SACP denounces attacks and lies peddled by proto-fascist and right-wing opposition parties in Parliament

14 February 2019

Liberal-conservative attacks

The DA, a liberal-conservative party that seeks to curtail the role of the democratically elected government of South Africa in the post-1994 period and thus expand space for the control of the economy by capitalist private wealth accumulation interests, used debates on the State of the Nation Address in Parliament, Cape Town, on Wednesday, 13 February 2019, to attack the national democratic revolutionary Alliance headed by the ANC. It is a fact that the architecture of the prevailing capitalist mode of production in South Africa was designed in the interests of imperialism, imposed colonially and furthered through apartheid.

The liberal ideology that seeks to curtail the role of the democratically elected government in the economy inevitably seeks to feed the roots of racial supremacy and thereby conserve the racist economic legacy that dates back to colonialism and apartheid. The conservatives who supported colonialism as clearly defended by the DA’s Helen Zille, and who benefitted from apartheid and white privilege, took refuge in liberalism post-1994. They viewed the ANC-led democratically elected government through racial lenses as a black government that had to be kept out of the economy in line with liberalism. This employment of liberalism in South Africa is essentially racist regardless of the mask on its face. The SACP strongly condemns it.

Proto-fascist attacks

One Mr Floyd Shivambu of the proto-fascist party, the EFF, a DA voting alliance partner, made an outrageous claim that in 1991 the current President of the ANC and the Republic, Comrade Cyril Ramaphosa, was denied membership of the SACP by the Party because he was regarded as a sell-out. This utterance is baseless and false. The SACP dismisses it with the contempt it deserves.

Floyd has no right whatsoever to speak for the SACP because he is a renegade and detractor of the Party.  He is not part of the SACP and has no standing in the Party.

It is a historical fact that the SACP widely opened its membership in 1991 to build and further develop itself as a large vanguard Party under the new conditions of legality. The Party was emerging from underground organisation and also returning from exile after 41 years of its banning by the DA’s predecessor, the National Party, under the Suppression of Communism Act. In fact the DA’s attack on the national democratic revolutionary Alliance and the focus of the attack on the SACP and the progressive trade union federation, Cosatu, is a continuation of a politics of the apartheid regime’s Suppression of Communism Act.

Mr Terror Lekota

Mr Lekota accused President Ramaphosa of selling out during apartheid. The fact is that Mr Terror himself is not COPEing in what clearly appears to have passed a point of no return to the dustbin of history. He has resorted to fabricating baseless allegations in order to try and COPE and attract attention to himself. The least said about Mr Lekota and his clearly fast disappearing COPE the better.

Issued by Alex Mohubetswane Mashilo, National Spokesperson & Head of Communications, 15 February 2019