Umsebenzi Online, Volume 18, No. 12, 6 October 2019
|
Volume 18, No. 13, 6 October 2019 |
|
|
Build Broad Patriotic and Popular Left Fronts: Mobilise to Fix our Country |
 |
SACP Red October Campaign 2019-2020 launch statement
Delivered by Dr Blade Nzimande, SACP General Secretary, 6 October 2019, OR Tambo Hall, Mthatha
Back to community campaigning - Every communist a community activist
The chief focus of our Red October Campaign 2019-2020 is to build community activism. Our overarching objective is to use this focus as a platform to forge broad patriotic and popular left fronts, with emphasis on all levels of government and broader society, as we did resolve at our 14th National Congress. In this regard the grass-roots level is crucially important.
The chief focus and overarching objective of the Red October Campaign 2019-2020 are guided by the task the SACP has assigned all its members, following the Party's assessment of the May 2019 general election. That is, every communist must be a community activist; thematically - Every Communist a Community Activist.
The main aim of the chief focus of the campaign and its overarching objective is to build, sustain and deepen community mobilisation, with the purpose of overcoming the challenges and solving the problems our communities identified during our May 2019 general election campaign. In other words, we are going back to the communities through campaign work, as we did commit ourselves during our May 2019 general campaign. Our strategy is to institutionalise, strengthen and drive the mobilisation consistently to overcome new challenges and solve new problems as well. We are decisively ensuring that our campaign interaction with our communities is consistent and not limited or confined to election campaign periods.
The chief focus, overarching objective, main aim, purpose and strategy of the Red October Campaign 2019-2020 summarise the approach we have adopted to build working-class leadership in the community as a key site of struggle and significant centre of power. This approach also applies to the tasks we are facing in other key sites of struggle and significant centres of power. These include:
- Fixing and turning around our economy, to systematically eliminate inequality, create employment and eradicate poverty;
- Defending workers' rights and hard-won achievements, through workplace struggles, and driving the decent work agenda to improve workers' conditions, working together with the progressive trade union movement;
- Protecting our environment, to slow down and eventually stop the dangerous trend of global warming and the increasing number of 'natural' disasters it is causing;
- Engaging in freedom of expression, exchange and the battle of ideas;
- Building a capable democratic developmental state to serve the people selflessly at all levels of government.
The importance of building a capable democratic developmental state to serve the people selflessly at all levels cannot be overemphasised. This is central to our Red October Campaign 2019-2020 focus on community mobilisation to improve local government, overcome community challenges, solve community problems and drive community development. We now turn our attention on this important focus, followed by the equally important focus areas to fight gender-based violence, violence in general and criminality in our communities.
Much as the Red October Campaign is an SACP campaign, but since the issues we raise affect millions of our people, we invite all our allies, sectoral and community organisations, progressive trade unions, to join us in taking forward the key issues of this campaign. We call upon all our SACP branches and districts to reach out to local and community organisations to join us in this campaign.
The SACP strongly believes that the idea of 'service delivery' does not allow for government and communities to work together. It is as if our people must sit back and wait for the government to deliver. This ends up in our communities waiting for someone who is awarded a tender to come and give them 'services', even where such functions could have been given to communities to perform themselves.
Local government
Despite the commendable progress we have made since 1994, there are still many challenges and problems our people are facing in our communities. A number of these were identified by the people themselves during our May 2019 general election campaign. These include poor quality of services, houses and community-based economic and social infrastructure. In other areas there were incomplete RDP houses and community infrastructure that have been outstanding for many years. In worst case scenarios, local government services had collapsed and basic community infrastructure was non-existent, but the budgets that were allocated had been spent without anything to show on what the money was used for. Corruption had entrenched in an increased number of municipalities, with looting part and parcel of the order of the day.
This is the context in which the latest audit report, produced by the Auditor-General, found increased irregular, wasteful and fruitless spending in many of our municipalities. A recent report released by the Department of Finance found that 125 of our country's 257 municipalities are in varying extents of financial distress, which is a cause for serious concern to the SACP.
