Struggling in unchartered waters
Revolution is foundering under weight of corruption, state capture, lies, arrogance
SACP first deputy general secretary Solly Mapaila spoke at its 96th Anniversary Rally in Khayelitsha, Cape Town, on August 19. This is an edited version of his speech:
ON July 30, the SACP marked its 96th anniversary which coincided with an increasingly difficult situation. In summary, the revolution has been plunged into a worse crisis since our historic April 1994 democratic breakthrough. The revolution has effectively been pushed into unchartered waters. Without fundamentally altering the way things are going in the troubled waters, without a successful turnaround strategy, the ANC might not pass the mark of 50% in the 2019 elections.
Things are unfolding as if our alliance does not exist. There is a growing tendency of arrogance from within the ANC to think and behave as if the ANC is the whole alliance. This is why those pushing this tendency do not mind to issue statements misinforming the public, saying that we have held alliance meetings since the SACP and Cosatu independently decided that it was time for President Jacob Zuma to resign. The lie does not end there. It goes on, without shame, to allege that the matter was discussed exhaustively with alliance partners expressing their views at platforms created by the ANC.
The ANC we know did not earn its hegemony through lies. It earned it through the truth. Lies and arrogance will liquidate the ANC and destroy the alliance. This process is already under way as evidenced in the now fast-declining ANC electoral support and weakening of alliance unity.
When the ANC cancelled this year’s June Alliance Political Council meeting the SACP responded by calling for the meeting to take place as a matter of urgency. That has not happened, yet the ANC claimed this week that it has always created platforms for engagement with alliance partners to make decisions. We want to take this opportunity to reiterate our call for an urgent Alliance Political Council meeting to discuss, not trivial issues, but the major decision by the SACP and Cosatu that it was time for President Zuma to resign and, if not, the ANC must recall him.
Zuma’s resignation or recall will form the basis for resolving the endless problems associated with his pathetic and failing leadership. We must successfully deal with the problems of corruption, rent-seeking, corporate capture of the state, and corporate capture of sections of our movement and its leaders – that is, if we want the movement to emerge united and decisively victorious in the 2019 elections. These have become worse during the terms of office of Zuma as the head of state. His friends, the Guptas, who are in business with his son, have made a lot of money from state owned enterprises, from decisions made or influenced by those they are very close to or their captured network of public office bearers, officials and executives of state entities.
The SACP has nothing in common with ratings agencies. We are not oblivious to the deleterious consequences of their downgrading decisions. Zuma’s reckless decision-making, without consultation with the ANC – as acknowledged by other ANC national officials (for example, the last cabinet reshuffle), and without consultation with the alliance, has delivered our country, on a silver platter, to a junk status.
The consequences are enormous. The cost of borrowing has shot sky high. Our economy slipped into recession. Thousands of workers in the mining sector are facing retrenchments. Zuma’s blind loyalists, those who said the rand must be allowed to fall as they will easily “pick it up”, have no solution. They are not experiencing any problems personally – because they are living out of taxpayers’ money.
Unemployment, inequality and poverty remain high. And the solution is not to hand over our country to the dictatorship of the International Monetary Fund in the name of radical economic transformation. Such a sell out “radical economic transformation” is not true radical economic transformation. It is false. It will bring our democratic national and policy sovereignty to an end and replace both with IMF dictates.
The solution lies in dealing with governance decay, corruption, wasteful and fruitless expenditure, irregular spending, state capture, illicit tenders, and rotten leadership. Those who think these problems that have become worse under Zuma’s leadership will be solved under his leadership are day dreaming. They have buried their heads in the sand from hard facts, from the truth, from reality.
Our revolution is indeed struggling in unchartered waters.
The situation facing our programme to complete the liberation of our historically oppressed people towards social emancipation is facing uncertain circumstances. The future of our people, the majority of whom is made up of the workers, the unemployed and the poor, in rural and urban areas, is hanging in the balance. Our hard-won 1994 historic breakthrough, and its subsequent constitutional achievements are facing a real threat of erosion.
Organisationally tendencies that are foreign to the revolutionary values that we developed to guide our conduct in our 96 years of unbroken struggle for national liberation and socialism have become entrenched. These are the values of revolutionary moral superiority, the values that we did not elaborate entirely alone but through mutual influence with our 105 year-old ally, our own mass-based national liberation organisation, the ANC. These are the values that we also developed in alliance with our country’s progressive trade union movement.
Principled unity has collapsed, or been replaced with unprincipled, factionally articulated unity. The principle of democratic centralism proper, which involves freedom of discussion based on consensus-seeking, democratic consultation towards binding decisions, has been replaced with factional centralism and avoidance or suppression of democratic consultation. Revolutionary discipline has collapsed, replaced with factional discipline. Accountability is factionalised or non-existent.
Factionalism, corporate capture of the state and of some sections of our movement, corruption, networks of patronage and complicity with parasites (the parasitic bourgeoisie) in the hollowing out of state institutions and public entities, have become a entrenched. This is destroying our movement and shedding its support and hard-won democratic hegemony.
But the rot of corruption, rent-seeking and state capture always everywhere involves the “hidden hand” from the private sector, from private wealth accumulation interests on the “demand side”. On the “supply side” it involves corruptible or captured bureaucrats (public sector officials), public office bearers or public representatives who at times act together in concert. The epicentre of this rot lies in tenders or supply chain management.
Associated with this rot is state dependency on the “invisible hand” of the capitalist market for the production and delivery of pubic goods and services. This does not mean private sector investment is less important. It is still important, but rests in a contribution to the achievement of national transformation and development imperatives, rather than in the exploitation and looting of our national wealth and public resources. This is why the SACP is worried about looming retrenchments of thousands of workers in the mining sector.
The rot is compounding the triple capitalist produce of persisting high levels of inequality, unemployment and poverty. Millions of workers who wake up in the early hours of the morning, or who work under tiring shift patterns, live in poverty as if they are unemployed. The lack of a safe, reliable and affordable public transport system, coupled with the persisting legacy of apartheid settlement patterns that forced black people far away from work, means that they spend a significant portion of their wages on transport.
Crime and violence, including violence against women and children, have plunged our communities into a crisis of insecurity and fear. Drug dealing, drug and substance abuse, have become widespread. State organs that are supposed to be fighting the rot are increasingly losing the trust of the people, the crimes are endless and have almost become an established system.