SACP Central Committee Statement

The South African Communist Party (SACP) held its Central Committee Plenary in Johannesburg from Friday, 11 October to Sunday, 13 October 2024.

This Plenary of the Central Committee took place following our highly successful Red October Campaign 2024–2025 launch in eMalahleni, Mpumalanga, under the theme “Tackle the cost-of-living crisis. Implement the NHI now!” The positions adopted by the Central Committee advance and broaden the objectives of the Red October Campaign and intensify the working-class struggle.

We discussed the political report presented by Party General Secretary Solly Mapaila, along with other reports on the SACP’s work and its analysis of both domestic and international situations. The Central Committee reviewed discussion documents and other preparations for the 5th Special National Congress of the Party, scheduled for December 2024.

Class struggle in the aftermath of a monumental setback

In light of the monumental setback in the May 2024 elections, the ANC’s decline to below 50 per cent plus one parliamentary seat and its subsequent, deliberate political choice to establish the “Government of National Unity” (GNU) coalition arrangement including right-wing parties like the DA, a neo-liberal manifestation and organisational evolution of apartheid beneficiaries at its core, the SACP adopted a critical stance towards the GNU. The Central Committee reaffirmed this stance. The pursuit of the right-wing-including GNU coalition arrangement contradicted our position, shared at Alliance Secretariat and Political Council briefing sessions, especially our rejection of coalition arrangements involving the DA and underpinned by a neo-liberal agenda.

We will intensify our programme of national-revolutionary transformation policies, defending the National Democratic Revolution as a strategy to overcome imperialist domination and achieve non-capitalist development, while vehemently opposing neo-liberal and other right-wing policies and forces both within and outside the GNU in its current form and underpinning class character as the subject and site of struggle.

While reaffirming that our critical posture towards the GNU is different from adopting an opposition stance towards the ANC, the Central Committee emphasised our unwavering right to oppose and mobilise against a rightward shift in government policy, as in its composition. However, in no particular way does this mean that we must or will accept the wrong things propagated or advanced in the name of the ANC.

To give practical effect to this immediately, the Central Committee strongly denounced the conduct of ANC National Officials who, in seeking to justify their embrace of the right-wing and neo-liberal DA in the GNU coalition arrangement, embarked on misinterpreting facts about our Party and General Secretary, Solly Mapaila, also seeking to isolate him from the SACP.

For the record, Mapaila is not the so-called “lone voice”: as our General Secretary, he correctly led the charge in advancing our stance as the SACP regarding the right-wing-including GNU coalition arrangement. In addition, there are many other South Africans beyond the SACP who share similar views as the SACP. We will not allow any person, regardless of their position, to export their factional opinions or conduct to the SACP.

We will not allow our participation in Alliance processes to be misinterpreted as participation in capitalist class consolidation projects.

Alliance reconfiguration, confronting capitulation to capital and forces representing the apartheid legacy

Without reconfiguration of the Alliance, the ANC’s unilateral approach to major political and policy questions will undermine the socialist axis of the Alliance. Since the May 2024 elections, the Alliance has not met to provide joint programmatic direction for the manifesto commitments adopted by all Alliance partners or to offer strategic collective leadership towards the government’s Medium-Term Development Plan for 2024 to 2029.

The class collaboration, or elite pact, forged with the DA in the name of the ANC through the GNU coalition arrangement, will further undermine the Alliance, particularly its socialist axis. This is evident in the capitulation to forces representing the apartheid legacy as exposed by the postponed implementation of clauses 4 and 5 of the Basic Education Laws Amendment Act, the flirtation with the greedy, profit-driven capitalist agenda seeking to delay or water down the National Health Insurance, and the reformist, or ineffectual, “kicking-the-can-down-the-road” attitude towards the establishment, especially initial funding, of the sovereign wealth fund.

The Central Committee strongly denounced and committed to develop a vanguard role in confronting the capitulation, along with other rightward shifts in or revisionist interpretations of our Alliance’s shared commitments.