Consistent community mobilisation and participatory democracy are essential in dealing local government problems and corruption a blow. This is why the Red October Campaign 2019-2020 strategy is focusing on mobilisation of communities to bring about meaningful improvements in the lives of our people.
The SACP commends and welcomes the initiative led by President Cyril Ramaphosa, in adopting a new District-Based Model for Development. This approach focuses on co-ordinating national, provincial and local government to work together to address, in an integrated manner, the developmental needs of our people in each district. It is an approach to focus on the 44 districts and eight metros that make up our country's local governance.
Coincidentally, this model has been launched here in this very district, the OR Tambo district. We therefore expect the SACP district here to organise its activities better, focusing on how the estimated R11.5 billion to be spent here will be managed and actually spent. This money must make tangible improvements in the lives of our people here. We expect our SACP district, working together with our allies and communities, to understand all the developmental projects planned in this district, the stage they are in, and progress being made in their implementation. Already this is the gist of this district's community-based Red October Campaigning 2019-2020.
The SACP wants the new district-based model for development to serve as a platform for eliminating uneven development and corruption. The SACP, working together with local structures and the Alliance, must ensure that, for instance, no money is said to be allocated to build a bridge without that bridge being built. And we want quality across the country, comrades.
The new District-Based Model of Development requires spatial referencing of national budgets and programmes across all 44 district and eight metropolitan municipalities from 2020/21 budget cycle. Provinces will accordingly have to realign their budgets and programmes.
Last but not least, under the new district-based development model, the distance between planning and community participation will and must be narrowed and eventually eliminated. Participatory democracy, giving effect to the Freedom Charter's principle that the people shall govern, must be entrenched. And our Red October Campaign must make its contribution in this regard.
Gender-based violence
The SACP strongly condemns gender-based violence and all other forms of women abuse, including sexual harassment and rape, human trafficking and sexual slavery, forced sex work, femicide, as well as discrimination against the LGBTIQ+ community members. The SACP also condemns the abuse of women with disabilities, just as we are against any discrimination directed at people with disabilities in general. We expect SACP structures to also pay attention to the needs of our people with disabilities, and to ensure that they are empowered to meaningfully participate and benefit from government programmes.
We reaffirm our unwavering commitment to the struggle against gender-based violence. Two years ago we launched our Red October Campaign focusing on the elimination of gender-based violence. By that time it had become clearer to us, that unless our structures and society as a whole were mobilised, our society was going to be overwhelmed by this scourge.
An increasing number of our schools and higher learning institutions have also become sites of gender-based violence and other forms of criminality, including drugs.
A multi-pronged strategy, including building the progressive women's movement and forging a broad front of women, men and people of all sexual orientations, is required to deal with gender-based violence. Our SACP structures, at all levels, must develop leadership to achieve this national imperative. Our tasks in this regard include strengthening community organisation into street and village committees, and mobilising participation in Community Police Forums.
Immediately following this launch of the Red October Campaign 2019-2020, SACP structures must embark on community mobilisation to collect proposals to government about improving the criminal justice system to deal effectively with the scourge of gender-based violence. This should include proposals on improving social services delivery on gender-based violence cases. The SACP must also seek to work closely with NGOs that are active in dealing with gender-based violence.
The Campaign Against Gender-Based Violence must serve as a practical platform to develop strategies to foster proper socialisation and equal treatment of all children, including now the necessity to focus on both the girl and the boy child.
The SACP reiterates its call for the integration of gender transformation in teaching and learning content in our school, college and university curricula at all levels.
We also want to take this opportunity to continue popularising the Gender-Based Violence Command Centre contact number - 0800428428. We call upon all affected people and survivors of gender-based violence to use the number and ask for the support of the police, social workers and medical practitioners.
