Reaction to FNB advert like Lady Macbeth’s guilty rants

It is never a good sign when an organisation or individual completely overreacts to perceived criticism. As the simmering discontent of South Africa’s underclass boils over into open revolt and violence and as corrupt shoot-to-kill cops are increasingly deployed in places as far flung as Marikana, De Doorns and Sasolburg to protect the old and new elites from the wrath of the dispossessed, some politicians are increasingly resembling Lady Macbeth, driven by their guilt and shame to commit ever more heinous misdeeds. The hysterical and often undemocratic response of various ANC and SACP structures to the silly First National Bank (FNB) advertising campaign is a case in point.

In Shakespeare’s “Macbeth”, Lady Macbeth urges her husband to kill Duncan, the king, to allow Macbeth to satisfy his ambitions of becoming king. She overrides all of her husband’s objections by challenging his manhood and he relents and kills Duncan. Later Lady Macbeth becomes racked with guilt and sleepwalks through the palace, haunted by the murder of the former king. In this trance she tries to wash off imaginary bloodstains from her hands, shouting: “Out, damned spot! Out, I say!—One, two. Why, then, ’tis time to do ’t. Hell is murky!—Fie, my lord, fie! A soldier, and afeard? What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account?—Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him.”

The response of the ANC, the ANC Youth League and the SACP to the FNB campaign resembles the attempts of Lady Macbeth to clean imaginary bloodstains from her hands.

“What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account?”

The FNB campaign includes videos of young South Africans apparently speaking their minds. In one of the videos a participant says: “Stop voting for the same government in hopes for change – instead, change your hopes to a government that has the same hopes as us.”

The ANC Youth League and SACP joined the ANC in slamming the campaign, with the league saying it was “deeply angered and disappointed” by the bank’s “treacherous” campaign. On Sunday, Youth League spokeswoman Khusela Sangoni-Khawe said FNB had failed in trying to “recreate an Arab Spring of some sort in South Africa” and said it “uses children to make unproven claims of a government rife with corruption. We call upon South Africans to close ranks against what is a treacherous attack on our country.”

ANC spokesperson Jackson Mthembu said the ANC (who is never directly mentioned in any of the videos) was “appalled” by the campaign in which the ANC, its leadership and government were “under attack” the campaign was an “undisguised political statement that makes random and untested accusations against our government in the name of discourse. While we believe that people are entitled to their views, we don’t accept that young kids should be used as proxies to articulate political views espoused, as in the case of the FNB advertisement.”

“Out, damned spot! Out, I say!”

These vehement reactions to what appear to be rather mild criticisms of the government and platitudes about one’s right to vote for the party of one’s choice (widely accepted in any functioning democracy) are curious for several reasons.

First, whatever one might think of FNB and its advertising campaign (and I am not a fan of the campaign or of the lily-livered manner in which the bank caved in to political thugs), the manner in which several ANC and SACP spokespersons conflated the ANC with the state and with the country is worrying. The ANC is not the state. Neither is it the sole representative of the South African people. South Africa, in the words of the Freedom Charter, belongs to all who live in it – it does not belong to the ANC. Like any political party, the ANC deserves to be praised when it does something well and deserves to be criticised when it abandons the poor that it professes to love and serve.

Second, the statement that the FNB campaign is treacherous and tries to recreate the Arab Spring, is anti-democratic and – I am sorry to have to use such an emotive term – proto-fascist. There is nothing wrong with telling people that they should refrain from voting for the governing party. Voting for whomever one pleases is at the heart of political freedom in a democratic state. Every democratic election is based on a fair and free contestation between political parties in which we are all allowed to express our preferences.

We are also all free to try and convince others to vote for the ANC, to vote for the DA, or to vote for the TP (Tender Party), for that matter. It is probably not a great business model for a Bank to get involved in an advertising campaign that might alienate the majority of voters, but if it does, there is nothing treacherous about it. If FNB had not pulled the adverts I might even have lauded the bank for putting its principles (which one may agree or disagree with) before naked profits.

The Arab Spring refers to various uprisings organised by oppressed populations in countries where citizens did not enjoy political rights and where democratic contestation and free and fair elections could not be held. To refer to an advertising campaign in which a teenager urges people in South Africa to vote for the party of their choice as an attempt to recreate an Arab Spring, suggests the ANC Youth league believes that South Africa is not a democracy, that its citizens are oppressed and do not enjoy political rights and that they will never be allowed to change the government by using their vote. Like Lady Macbeth wandering in a trance and trying to wash off imaginary bloodstains from her hands, the ANC Youth League is revealing rather more than it intended about its own undemocratic tendencies. Pity Jackson Mthembu will not display the same sense of outrage about this full-frontal attack on our democracy.

