SACP Political Bureau Statement
A scheduled SACP Political Bureau meeting was convened in Johannesburg on Friday 1 April. Meeting on the day after the important Constitutional Court unanimous judgement on the Nkandla matter, the Politburo naturally devoted most attention to the implications of the judgement and the collective responsibilities that ensue from it. The judgement and yesterday’s public apology to the country by President Zuma were important moments in the re-affirmation and consolidation of constitutionality and the rule of law in our still relatively young democracy.
The SACP knows all too well from the history of many other post-colonial and post-independence third world societies that, where a democratic constitution and the rule of law are eroded by parasitic and comprador elements, often in the fictitious name of fighting “imperialism”, then it is the workers and poor, along with left-wing political formations that quickly become the key victims.
The brutal suppression of mass communist parties at the hands of parasitic nationalist strata from within independence movements in Sudan, Iraq, Egypt, Indonesia and elsewhere in the second half of the 20th century should never be forgotten.
Thursday’s Concourt judgement and the evident popular acclamation it received from the widest array of South Africans should be a clear warning signal to the ANC, to our ANC-led alliance, and to the ANC-led government. Decisive action is now imperative, otherwise the continuing loss of moral authority, political paralysis and fragmentation of our movement will continue. For these reasons, the SACP will seek an urgent meeting with the officials of the ANC and, of course, a commitment to ongoing engagement.
President Zuma’s apology and his undertaking to implement to the full the remedial actions proposed by the Public Protector, and now upheld as enforceable by the Concourt, are important beginnings.
The ANC parliamentary caucus (which includes, of course, SACP members who serve as ANC MPs), also needs to conduct serious and collective soul-searching. The Concourt judgement correctly found that Parliament had failed to exercise its constitutional responsibility in holding the executive to account in the Nkandla matter.
The ANC has a proud history and the very existence of a non-racial, democratic South African parliament owes everything to the decades-long liberation struggle led by the ANC. It is unconscionable that opposition parties old and new, with tarnished origins, have been gifted with the opportunity to occupy the moral and political high ground within the National Assembly. We call on the ANC parliamentary caucus not to be narrowly defensive in the necessary introspection that must now follow.
President Zuma’s acknowledgment that “with hindsight, there are many matters that could have been handled differently and which should never have been allowed to drag on this long” is correct. It lays the basis for a range of further lines of inquiry, reflection and, above all, corrective action. The SACP has long believed that the Nkandla matter should have been handled differently and more expeditiously. The ANC leadership needs to reflect critically on the capacities and motives of a circle of informal presidential courtiers, flatterers, patrons, factionalists and hangers-on. It is a circle that, in our view, continuously and prejudicially exposes the presidency.
It is for this reason that we believe that the Concourt judgement and the dangers of corporate capture are not unconnected. Ever since the 1994 democratic breakthrough the SACP has consistently warned about and exposed instances of corporate capture. We argued that the 1996 adoption of the GEAR macro-economic policy package reflected serious corporate ideological inroads into our movement and state institutions.
We mobilised against the role of Brett Kebble and his criminal circle in perverting strategic parts of the criminal justice system and in particular its seduction and perversion of an ANC Youth League leadership. We exposed former ANC YL’s Julius Malema’s campaign for the “nationalisation of the mines” for what it really was – corporate capture of a new kind.
Malema’s “nationalisation” campaign was co-ordinated and funded by BEE mining interests at a time when their highly-leveraged mining shares were under water. The “nationalisation” call was little more than an attempt to bail these interests out at public expense.
More recently, the SACP has blown the whistle on Koos Bekker’s Naspers/Multichoice/Media24 empire and the manner in which it has infiltrated key state departments, delayed the much needed digital migration process, and undermined the public mandate of the SABC.
Our grave concern about growing evidence of a web of corporate capture interventions by the Gupta family is, therefore, neither a new concern nor, emphatically, a siding with one wing of capitalism against another. The SACP has been a consistent fighter against the role of monopoly capital and the way in which it has locked South Africa’s political economy into a semi-peripheral role within the global imperialist system.
It is a semi-peripheral role that is now in deep trouble, reproducing de-industrialisation, capital flight, the squeezing out of small enterprises, and crisis levels of unemployment, poverty, household indebtedness, and inequality.
We cannot, as a country, engage actively in a transformation struggle against monopoly capital to overcome these challenges without a strategically disciplined and developmentally oriented state. We cannot defend our democratic national sovereignty, we cannot staunch the massive illicit exodus of capital out of our country, if critical state institutions like the South African Revenue Services are captured by corporate interests who are more interested in covering up wrong-doing and using state investigative capacity in factional battles.
We therefore reject with contempt the suggestion that blowing the whistle on the Gupta family is a diversion from the struggle against established monopoly capital.
Thursday’s Concourt judgement and the widespread positive public reaction to it provide an important opportunity for the ANC and the ANC-led movement to seriously embark on a collective process of decisive self-introspection and self-correction. Strict implementation of the remedial measures called for by the Public Protector on Nkandla will be a beginning, but self-correction must clearly go way beyond this.
Statement issued by South African Communist Party Political Bureau, 3 April 2016