The socialist axis of the Alliance can no longer rely solely on seeking reconfiguration from within. While continuing to build the vanguard character of the SACP, we will intensify efforts to forge a popular left front and build a powerful, socialist movement of the workers and poor. This shall form part of the broader imperative to reconfigure the Alliance, including from without, and remains open in our modalities to contest the battle of democracy and elections as resolved by our Special National Congress, the National Congress and further elaborated by the Augmented Central Committee.

Radical policy change

In taking forward our critical stance towards the GNU coalition arrangement, we will intensify the imperative for a radical policy change and defence of the National Democratic Revolution, including through the following policy and mobilisation programme.

The Medium-Term Budget Policy Statement, set to be tabled on 30 October 2024, along with every annual budget starting from February 2025, and the Medium-Term Development Plan, must drive a decisive shift in policy and advance radical structural economic transformation. It is imperative to break away from the failed policies of the past 28 years, particularly those implemented since the neo-liberal economic policy called Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) was imposed in 1996.

The hard-won gains from progressive policies over the past 30 years of our democratic dispensation, achieved by millions, are now threatened by the devastating consequences of neo-liberalism, which has utterly failed to stop de-industrialisation or address the crises of mass unemployment, widespread poverty, and extreme inequality, all of which correlate with the high levels of crime ravaging our country. There must be no room for half-measures – every action must prioritise building and increasing South Africa’s productive forces and vigorously fighting to end inequality, unemployment, poverty and uneven development.

Persisting with the failed post-1996 economic policy regime would be a gross betrayal of justice and the working class – the majority of our people – and a reckless disregard of the clear warning sign in the ANC’s gradual electoral decline and eventual loss of majority support.

To improve the standard of living of the impoverished millions of the workers and poor, the government must abandon austerity budgeting, invest substantially in transformation and development, implement a programme that places our basic national wealth and resources in the hands of the people as a whole and combat their manipulation by elitist groupings, whether white or black. Only through bold, radical change can we lift our economy from the yoke of historical underdevelopment, low levels of domestic production output and unlock our true national potential.

The SACP calls for and will in the coming period strengthen its mobilisation of the working class to press for the following transformation and development measures relentlessly.

State-led investment

The government and public entities must take the lead by ramping up their annual investments in critical economic infrastructure. This includes expanding road networks, building new state-owned power generation capacity, publicly owned ports and constructing bulk water infrastructure to support the economy and ensure that all families – especially those still having no piped water – gain access to this basic necessity.

The stat-led infrastructure programme should include massive investments in sanitation, public healthcare, education and integrated human settlements infrastructure, including recreational facilities, to drive inclusive economic growth, tackle uneven development and uplift disadvantaged communities.

Government spending on goods and services must be strategically controlled and enhanced to prioritise domestic production and localisation.

Moratoriums on filling vacant posts in the state must be lifted immediately. The filling of all vacant posts must no longer be delayed – this is a crucial step in realising the vision of a capable developmental state.

To achieve this, austerity measures or fiscal consolidation, which have crippled growth and negatively impacted the working class, must be decisively ended.

Monetary policy and the Reserve Bank

The mandate of the Reserve Bank must be radically transformed, prioritising both maximum sustainable employment creation to resolve the unemployment crisis and advance high-quality, inclusive growth. This means renouncing the restrictive, neo-liberal inflation-targeting regime which is anchored in interest rate hikes and makes the cost of finance exorbitant, and instead using monetary policy as a developmental instrument for driving industrialisation and supporting large-scale employment creation.

Expanding credit at affordable levels to stimulate diversified production and create large-scale employment must become central to economic policy.