Whether one is a staunch ANC supporter or a supporter of the right wing Freedom Front Plus, if one supports democracy one will not be appalled by the fact that an institution has dared to criticise a political party. Only proto-fascists would be appalled by the fact that a bank has dared to broadcast statements criticising the government.

One might, of course, disagree with the sentiments expressed by the youngsters in the FNB produced videos, and the ANC has every right to express its disagreement with some of the statments made by the youngsters. But claiming that the sentiments are treacherous or that it is not legitimate to criticise the party displays the kind of undemocratic intolerance that cannot be associated with a party who supports democracy.

Personally I find that it is better to ignore attacks that are far-fetched or motivated by racism, hatred or a complete lack of information. That is what I do when I am criticised for something I have written. “Don’t feed the trolls,” I tell myself every time I read the unhinged invective of faceless loonies on my Blog. If the criticism is serious, one either responds to it by pointing out why and how it is wrong, or one takes it on board and changes one’s behaviour. Just a thought: use it, don’t use it.

One does not tell those who criticise that they are committing treason or that they are attacking the state merely because one happens (for the time being) to be the party of government.

I was reluctant even to enter this discussion, not because I am fearful of repercussions, but because what I have written here is so obvious and because all this fuss about a bank’s advertising campaign detracts attention from the far more important social and economic issues facing the country.

Maybe that is why the campaign has attracted such hysterical responses from the ANC and its partners. Like Lady Macbeth, whose paranoid dreams symbolises the fact that she is haunted by her guilt, the ANC reaction is perhaps a symptom of the fear and guilt that stalks the political class in South Africa. As Marikana, De Doorns and Sasolburg have shown, the poor, economically excluded and marginalised members of society have not benefited as handsomely from the end of apartheid as the members of the old (mostly white) and emerging (mostly black) middle classes.

While those in the chattering classes squabble about silly adverts made to promote the commercial interests of a big bank and argue whether these adds exploit children, many of those same children are dropping out of school or receiving a third rate education because of the cowardice of politicians who are too scared to take on a powerful union. While I write about the nature of democracy, members of social movement are harassed and tortured by the police. While Helen Zille spends her days on twitter, blaming the poor for the lack of services in their communities in Cape Town, millions of South Africans go to bed hungry, wondering whether this wonderful democracy will ever guarantee them a full stomach.

Source: Constitutionally Speaking

SACP backs probe of ‘contract killings’ on KwaZulu-Natal coast

THE South African Communist Party (SACP) in KwaZulu-Natal has added its voice to calls for a dedicated police team to be established to investigate the "contract-killing industry" in the province, after the murder of two more African National Congress (ANC) branch leaders on the south coast on Sunday night.

There has been a spate of murders of political leaders in the province over the past year, mostly of ANC and National Freedom Party (NFP) leaders at branch level, and most cases remain unsolved.

"It is high time that … people put their heads together irrespective of political affiliation and come up with a strategy of ridding the province of the contract-killing industry," SACP Moses Mabhida provincial secretary Themba Mthembu said on Monday.

ANC provincial secretary Sihle Zikalala said that Oshabeni branch chairman Dumisani Malunga and branch secretary Bheki Chiliza had been shot and killed on Sunday night after a meeting. Political analyst Protas Madlala said the killings come barely two weeks after political parties in KwaZulu-Natal had held a joint summit to find ways to end politically motivated killings.

"We are very concerned with the killing of our comrades. This is unacceptable and cannot be tolerated," Mr Zikalala said.

Police spokesman Capt Thulani Zwane said no arrests were made. In July, ANC councillor Wandile Mkhize was murdered in a drive-by shooting near his home in Margate. Nhlakanipho Shabane, who was with him at the time, spent three weeks in a coma before dying in hospital. Two men have been charged in these murders.

Since the beginning of last year the NFP has lost 21 members to assassinations, which appear to be politically motivated. Mr Madlala said political leadership at local government level represented easy access to wealth in areas where unemployment was high and this might be behind the spate of murders. He said the latest killings did not appear to be linked to the election of new ANC leaders in Mangaung at the end of the year, as KwaZulu-Natal was the one province that was united in its support of the current administration. Mr Mthembu said the SACP in KwaZulu-Natal also firmly supported the current leadership. Mr Madlala said there was an "industry of people earning a living from this". Such people were also likely to have been involved in taxiindustry related killings. "Where is the intelligence in all of this?"

In eThekwini, the ANC’s biggest region in terms of number of branches, the cost of providing protection such as bodyguards for city councillors rose to R18m in the 2012-13 financial year from R2m the year before, and the city wants to increase this allocation even more.

