SACP CENTRAL COMMITTEE PRESS STATEMENT
The SACP Central Committee met on the 27th and 28th November in Johannesburg in the final regular CC meeting for 2009. The main focus of the CC concerned preparations for our Special National Congress to be held in Polokwane from the 10th to 13th December. Draft political and organisational reports to the Special National Congress were tabled and discussed.
SACP membership has been growing significantly over the course of this year, and now stands at 96,049. We attribute this growth to the SACP's active campaigning in communities around the issues that affect the great majority of our people. The profile of our membership is relatively young, nearly 40% of our members are now women, and a majority of our members are drawn from the ranks of the millions of unemployed and marginalised.
With our track-record of consistent activism and with our membership profile, the SACP is well aware of our leadership responsibilities. After more than 15 years of democracy, SA's GINI co-efficient indicates extremely high-levels of persisting income inequality - and this inequality is racialised. Unemployment and particularly youth unemployment remains stubbornly at crisis levels. Notwithstanding the modest and uncertain upturn in growth for the third quarter, levels of poverty and distress in our townships and rural communities are severe and are often deteriorating.
In a situation like this, there are very real dangers of attempts at chauvinistic rabble-rousing of sectors in distress, not least among an often alienated youth sector. These dangers are enhanced by ambitious business-people and politicians flirting with these realities, using corruption and patronage politics to advance their own narrow personal ambitions.
The SACP pledges to work closely with all our Alliance partners, including the ANC's Women's and Youth Leagues, to uphold the great traditions of our movement. We also respect the ANC's multi-class character and we know that the great majority of professionals, small entrepreneurs and business-people abhor reckless demagogy and right-wing bombast masking itself as militancy. We pledge to work constructively and unsparingly to nip in the bud any signs of narrow chauvinism, corruption, patronage politics and personalised factionalism. The SACP will remain focused on the core challenge of our times - the struggle to transform our current semi-colonial economic growth path and persisting spatial patterns of settlement and infrastructure that are reproducing the crises of underdevelopment.
We challenge the banks to say whether BASA had a mandate or not
This past week, Cas Coovadia, MD of the Banking Association of SA (BASA) held a press conference to announce that BASA would no longer engage with the Community and Labour members of the Financial Charter Council. He said that in future the banks would only engage with Government and the Association of Black Securities and Investment Professionals (Absip) "because this body is among the organisations which have black interests".
Who is BASA trying to convince by claiming that Absip represents "black interests" but organised Labour and Community groups do not?
There are two matters that need highlighting in this regard:
- Behind the scenes, leading banks officials are saying that BASA did not have a mandate to make this unilateral and clumsy announcement. If these claims are to be believed, then the banks must now say that BASA did not have their mandate, and they must discipline BASA;
- BASA (like most media reporting on this matter so far) continues to claim that the blockage in the Financial Charter Council is a disagreement on whether direct black ownership of financial institutions should be pegged at 10% (as currently is the case with the Financial Charter), or at 15% (which is the case with the general BEE charters). In fact, both government and the community and labour delegations have long since indicated a preparedness to consider an equity equivalent to resolve the ownership dispute. This is currently what has been under negotiation at the Financial Charter Council.
An equity equivalent involves performance in other areas (for example, financing cooperatives or low-income housing) with an equal Rand value for what would otherwise have been required to meet the 15% black ownership target. BASA's present embarrassment is that when we were still insisting on compliance with the 15% target, they were telling us that this extra 5% black ownership stake would be impossibly costly and risky. They mentioned a figure of R32bn. However, once they were locked into a discussion on an equity equivalent, suddenly they were somersaulting backwards and coming up with laughably low estimates! In the negotiations process a tentative figure of R16,8bn has now been arrived at.
Having snookered themselves in this way, BASA is trying to wriggle out of the process, and it is THIS that explains BASA MD Cas Coovadia's arrogant (and futile) unilateral attempt to choose whom to discuss with. The labour and community formations will not be provoked into walking out of the Council, and we have every reason to believe that government is equally committed to ensuring that the process continues, and BASA is not allowed to try and resist transformation by excluding labour and communities.
