Monday 4th April 2016 posted by Morning Star in World
'Decisive action now imperative,' say leaders
by Our Foreign Desk
SOUTH AFRICA'S communists welcomed the Constitutional Court's judgment on President Jacob Zuma's rural home in Nkandla yesterday.
A South African Communist Party (SACP) political bureau meeting, which began on Friday, concentrated on the implications of the judgment and the collective responsibilities ensuing from it.
The judgment and Saturday's public apology to the country by Mr Zuma were "important moments in the reaffirmation and consolidation of constitutionality and the rule of law in our still relatively young democracy," the party's leadership said.
The SACP recognised from the experience 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 … then it is the workers and poor, along with left-wing political formations, that quickly become the key victims."
It added that the court judgment and the "evident popular acclamation it received from the widest array of South Africans should be a clear warning signal to the ANC [African National Congress], 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."
The party saw the presidential apology and his undertaking to implement fully the remedial actions proposed by Public Protector Thuli Madonsela as "important beginnings."
It urged that the ANC parliamentary caucus, which includes SACP members deployed as ANC MPs, should conduct serious and collective soul-searching, especially since parliament had failed to exercise its constitutional responsibility in holding the executive to account over Nkandla.
To have gifted "opposition parties old and new, with tarnished origins," the opportunity to occupy the moral and political high ground was unconscionable, the SACP stressed.
"The SACP has long believed that the Nkandla matter should have been handled differently and more expeditiously," it said.
"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," the party warned.