Last but not least, violence is often closely related to conditions of the inequality and oppression engendered, particularly in modern society, by the system of capitalist exploitation. To this end, it is clear that the elimination of all forms of violence in society, including gender-based violence, requires the building of a more just society, characterised by equality and social justice, and ultimately socialism - especially for the working class.
Let us build the widest possible patriotic front that we need as society to end gender-based discrimination, abuse and violence.
Violence in general
In 1994, the democratic government inherited extreme forms of violence in our society and communities, including politically inspired forms of violence. Violence was in many instances codified in law. It formed part of the legislation that was adopted by successive colonial-apartheid regimes to continue oppressing the majority of South Africans, and specifically the Black majority.
In production, violence was used as part of on-the-job-training measures and strategies to raise productivity. This became entrenched as 'a way of life', including in domestic employment where 'kitchen girls'; referring to women workers, and 'garden boys'; referring to men workers, were employed. These African elders were referred to as 'girls' and 'boys' and treated as such even by the children of the masters and madams.
In schools, violence in the form of corporal punishment was used as part and parcel of the strategies of teaching.
The violence unleashed in production, at schools and in the oppressive colonial-apartheid regime and its laws, found its way into the homes of its very victims as the way things are being done, as the 'way of life'. Violence became part of the means to 'settle' domestic and community disputes or disagreements. Again women became victims in terms of gender-based violence, and children victims in terms of violent socialisation.
The persisting capitalist economic system challenges of unemployment, poverty and inequality have also entrenched the culture of violence in households and communities, with women, and children, bearing most of the brunt of this violence. This is underpinned by persisting patriarchy and patriarchal stereotypes.
All forms of violence must end!
It is therefore imperative that we mobilise and educate our communities to foster a human-rights based, non-violent national psyche and culture in South Africa in all spheres of social life. The struggle to end violence must be premised on intensifying the struggle against capitalism, whose very system of exploitation is itself a form of violence, and continues to create conditions that generate different forms of violence.
The scourge of drug, human trafficking and sexual slavery
Every person in our land, regardless of whether they are South African citizens or nationals from another country, must observe the rule of law. In order to become successful, the building of a law-based democratic society must deal with criminality without fear, favour and prejudice.
The SACP therefore reiterates its call for decisive action to be taken by law enforcement authorities against all criminal elements, regardless of their nationality. In this regard, law enforcement authorities must not turn a blind eye to the scourge of drugs that is destroying our youth, among other sections of our society. It is a fact that both South Africans and foreign nationals are involved in drug dealing, a form of violence and murder of our youth and destruction of their future.
The taxi driver who was murdered in Tshwane last month, Jabu Baloyi, was reportedly intervening to stop drugs being sold to a school child.
It is also a fact that human trafficking, as well as abduction and sexual abuse of mainly young women, as sexual slaves in forced sex work, also involves both South Africans and foreign nationals. These criminals must be hunted down and held to account for the criminality.
The SACP is calling for the strengthening of criminal law to decisively rid our society of crime. This must in particular include harsher imprisonment terms - duly taking into account the human rights-based society we seek to build.
Let us go all out to strengthen Community Policing Forums and build street and village communities to end criminality in our communities and society at large. Let us work together with law enforcement authorities and decisively hold them to account.
National Health Insurance and the Health Market Inquiry report
The SACP reiterates its support for quality healthcare for all through a successful introduction of the National Health Insurance (NHI). Several findings from the Health Market Inquiry, undertaken by the Competition Commission, confirm what we have been saying as the SACP in our campaign for the introduction of the NHI.
The Competition Commission investigation has revealed many of the things we know, including the following:
- There are a lot of hospital beds in the private health sector which are made to be occupied through unnecessary admissions, occasioned by the need to make profits. Unfortunately, some of the health practitioners and medical aid schemes are colluding and benefitting from greed and looting.
- It is an injustice for the private health sector to exclude those not on medical aid scheme cover from treatment.
