to servicing of members by the trade union movement.
We take this opportunity to inform especially the workers and the poor of our country that in 2013 the SACP will also intensify its campaign for basic services for all, more radical land and agrarian reform, and the struggle for jobs. We commit to the workers of our country that we will continue to be in the trenches with them. Ours is a struggle that must culminate in the building of a workers' state.
We wish all South Africans, especially the workers and the poor a happy 2013!
Statement issued by the SACP, December 31 2012
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