02 December 2002
The Unity of the ANC and the Alliance – the key priority
The 11th Congress Central Committee (CC) of the South African Communist Party (SACP) held its 2nd Plenary Session through an end of year Lekgotla outside of Johannesburg from the 28th to the 30th of November. The CC used the occasion to reflect on the current situation. We sought to analyse new international dynamics, and to assess recent socio-economic data for South Africa. We received and discussed reports from our provinces on the progress and lessons of our ongoing Red October campaign for a comprehensive social protection system. We also approved a programme of action for 2003, and a longer-term five-year programme for the duration of the present CC. In the context of all of these topics, the CC, naturally, discussed the many challenges and current internal tensions within our ANC-led tripartite alliance.
Forward to the Historic 51st National Conference of the ANC
The CC looks forward, and with great optimism, to what will be an historic 51st ANC National Conference, beginning in two weeks time. The December Stellenbosch ANC Conference follows our Alliance Ekhuruleni Summit (April 2002). It also follows the ANC National Policy Conference in mid-October that tabled a wide range of progressive draft resolutions. As ANC spokespersons themselves have underlined, these draft resolutions once more affirm the ANC as a political movement of the left. The National Conference presents us all with an important opportunity to contribute to the building of the unity of the ANC and of its alliance, around progressive policies and programmes of action that prioritise workers and the poor.
The CC underlined the safe-guarding and fostering of the unity of the ANC and its Alliance as the key priority confronting us. We are convinced that the great majority of ANC and alliance comrades, regardless of their various shades of political opinion, are extremely uncomfortable with the excessively polemical, labelling interventions that have characterised recent weeks. These interventions may or may not be responses to our own successful 11th SACP Congress in July. They may or may not be related to the forthcoming ANC National Conference elections. We call on all comrades to focus on the core policy and practical issues. These must be the priority, we cannot afford fragmentation or distraction at this time.
We say this for many reasons.
The Global Situation
The past year, globally, has seen the ending of a decade in which the belief in a benign globalisation was the dominant discourse, whether in regard to economic policy options or political systems, where there was an assumed “global” trend towards domestically-driven “democratic transitions”. The new global reality is increasingly characterised by an aggressive, imperial unipolarity. Leading circles within the US are more boldly asserting their global dominance, they are more openly militaristic and less apologetic about their unilateralism or their preparedness to actively impose “regime change” from the outside. The principled unity of our own Alliance is an important local bulwark in response to these sharpening global challenges.
The unity of our Alliance is also an important factor for the successful consolidation of the NEPAD programme, which is now having to confront a more arrogant North, a North that is often more focused on the “war against terrorism” (often an alibi for the tightening of its grip on Mid-East oil fields) and on “teaching” Third World leaders “lessons”, than on Third World developmental challenges.
As part of our programme of action for the coming five-year period, the SACP will actively deepen its links with fraternal parties, social movements and progressive NGOs around a progressive elaboration of NEPAD and consolidating solidarity and a socialist perspective in the African continent.
Socio-Economic Transformation
Within our country, recent government statistics (report released by Statistics South Africa in mid-November) confirm that, in terms of income poverty and inequality, the average South African household became poorer between October 1995 and October 2000. The income share of the poorest 20 percent of households dropped from a miserly 1,9 percent in 1995 to an even more shocking 1,6 percent by 2000. Even more sobering is the fact that, while the average white household improved its income by 15 percent, the average African household suffered a 19 percent fall.
However, and this is very important, in terms of access to resources there are heartening indications of a significant impact in regard to access to health-care, education, safe drinking water, electricity for lighting, phones and formal housing. Access to these resources all registered significant improvements in the five-year period between 1995 and 2000.
The SACP believes that there are important lessons from these indicators. In particular, where we have tried, even if unevenly, to defend and consolidate the public sector (education and health); where we have, at least until recently, held on to key parastatals and provided them with a relatively clear developmental mandate (electricity and telecommunications); where we have rolled back, to some extent, the capitalist “user- pays” market principle (water and electricity); where we have strategically intervened into the capitalist market with active subsidy policies (housing) – in these cases we have had a tangible transformational impact on the apartheid socio-economic legacy.
Comprehensive Social Security
The SACP’s ongoing national campaign for comprehensive social protection, launched this October, has seen Red October brigades in provinces visiting house-holds, holding township people’s forums, and monitoring pay-out points. SACP activists have worked closely with colleagues from the Department of Social Development, and in some provinces we have helped to register thousands of children for the Child Support Grant. We believe that this popular campaign is an important example of how, more generally, we need to ensure greater alignment of popular organisation and mobilisation with government structures and programmes.
This is another critical challenge facing the Alliance – let us build our unity through systematic programmes of action, organisational building and mobilisation that unite popular forces and government. In particular, we call on the ANC to play a more active leadership role in the mobilisation and organisation of popular forces on the ground. The SACP pledges its full support to any such effort. We cannot consume all our energies on internal Alliance polemic and manoeuvre. If we fail to be active on the ground, we should not complain if other forces fill the vacuum.