Source: Business Day

South Africa after the Marikana massacre

The police massacre of striking miners at Marikana is a watershed for post-apartheid South Africa and for the international class struggle.

It demonstrates in the starkest form imaginable that the perspective of “black empowerment” and the “National Democratic Revolution” providing the basis for overcoming economic and social oppression has failed utterly. The central lesson of Marikana is that the fundamental division within society is class, not race.

The African National Congress, having come to power in 1994 as a result of immense sacrifice and revolutionary struggle by millions of workers, has revealed itself to be every bit as ruthless as its white predecessors in enforcing the most brutal exploitation on behalf of the major global corporations.

The ANC sent in the police to shoot, kill and maim striking workers whose sole crime was to fight for the right to live as human beings and not beasts of burden. Now, after the police have killed 36 and wounded another 78, some 270 imprisoned strikers are being charged with the murder and attempted murder of their colleagues under Apartheid-era “common purpose” laws designed to blame the victims for “provoking” police violence.

The Marikana miners are paid less than $500 a month for living in squalid communal huts and working in hazardous, back-breaking conditions for the UK-based Lonmin, extracting platinum that sells for over $1,400 an ounce. Their fate, worse still, is shared by millions in what has now become the most unequal country in the entire world.

Meanwhile the ANC has spawned a grasping layer of black bourgeois, with a reputation for unparalleled corruption and repression. It is synonymous with terms like Black Economically Empowered (BEE) companies and “tenderpreneurs”—those who have enriched themselves by acting as front-men for the transnational corporations or who have used their control of the state apparatus to secure a direct role in exploiting the working class.

Even as charges were being brought against the arrested miners, South African Minister of Mining Susan Shabangu was reassuring “our investors, incumbent and prospective” at a gathering of mining executives in Perth, Australia, that President Jacob Zuma is “determined to isolate bad elements in our society.”

The ANC in turn relies upon its partners in the Tripartite Alliance—the South African Communist Party and the COSATU trade union federation—to impose the dictatorship of global capital and the South African bourgeoisie upon an increasingly restive population.

The Stalinist SACP insisted throughout the struggle against apartheid that black majority rule of a capitalist South Africa was a necessary stage in an eventual transition to socialism. It has portrayed COSATU as a bastion of working class power within government that would guarantee this transformation.

Events have proceeded in an entirely opposite direction. For services rendered, SACP leaders were granted key roles in the post-apartheid regime and a share in the spoils of office. COSATU and its affiliated unions have functioned as an industrial police force and a mechanism for the self-enrichment of the bureaucracy.

Philip Hirschsohn, Professor School of Business and Finance at the University of the Western Cape, pointed out last year how the trade unions have taken on “oligarchic characteristics.”

The position of shop steward has become a mechanism for securing management positions, as part of the “emergence of entrepreneurial and career unionists,” with SACP membership a favoured “stepping stone” for “access opportunities in managerial ranks or in government.”

Former NUM leader and high-ranking ANC politician, Cyril Ramaphosa is now the 34th richest man in the whole of Africa, with a net worth of $275 million. One of his many companies has a contract to supply labour at Marikana in a form of indentured slavery. He is paid R12 000 ($1500) per worker per month by Lonmin, but only pays his workers R4000 ($500) per month.

Its role as an adjunct of management has meant that NUM membership has declined to less than 50 percent of employees in many mines; most of these are skilled white collar and surface workers. The strikers at Marikana are either members of the breakaway Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU) or not unionized at all.

The NUM, COSATU and the SACP have all called for police to clamp down on the strikers, defending the massacre and urging the suppression of the AMCU. NUM General Secretary Frans Baleni said of the Marikana massacre that, “The police were patient, but these people were extremely armed with dangerous weapons.”

This has not prevented the pseudo-left groups internationally from opposing the necessary break from COSATU and its affiliated unions, without which any struggle against the ANC is impossible.

The South African affiliates of the Committee for a Workers International, the Democratic Socialist Movement, instead urge “workers in both unions to demand united solidarity action, beginning with a local general strike” and ending in a “national general strike”—all presumably led by the NUM and COSATU.

The Socialist Workers Party in the UK is more despicable still, writing on August 17, “Whatever its intentions, AMCU has sometimes been used to introduce disunity at a time when workers face big challenges. It would have been better for the workers who formed the rival union to fight among the NUM rank and file and shift its policies from below.”

Support for the NUM and COSATU is support for the ANC and the Tripartite Alliance government. It is support for the continuation of capitalism and imperialist oppression.

The theory of Permanent Revolution provides the political basis for the workers and youth of South Africa to conduct the life-and-death struggles that lie ahead. The evolution of the ANC is a graphic confirmation of Leon Trotsky’s insistence that bourgeois nationalist movements, tied as they are to capitalism and organically opposed to ending the brutal exploitation of the workers and poor farmers, are incapable of carrying through the struggle for democracy and liberation from imperialist domination.