These are among the essential steps to dismantle the neo-liberal policy regime that has constrained our economy, negatively impacting the working class for too long. It is the neo-liberal policy regime that has maintained the paradigm of high levels of inequality, poverty and unemployment, which, dating back to GEAR in 1996, has been above 20 per cent and later above 30 per cent crisis levels by the narrow definition that excludes discouraged work seekers, and above 40 per cent when they are considered in terms of the expanded definition.

Public employment programmes and social policy

The government must prioritise public employment programmes, transforming them into a powerful engine of the national imperative to pursue the Freedom Charter’s right of all to work. These programmes must provide workers with decent pay and working conditions.

Public employment programmes must also become a key site for skills development, including through significantly expanding their reach to cover more unemployed work seekers and prepare them for work opportunities in other sectors.

The Social Relief of Distress Grant must be radically improved, at the very least doubled, or at least set to the minimum food poverty line and then progressively increased towards the upper-bound poverty line.

This support should immediately be extended to cover every unemployed South African and offer them relief from the brutal high cost of living. Beyond survival, this grant should empower the unemployed to seek skills training and decent work opportunities actively.

Advancing towards a comprehensive social security system, including the transformation of the Social Relief of Distress Grant into a universal basic income grant, can play a crucial role in the broader policy interventions needed to tackle the cost-of-living crisis. This crisis affects 12.4 million unemployed people and the 40 per cent of our national population who, in 2023, lived below the lower middle-income poverty line of $3.65 per day (equivalent to R63.44 at recent exchange rates).

Industrialisation and sectoral policies

A well-resourced, high-impact and whole-of-government driven industrialisation policy, including domestic beneficiation of our mineral resources and localisation, is a key imperative that the SACP will deepen its efforts to ensure is adopted and implemented.

Sectoral support policies must be directed towards securing sustainable livelihoods and radically raising the levels of food production to ensure national food sovereignty. This is essential not only for domestic food security but also for annually boosting agricultural exports.

Sectoral policies must also focus on raising production levels and exports across all industries, with a strategic focus driven by aggressive broad-based industrialisation to break the stranglehold of historical underdevelopment and economic stagnation.

Through developmental sectoral policies, the government must take decisive action to lower the exorbitant costs of communication and transportation. This includes slashing the price of mobile data and advancing the urgent need for an integrated, safe, reliable and affordable public transport system that serves the working class – not just the privileged few.

For too long, industrial policy measures and the funding necessary for industrialisation have been sabotaged by fiscal consolidation, austerity, or budget cuts. This must be stopped immediately if South Africa is to break free from the shackles of low national output, de-industrialisation and the crippling levels of unemployment and poverty that devastate millions of our people.

All unnecessarily outsourced public sector functions must be in-sourced. The remainder of the state’s procurement of goods and services must be uncompromising in promoting localisation and developing domestic production capacity.

Expanding skills development across all sectors of the economy is critical. The government must also rapidly scale up the post-school education and training sector, including through considerations to establish new technical and vocational education and training colleges and additional universities to meet the needs of an industrialised economy and our increased national population.

Scaling up investment in the economy and turning around state-owned enterprises

Public development finance institutions, such as the Industrial Development Corporation, Public Investment Corporation and the Development Bank of Southern Africa, must strengthen their role in driving industrialisation and supporting investments in state-led infrastructure development. These institutions should strive to build a leading role in the state in building a powerful, state-directed economy that can challenge the dominance of private monopoly capital and de-monopolise monopoly- or oligopoly-dominated sectors of our economy.

State-owned enterprises, including those in the financial sector, such as the Land Bank, must be turned around and thrive. The state must actively drive the growth of the public economy, ensuring it not only survives but thrives through robust expansion and diversification. The public economy must advance to become a key force in transforming South Africa’s economic landscape, unlocking opportunities that serve the people as a whole, the majority being the working class.

Financial sector transformation

To drive the turnaround and expansion of the public economic sector, the government must, with equal importance, prioritise the immediate implementation of financial sector transformation as an apex medium-term development plan priority, including the commitments adopted by all Alliance partners in the May 2024 election manifesto, namely:

Building a state banking sector through the creation of development and sectoral banks, among others, focusing on supporting industrialisation.