- The private profit health sector consumes more than 60% of the country's health resources, yet it caters for less than 20% of our total population.
- The prices charged in the private profit health sector are excessively expensive; the sector is dominated by three private hospital oligopolies, namely Netcare, Mediclinic and Life Healthcare.
- About 70% of medical aid administration is shared between two mega administrators, namely Discovery and Medscheme, underlining what we have been saying all along, as the SACP; most of the health administration money goes to middlemen, often at the expense of both medical aid members and the medical schemes themselves.
It is evidently clearer now to all who care that at the centre of those opposed to the introduction of the NHI are greedy private profit interests involved in the exploitation of the healthcare needs of the people to amass wealth. Those who have a medical aid cover are affected, in many ways. Many of them find themselves effectively without medical aid cover by the second half of the year annually.
A lot of money charged by the private monopoly hospitals does not go to healthcare but goes to private profit. Medical aid schemes have been repurposed and subordinated to feed the roots of this private wealth accumulation regime. Medical aid scheme 'benefits' have been and are continuously restructured to feed this greed.
The SACP, once more, as we have done for more than 20 years now, is calling upon the progressive trade union movement to forge a common front to fight this greed in the private health sector. The trade unions are the most organised and powerful formations in this sector, and have a vested interest to defend the workers and the poor in this regard. The SACP, as always, stands ready to be part of this struggle.
The SACP is also calling upon COSATU and the rest of the trade union movement to be at the forefront in the struggle for the implementation of the NHI. The SACP is part of the #FriendsOfTheNHI Campaign, which is an emerging broad front in support of the NHI. We are going to wage the struggle - until the end - for the successful introduction of the NHI to deliver quality healthcare for all.
Forced migration
There are many problems in Southern Africa and on the African continent resulting in what may be referred to as forced migration of people, through either a search for means of livelihoods or fleeing from political repression. The best way to deal with this situation is to build solidarity with the victims (in essence 'economic and political refugees') and confront the causes and driving forces behind the push factors resulting in forced migration.
We must strengthen Southern African regional and African continental solidarity and drive the mobilisation consistently. We must condemn injustice regardless of where it is being committed in our region and on our continent, and regardless of who is involved in committing the injustice. South Africa is not immune from the negative impact of the problems taking place in our region and on our continent.
To mention but a few situations, the Zimbabwean economy is 'dead', according to what the Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa is attributed to have recently said. Before this, we moderately characterised Zimbabwe as having experienced a huge economic collapse. Over and above the economic collapse, the state in Zimbabwe is still having the tendency to unleash violence against sections of its people.
There are serious problems facing democratisation in Swaziland. The country is ruled by an absolute monarch and ravaged by systemic social problems. During this week Mswati's dictatorship unleashed violence against public sector workers and school children. According to the Swaziland Solidarity Network, 17 workers were hospitalised as a result of injuries and two were fatally injured. The attack by Mswati's dictatorship was in response to the public sector workers demanding a 7.8% salary increases.
The SACP strongly condemns the violence by Mswati's dictatorship and repression of trade unions both in Swaziland and Zimbabwe.
The African continent is littered with situations involving the rise of a post-colonial looting class and associated governance decay, as well as collaboration with former colonial powers, imperialist regimes and the private profit sector to impede post-colonial development and enrich a few. The African revolution has in many situations been abandoned. In particular situations former liberation heroes have become new oppressors of the people. They have digressed from the African revolution and are complicit in forging post-colonial predatory states. Associated with all of these is the rise of the securocrat features of the predatory state, unleashing repression against sections of the people.
South Africa has relatively strong pull factors and is housing many of the migrants forced out of other African countries. We need to unite, forge peaceful co-existence and together carry out the African revolution to fix and develop our region and continent.
The problem South Africa has to battle with now is that its own economy is not fully transformed and developed to look after the needs of the whole of the country's population. For example, South Africa has an unemployment crisis of approximately 10.3 million active and discouraged work-seekers combined. Inequality and poverty remain widespread, despite the commendable massive social achievements millions of our people experienced since 1994.