Against the background of these developments, the CC resolved:
- To intensify our financial sector campaign, and to reinvigorate our campaign alliance of more than 50 community and other non-governmental formations;
- To call on all South Africans to join a massive popular campaign for the transformation of the financial sector - partly in response to the high-handed arrogance of the banks, but also in response to the deepening financial crisis in which millions of ordinary South Africans find themselves in the midst of the current economic crisis. Statistics last week showed that the number of adult South Africans who are banked has now dropped from 63% to 60%. At the same time, the number of Credit Bureaux black-listings, small business liquidations, and foreclosures on homes has soared. The financial sector cannot remain untransformed.
- To call on Government to include the transformation of the publicly-owned Development Finance Institutions (DFIs) within the remit of the Financial Charter Council discussions.
Let us all take responsibility for the struggle against HIV and AIDS
Minister of Health, cde Aaron Motsoaledi presented to the CC a report on the HIV and AIDS pandemic and a proposed nation-wide campaign.
The CC applauded cde Motsoaledi's forthright and activist stance on the pandemic. The CC strongly supported his approach to the campaign against HIV/AIDS with its emphasis on a joint effort between government and all South Africans, and on a primary health-care approach to testing and treatment. The campaign focus on all of us taking collective and individual responsibility is especially important.
The SACP also supports the proposal to make HIV/AIDS notifiable. In the case of any other pandemic it would be a matter of course to make the underlying disease notifiable. Let us banish this relic of an earlier denialism linked to stigmatisation.
The CC pledged the SACP's full commitment to taking forward the campaign. In this regard the SACP will intensify its campaign for an affordable, quality and primary health care driven health system.
The challenges of local government
The CC also discussed an input by the Minister for Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs, cde Sicelo Shiceka on the local government turnaround strategy. Among the points of strong agreement with the strategy, the CC highlighted the following key elements:
- The focus on popular participation in local governance - to transform local government, and to empower communities at the ward level to make key decisions on infrastructure development and budgetary allocations;
- The negative impact of political party interference in appointments of municipal staff, with all of the attendant problems of poor capacity, factionalism and the dangers of corruption;
- The need for training and upgrading of councillors and council management;
- The need to radically review the financing of municipalities.
While saluting the role played by the majority of councillors, often under very difficult circumstances, the CC stressed the central importance of fighting a fearless struggle against corruption in local government, and, indeed, in all spheres of our society. The struggle against corruption, we underlined, is not only a moral struggle, it is a struggle to prevent the erosion of all of our democratic gains. Our communities are thoroughly sick of the reckless ripping off of public resources. The CC also stressed the importance of working closely with public sector unions in the municipal sphere. Union members have often bravely blown the whistle on corruption - sometimes without being listened to. This must change.
We also call on union members and communities not to take out their frustrations through self-destructive damage to public property. Government's local government turnaround strategy provides us all with the possibility to collectively take up a range of struggles that have a genuinely transformative impact on the lives of our communities.
The situation in Western Sahara
The CC was also apprised of developments in Western Sahara, including the hunger strike embarked upon by cde Aminatou Haidar - the award-winning Western Sahara independence activist who has been on a hunger strike for nearly two weeks since Morocco expelled her from the disputed territory. She is reported to be in a grave situation and so weak that she cannot speak.
The SACP calls for a speedy and comprehensive resolution of the impasse and for the international community to bring pressure on the Kingdom of Morocco, to remove all obstacles towards a settlement, which should result in the full recognition of the territory of Western Sahara as a sovereign state.
The 12th International Communist and Workers Parties meeting in South Africa in 2010
The 11th International Communist and Workers Parties (ICWP) meeting recently held in New Delhi, India unanimously agreed to convene the 12th meeting of the ICWP in South Africa, as part of fulfilling an important political process for the international communist movement. The SACP is greatly honoured and will ensure a successful meeting at a time when globally capitalism is more and more discredited.
16 Days of activism against violence against women and children
The CC urged all of our structures to participate actively in the 16 days of activism against violence against women and children. This campaign is an integral part of re-building solidarity and collective responsibility in our communities.
Statement issued by the South African Communist Party, November 29 2009
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