Establishing a public retail banking system to meet the people’s financial service needs.

Empowering provinces to create state-owned provincial banks.

Supporting the growth of co-operative banks, including ensuring that they gain affordable access to the national payment system.

Finalising the establishment of a public sovereign wealth fund and build it to serve as a key source of funding for transformation and development goals.

Introducing prescribed assets to direct increased investment into industrialisation and infrastructure development.

Adequately recapitalising public development finance institutions to ensure they thrive and support transformation and development efforts.

The implementation of these and other commitments in the progressive thrust of the manifesto cannot depend solely on the government. Consistent working-class mobilisation is therefore essential, both in securing implementation and in combating capitulation or reformism.

Positive impact of a radical policy change

Modelling by the Applied Development Research Solutions on some of the measures we outlined plus others at significant levels of macro-economic policy support and change underlined a radical reduction of unemployment and poverty by 2030.

The real problem, in addition to the constraints associated with the persisting legacy of colonialism and apartheid, the impact of the multiple global capitalist system crises and the recent history of corporate and mafia state capture, is the government’s choice of austerity, hidden behind or executed under the euphemism of fiscal consolidation.

To confront the problems, the SACP will combine mobilising and developing technical capacity with advancing sustained mass action, building maximum working-class unity and working with other progressive forces, in particular, forging a popular left front and building a powerful, socialist movement of the workers and poor.

Fighting gender-based violence

The Central Committee strongly condemned the brutality of rape across the country and the extortion called “protection from rape” demanded by rape gangs from targeted victims in Mqhekezweni, the Eastern Cape. We call on the law enforcement authorities to leave no stone unturned in hunting down and bringing the perpetrators to book.

The SACP has directed its structures in the Eastern Cape, and across the country, to strengthen consistent community mobilisation efforts and technical capacity building to complement the law enforcement authorities in clamping down on the sexual assaults and other forms of gender-based violence, including femicide. This must be intensified now, ahead of the 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence from 25 November to 10 December 2024 and sustained beyond this period.

Fighting crime

The Central Committee reaffirmed the SACP’s Red October message by strongly condemning the recent criminal massacres in the Eastern Cape, which claimed 18 lives in Lusikisiki. This attack reflects a broader crisis of lawlessness, with communities terrorised by drug networks, construction mafias, extortion gangs and other criminal syndicates.

Decisive action by law enforcement authorities and consistent societal mobilisation are essential, leaving no stone unturned, as part of an integrated effort required, while simultaneously increasing our total productive forces as rapidly as possible to resolve the unemployment, poverty, inequality and social reproduction crises.

International solidarity and struggle against imperialism

The SACP stands firmly with the people of Palestine in their just struggle for their fundamental right to national self-determination and against the genocide, other human rights violations and occupation of their land by the apartheid Israeli settler regime – which the Central Committee strongly condemned.

Israel must end its occupation of Palestine unconditionally and immediately. The leaders of the apartheid Israeli settler regime must be held accountable for the genocide and other human rights violations they have committed against the Palestinian people, as well as their blatant disregard for the rulings of the International Court of Justice.

We reiterate our unequivocal condemnation of the imperialist United States-backed Israeli settler regime for the systemic genocide, ongoing Palestinian human rights violations and illegal occupation of Palestinian land, depriving the Palestinian people of their statehood.

In the same vein, the Central Committee condemned the Israeli settler regime’s attacks, killings and destruction in Syria, Iran and Lebanon. We pledge solidarity with the axis of resistance against Zionism and the apartheid Israeli settler regime in the Middle East.

We stand with the people of Western Sahara in their just struggle against occupation by the imperialist-backed Morocco. The Central Committee welcomed the ANC’s statement reaffirming its solidarity with the people of Western Sahara and calling to order its International Relations sub-Committee Deputy Chairperson Obed Bapela regarding his utterances on Morocco and Western Sahara.