The aftermath of the global economic crisis, which broke out in 2008, combined with the economic distress and political problems of our region and continent, is also a key factor unravelling in South Africa. The Southern African region continues to be the labour reservoir, not only of South Africa's monopoly capital, but increasingly, post-1994, also of other South African non-monopoly sectors, including domestic employment.
Now unlike prior to 1994, labour from the rest of Southern Africa is occupying the very same informal settlements occupied by South Africa's largely unemployed labour, as a shared social reproductive space. It is also to be found in overcrowded spaces in major cities. This has increased pressures on housing, schools and the public healthcare sector, among other areas of government services and programmes. Increasing forced economic and political migration from other parts of Africa and elsewhere is also adding its own impact.
These factors have led to a situation where the poor are pitted against the poor, and the working class against the working class. This is deepened by the tendency of many unscrupulous employers who are exploiting migrant workers as a source of super-cheap labour, by paying them absolutely close to nothing, taking advantage of the situation that forced them out of their respective countries. This is one of the drivers of the problems emanating from sections of South African workers who find themselves compromised. The SACP says: 'Workers unite regardless of nationality and wage a relentless struggle against exploitation and divide-and-rule by the greedy employers. Do not fight among yourselves as the victims of the exploiters'. .
The SACP strongly condemns those fighting against the victims, and calls for Southern African regional and African continental solidarity to tackle looting and repression in our region and on our continent, and to drive the African revolution. This solidarity, which we have been driving, as the SACP, is central to regional and continental unity and integration. The rest of Southern Africa and the continent must democratise and develop. In order to succeed, this African revolution must be intensified to uproot the domestic looting class, the predatory elite, tyrannies and repressors in every African country. In order to reach its logical completion, the African revolution must uproot neo-colonial and imperialist domination in every African country.
Important announcements
Justice for Chris Hani
On Monday, 7 October 2019 Janusz Walus, the cold-blooded murderer of our former General Secretary Cde Chris Hani, will be back in the High Court of South Africa, in the North Gauteng Division in Tshwane. The unrepentant, unremorseful and unrehabilitated assassin will be challenging the decision by the Minister of Justice denying him parole. Our legal team is handling the matter on our behalf and on behalf of the Hani family. We reiterate our call for full disclosure of the truth and all the circumstances surrounding Hani's assassination. We reiterate our strong opposition to parole for the assassin.
Alliance Political Council
The SACP welcomes the agreement by all ANC-headed Alliance components to continue with the convening of the Alliance Consultative process to agree on an economic policy way forward for our country. The SACP remains firmly convinced that the best way to drive an inclusive economic development strategy is by seeking maximum possible consensus within the Alliance and across society, especially in the ranks of the historical support bases of our struggle for liberation and social emancipation, based on the key commitments contained in the ANC-headed Alliance-formulated and ANC-headed Alliance-endorsed ANC 2019 election manifesto.
Neither the parasitic behaviour of the Gupta-linked networks nor an attempted imposition of a neo-liberal, GEAR-type economic regime, will take us out of the economic difficulties our country is in. A successful economic policy for our country is as good as it is able to get a buy in from the key motive forces of the national democratic revolution - our shared programme of transformation and development.
The SACP will continue with and deepen the Financial Sector Campaign. In this regard the perspectives we have developed to achieve financial sector transformation form part and parcel of our economic policy content. We want a financial sector that serves the needs of the people as opposed to perpetuating financial exploitation.
Building public, collective, social and worker ownership, including co-operatives, is an indispensible requirement of financial sector transformation, as well as broader structural economic transformation, to build an economy that benefits all the people. That is, to build a people's economy. This we shall continue pushing consistently in every economic policy engagement.
Every Communist a Community Activist!
Umsebenzi Online is an online voice of the South African working class
