The SACP Central Committee met in Johannesburg on the 22nd and 23rd May 2009. This was the first plenary CC meeting after the April 22nd elections, and the Political and Organisational Reports and ensuing discussion devoted considerable time to assessing the election campaign and the way forward.
The CC noted the outstanding electoral victory achieved by the ANC and its alliance. The sustained, nearly two-thirds majority is a remarkable achievement for a movement that has now been an incumbent ruling party for 15 years. The electoral victory was all the more notable because it came in the midst of what was potentially a serious breakaway from within the leadership core of the ANC.
The victory was also notable because it was achieved against an unremitting and extremely hostile year-long ideological offensive mounted against the ANC and its alliance from a large part of the media and the middle class intelligentsia in our country.
The CC agreed that the electoral victory was the victory of the working class and poor of our country, who mobilised in overwhelming numbers to defend their movement, and to defend and advance the gains achieved over the past 15 years. The election victory was also notable for the high levels of participation by the youth sector, and the ability of the ANC-led movement to connect dynamically with a new generation of citizens.
There are, however, important challenges following April 22nd. The anti-ANC "public" opinion constructed by the media and chattering classes was roundly rebuffed by the actuality of popular opinion in our African mass base in townships and rural villages throughout our country. However, the media offensive did have an impact upon minority communities, including working class minority communities. This was seized upon by the opposition parties, notably the DA, which ran a thinly disguised, subliminal racist campaign in defence of perceived minority interests. Advances in building a non-racial society over the past decade and a half have suffered. The SACP calls on its membership and the working class movement to defeat racism, and to build a principled non-racial solidarity, particularly based on working class solidarity in the struggle to overcome the crises of unemployment, poverty and inequality.
We also need to engage actively and constructively with media professionals, academic institutions and think-tanks in our country. Much of the anti-ANC ideological offensive over the past year has been framed as a conflict between "populism" and the defence of various "liberal" constitutional rights (media freedom, freedom of speech, independence of the judiciary, academic freedom, etc.).
The SACP fully supports these constitutional rights, but we strongly reject the notion that these rights can be defended and consolidated without connecting them to other critical rights - the right of all to access to education, the right to employment, the right to shelter, etc. Nothing is more distasteful than the former upholders of apartheid, who had to be forced into our new constitutional dispensation, now posing as the defenders of constitutional rights.
Our electoral victory, of course, now places a huge responsibility on the ANC and its alliance partners. We cannot pretend that our comfortable electoral majority is secure for all time. In the face of the global capitalist melt-down and in the face of persisting systemic crises within our own society - deep-seated inequality, crisis-levels of unemployment, and wide-ranging poverty - the next five years must be marked by a sustained effort at transforming the underlying factors that are reproducing these crises of under-development. In particular, we need to place our economic growth path onto a new job-creating and more egalitarian trajectory.
The CC congratulated all SACP members who have been elected as ANC public representatives in Parliament and in provincial legislatures - overall, some 14% of ANC elected representatives are SACP members. The CC also congratulated the many SACP members who have now been deployed into senior positions in legislatures and executives. While there has been a minor campaign in some quarters of the media to suggest that these deployments are controversial within the SACP, certainly in the CC there was unanimous support for the idea that the SACP, working closely with its alliance partners, must never position itself simply an extra-parliamentary oppositionist bloc. We must assume full and collective responsibility for governance.
This will require, however, that we ensure that Communist deployees in executives and other senior positions must set an example of activist and participatory governance - in which popular organisation and mobilisation is not seen as inherently conflictual with the important governance tasks confronting our country. At the same time, maintaining a strong and independent SACP is the prerequisite for a Party and for a cadreship of communists that are able to build a principled mass-based Alliance. To this end, the CC is also seized with strengthening the organisational machinery of the SACP. In doing this, we will be building on our activist cadre that has played such an outstanding role in the election campaign.
The new Minister in the Presidency, cde Collins Chabane, was invited to the CC to brief our meeting on the newly reconfigured national executive. The CC noted that the issues raised in this regard over the past year by the SACP had been taken into consideration, and welcomed the efforts to ensure that we build a strategically focused, better coordinated and more effective developmental state. In particular, we welcome the establishment of a planning commission, and a cabinet cluster that will focus on economic policy and specifically industrial policy. The CC agreed that the reconfiguration needs to proceed in a phased but rapid fashion, and that we must ensure that reconfiguration does not consume all our energies to the detriment of actual implementation of our key programmes.
The CC also received a briefing from the City of Johannesburg on its public transport plans as an innovation that needs to be engaged with in the light of the coming Confederations Cup, 2010, and the need for affordable, accessible, safe and efficient public transport systems throughout our country.
At present, public transport often remains untransformed, relatively unregulated and operator-controlled. We need to transform this reality into public transport that is a publicly controlled and regulated reality in which the needs of communities are prioritised. The CC resolved to re-launch our former Red October public transport campaign, beginning here in Johannesburg. In the coming weeks, working together with a wide cross-section of commuter, trade union, driver, small operator, and community formations we will be campaigning for transformed public transport. It is critical that the future of public transport in our cities is not left simply to a (sometimes hostile) dialogue between government and taxi operators.
The CC also resolved to reinvigorate our long-running financial sector campaign. In the light of the current global capitalist economic melt-down and its impact on South African consumers, households and small businesses there is an increase in repossession of houses, cars and other items, and the closure of small businesses and the likely increase of black-listings.
The CC briefly discussed the question of ethics for executive members in government. The CC commended the Minister of Transport, cde Sbu Ndebele, for handing back the luxury car that he had received from a group of small contractors. This episode raises wider questions. The SACP strongly believes that no-one in government should receive a gift from the public for doing what is, in any case, their job. What is more, government delivery should not be seen as personal patronage from an individual government leader - it is a collective effort and a collective responsibility.
The SACP in the past week has supported COSATU in its efforts to reverse the sale of Vodacom to majority foreign ownership. In the light of the court decision to decline a ruling in this direction, we will be working closely with our alliance partners to chart a way forward. One thing is clear; the problematic way in which this sale has been handled (which the court itself acknowledged) is just one small part of a much wider problem.
Our IT and telecommunications sector has been badly mismanaged, largely by a former leading cadre in government (formerly, but no longer, associated with the ANC). Moreover, this is not just a question of mismanagement. All the evidence points to a systematic ripping-off of public and national resources in the interests of an avaricious personal accumulation agenda. In particular, the future of Telkom has now been seriously compromised. The SACP calls for a comprehensive ICT plan that places at its centre universal access and affordable quality service.
With new legislation and a new Parliament in place, the SACP now calls for the rapid dissolving of the current SABC Board. The imperative of urgent moves in this direction has been reinforced by the new evidence of massive financial losses in the SABC, the consequence of gross mismanagement. The current Board has presided over this implosion of this public resource, and it must now go. The SABC must be rescued and it must be re-built as a public broadcaster that serves all the citizens of our country, and not narrow factional or party political objectives.
Statement issued by the South African Communist Party Central Committee, May 24 2009
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