We are now a year and a half away from national and provincial elections. The ANC and its Alliance need to use the coming year to push forward with transformation that impacts qualitatively on the lives of millions of South Africans.
The CC discussed the Party’s perspectives on the Basic Income Grant (BIG) proposal, extending the Child Support Grant, and public works programmes. The CC reaffirmed our Congress resolution, expressing support, in principle, for a BIG. There may, however, be many legitimate uncertainties in regard to implementation and feasibility. We urge the ANC National Conference not to dismiss the BIG proposal out of hand, and to keep various options to redressing the dire reality of income destitution on the table and under review. We welcome the proposal to extend the Child Support Grant to children up to 14 years, and hope that this can soon been further extended to 18 years. We also believe that urgent attention should be given to considering dispensing with means testing for the Child Support Grant. From our own campaigning work we have discovered that means testing consumes a high proportion of resources on administration and often acts as an insuperable practical barrier to the very families that are most destitute.
The SACP supports the call for a major roll-out of public works programmes. However, public works programmes should not be seen as a panacea to address all of our problems of income poverty and unemployment. The most successful programme to date, Working for Water, is currently only employing (and often irregularly) some 24,000 individuals. We estimate that a two to three thousand percent increase in budget allocations to public works programmes would be required to reach all households in our country without any bread-winner whatsoever. Public works programmes are costly in terms of administration, with only around one-fifth of the Working for Water budget actually getting to the labourers doing the work. In short, we need a multi-pronged approach to poverty, unemployment and inequality. No one approach should be seen as a panacea, or as a solution that rules out consideration of other programmes.
Many of these issues must be taken to next year’s Growth and Development Summit, and the success of this Summit will itself rest considerably on the capacity of our Alliance to drive progressive policy perspectives. None of our planned programmes either as government or as various stakeholders will be achieved without a united alliance.
Right-wing Terror Attacks
The Central Committee noted the upsurge of right-wing terror attacks and the series of successful arrests made by the SAPS. The SACP agrees with President Thabo Mbeki that these ultra-right forces have no strategic capacity to alter the ongoing consolidation of a non-racial democracy in our country. They do, however, have capacity to cause serious damage. Once more, community vigilance and close working relations with government are the key to dealing with those forces who are futilely bent on “fighting for a better past”. Once more, principled Alliance unity is imperative.
HIV/AIDS
The CC welcomed the high-level negotiations at NEDLAC on a National Treatment and Prevention Plan which preceded this year’s World AIDS Day. The CC urged all the parties to finalise an agreement as soon as possible.
The Trade Union Movement
Meeting on the eve of the 17th Anniversary of the Congress of South African Trade Unions, the CC sent a message of congratulations and support to COSATU. The CC also devoted considerable time to assessing the trade union movement, and the current situation of the working class on the factory floor. Global capitalist trends towards the intensification of exploitation, and related mass lay-offs, increasing capital intensity, contracting out and other practices have had a devastating impact on the South African working class over the past decade. Shop-floor attitudes from the side of management have, in our experience, been marked in the recent period by growing arrogance, unilateralism and high-handedness. Polemical assaults on COSATU from within our own Alliance have not helped. We call on the affiliates of COSATU in particular to re-double their efforts to service their members at the point of production. We also reviewed our own contribution self-critically. The SACP will continue to organise and mobilise for the politicisation of the working class – but this politicisation must not be at the expense of leaving workers unorganised and unprotected in the face of intensified capitalist exploitation at the point of production itself.
The extent to which the organisation and mobilisation of the unionised working class will succeed depends on the relevance and absolute necessity of socialist ideology, strategy and organisation, and the extent to which the working class consolidates its socialist outlook and consciousness. The CC resolved that a fundamental task of the SACP, as the political vanguard of South Africa’s working class, is to deepen the socialist outlook, consciousness and unity of all sections of the working class.
The CC also expressed its view that some of the intra-alliance polemics directed at workers and the “ultra-left” misconstrue what are, essentially, desperate defensive measures by working people. The defensive activities of unions are misguidedly portrayed as “offensive” strategies designed to “attack government or the ANC”. Obviously, we need to assess to what extent particular forms of mobilisation or even agitation might contribute to this false portrayal. We will be actively engaging with our ally, COSATU, in the coming months to review our approach to the organisation and mobilisation of the unionised working class.
In the face of all of these challenges, the Central Committee called on SACP members, as well as comrades in the Alliance, not to be provoked into mutually destructive activities. Consolidating the principled unity of our Alliance, around active programmes, is the key challenge of the coming period.
CONTACT
Mazibuko K. Jara (surname Jara)
Department of Media, Information & Publicity
South African Communist Party
Tel - 011 339-3621/2
Fax - 011 339-4244
Cell - 083 651 0271
Email - mazibuko@sacp.org.za