SACP-COSATU national officials hold bilateral
Wednesday, 13 August 2014
The national officials and office bearers of the SACP and COSATU met on Monday, 11th August 2014. The agenda included discussion on taking forward the resolutions of the 2013 Alliance Summit - in particular providing context, content and a programme of action based around the call for a second radical phase of our democratic transition.
The meeting agreed that at the centre of the programme must be the need to fundamentally transform the structure of our economy and advance social transformation, and that this requires taking forward progressive policies. The meeting reaffirmed the continued relevance of shared SACP-COSATU strategic perspectives for a new, qualitatively different and inclusive growth path. Re-industrialisation, redistribution, employment creation and decent work, combating inequality and poverty, and leading efforts to achieve regional integration in Africa are, among other appropriate policies, important in this respect.
There was agreement that the centre-piece of such a second radical phase of transformation needs to be a state-led industrial action plan, buttressed by popular mobilisation, and that its key elements must include:
- dealing decisively with monopoly import-parity pricing of key upstream inputs into manufacturing through, amongst other things, strengthening our competition authorities;
- amendments to the Minerals Resources and Petroleum Development Act to ensure greater alignment with our industrialisation in terms of supply and pricing of key industrial minerals with our industrialisation objectives; and
- moving with greater determination to meet the 75% local procurement target, especially by the public sector.
But all these cannot be achieved without building a strong COSATU, SACP, a effectively functional and fighting Alliance leading social, economic and political campaigns on the ground. The immediate tasks facing the two working class organisations therefore include taking up a campaign against the privatisation of Eskom, as well as against the mismanagement of the public broadcaster, the SABC. A joint organising task team meeting will be convened to consolidate an action plan in this regard.
The COSATU national leadership briefed the SACP on progress in the ANC-led process to address internal challenges within the federation. Both parties expressed appreciation for these efforts, and underlined the absolute imperative of protecting the unity of COSATU as an independent and radical trade union movement. The SACP expressed its full confidence in the COSATU leadership's capacity to move forward in its own right towards an effective resolving of challenges.
The meeting was resolute that the process of confronting and resolving challenges within COSATU must be done in a manner that builds the fighting capacity of the federation as a leader of the progressive trade union movement in our country. The SACP will work with the federation in its focus on a sustainable programme with increasingly greater focus on service to affiliates' members.
Statement issued by the SACP and COSATU, August 13 2014
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