The Central Committee reiterated the SACP’s condemnation of the imperialist regime of France for its unlawful recognition of Morocco’s so-called sovereignty over Western Sahara. We welcome the recent European Court of Justice ruling that the European Commission breached the right of the people of Western Sahara to self-determination by concluding trade deals with Morocco on fish, agricultural and other products from Western Sahara.

We reiterate our revolutionary solidarity with the people of Swaziland in their just struggle for democracy, unconditional unbanning of political parties, release of political prisoners and the safe return of political exiles.

South African law enforcement authorities must act swiftly in investigating the recent forced poisoning and attempted assassination of Swaziland People's United Democratic Movement President Mlungisi Makhanya, as well as the assassinations of other Swaziland democracy activists in South Africa.

The SACP reiterates its unwavering support for the people and government of Cuba against the ongoing imperialist aggression, illegal blockade and sanctions against Cuba by the United States regime. We reiterate our call for an end to every aspect of the imperialist aggression and blockade to end unconditionally and with immediate effect. Equally important, the imperialist regime of the United States must remove Cuba from the so-called “list of state sponsors of terrorism”.

In the same vein, the Central Committee reaffirmed the SACP’s unwavering solidarity with the people and democratically elected government of Venezuela, and the people of Nicaragua and Bolivia. We stand firmly against United States imperialist attempts at undermining their democratic national sovereignty or destabilising their countries and anti-imperialist gains.

The Central Committee reaffirmed the SACP’s unwavering call for immediate peace and stability in Sudan, calling for an end to the war. We urge all progressive forces to strengthen efforts towards a negotiated resolution and national democracy.

The SACP calls for unwavering international solidarity with the people of Haiti as they face an escalating humanitarian crisis fuelled by gang violence, displacements and imperialist exploitation. The international community, especially progressive governments and the world working class, must act urgently, not just with humanitarian aid, but by supporting the Haitian people’s democratic sovereignty against imperialist interference that they have endured, and which has destabilised Haiti in various ways for many years.

Tribute to King Sibiya

While in session, the Central Committee received the sad news that King Sibiya, a lifelong South African activist, SACP member and champion of housing rights, breathed his last. Sibiya dedicated much of his life to fighting unscrupulous practices by banks, court officials and insurance practitioners. As the leader of the Lungelo Lethu Human Rights Foundation, Sibiya stood at the forefront of battles against unjust evictions and unlawful repossessions of homes, often sold at auction for a fraction of their value.

Sibiya’s tireless efforts bore fruit in significant legal victories, such as the 2018 Johannesburg High Court ruling, which mandated that repossessed homes cannot be auctioned without a reserve price. This judgment was a hard-fought victory that sought to prevent the abusive banking practices that had allowed properties to be sold for as little as R10, devastating homeowners, particularly from disadvantaged communities.

Message of condolences to Tito Mboweni family and the ANC

The Central Committee extended the SACP’s heartfelt condolences to the Mboweni family and our broader liberation movement on the great loss encountered. While in session, the Central Committee received the tragic news that Tito Mboweni, former ANC National Executive Committee member, breathed his last. Mboweni will be remembered for his significant contributions to the liberation struggle and for leading the development of progressive labour legislation as South Africa’s first Minister of Labour following our hard-won April 1994 democratic breakthrough.

Message of condolences to Mathabatha’s family

The Central Committee extended its sincere condolences to its member, Chupu Stanley Mathabatha, Deputy Minister of Land Reform and Rural Development, and to the entire Mathabatha family, for the tragic loss encountered. On the final day of its Plenary, the Central Committee received the heartbreaking news that Mathabatha’s mother, Mme Grace Mathabatha, breathed her last.

Issued by the South African Communist Party,

Founded in 1921 as the Communist Party of South Africa.

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