The working class, mobilising all the oppressed rural and urban layers, must break with the ANC and its defenders in the SACP and the trade union apparatus and build their own socialist party.

A workers government must be established to take the entire economy into social ownership and utilise the vast natural wealth presently monopolised by the super-rich to meet the needs of all for decent jobs, housing, education and health provision. This revolutionary struggle must be extended throughout Africa and internationally through the construction of a section of the International Committee of the Fourth International, the world party of socialist revolution.

Chris Marsden

Source: World Wide Socialist Web Site

South Africa 1960 – 1994

a) Political, economic and social factors contributing to the end of apartheid

The policy of total strategy or counter-revolution as it became known did not stop the anti-apartheid groups such as the ANC, PAC and UDF (United Democratic Front) from protesting for political and social equality for all races in South Africa. Poverty for blacks continued in the townships and homelands. Unemployment was on the rise due to sanctions, and education and housing were still of a third world standard.

The state of emergency failed to make South Africa safer for whites. Many whites were suffering loss of liberties under the censorship and rigid laws of the military state. Moreover, the ANC in exile continued to attack ‘soft targets’ in South Africa including shopping centres and post offices. Many whites were becoming disillusioned with apartheid and feeling the rejection of their society and culture by the rest of the world. Many Coloureds and Indians were becoming openly defiant of the white state demanding nothing short of full democracy for South Africa.

The United Democratic Front (UDF)

In 1983 a multi-racial party, the United Democratic Front was formed with the aim of uniting all resistance groups in the fight against apartheid. The UDF was highly successful because its members became a uniting force and it had many high profile members, including church leaders such as Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The UDF supporters also include ANC members such as Winnie Mandela. By 1985 the UDF gained over two million members and was a powerful force in demanding the immediate end to apartheid.

The gradual reforms of the Botha government, delivered no real change in South Africa, only cosmetic changes. South Africa could not change and embrace the modern world while apartheid existed. Many white South Africans and politicians began to feel that apartheid was like ‘living on the back of a tiger and they needed to find a way off without being eaten’.1

b) International factors contributing to the end of apartheid

By 1988 the cost of running the military state was staggering and the economic performance of South Africa was poor. Sanctions had driven the economy into recession; ‘sanction busting’ was failing to fix the problem. South Africa was unable to obtain foreign loans or foreign investment. 2

The impact of the Free Mandela Campaign, sporting sanctions, severe international criticism, military and technical equipment embargos and isolation by other African nations in the OAU (Organisation of African Unity) was crippling South Africa. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 removed the Communist threat which underpinned the existence of apartheid since the end of the Second World War. Festering social, political and economic grievances in all sectors of the South African population left the preservation of apartheid completely untenable by the start of 1990s.

c) Problems facing the National Party and the ANC in the transition to democracy in South Africa

In 1984 during townships riots, P.W. Botha declared, ‘I’m giving you a final warning; one man, one vote in this country is out-that is never!”.3 In 1989 after a mild stroke and the failure of Total Strategy, he resigned as President of South Africa. Botha was replaced by F.W.de Klerk.

On 2 February 1990, de Klerk opened Parliament, and in his maiden speech as President began dismantling the apartheid state. He rescinded the ban on the ANC, the PAC, the South African Communist Party and thirty other political organizations. He freed political prisoners and suspended the death sentence. On the 11 of November de Klerk released Nelson Mandela from prison4. South Africa would have one man one vote.

The transition to democracy was a challenging task. Some historians have called it a ‘miracle’. Both the National Party and the ANC struggled to keep South Africa from sliding into civil war in the early 1990s. Meetings were held to lay out South Africa’s new Democracy entitled A Convention for Democratic South Africa (CODESSA). It was in the CODESSA meetings, that the National Party and the ANC debated their differing visions of democracy. CODESSA 1 ended when the ANC walked out of negotiations5. Finally CODESSA II was able to pave the way for a new constitution and a national election.

Problems facing the National Party

• The traditional rulers of South Africa wanted to hold to power as long as possible. They wanted ‘one man, one vote’ to eventuate slowly to protect the white minority.
  
  
• Right Wing extremists’ elements including the AWB (Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging) vowed to prevent free elections and assassinate Nelson Mandela. They also wanted to create an Afrikaner homeland.
  
  
• Other white extremists were also letting off bombs and interrupting official democracy meetings such as CODESSA.

Problems facing the ANC

The ANC faced a number of difficulties:

• First in dealing with the National Party and with other anti-apartheid parties, especially Inkatha (a political organisation made up of Zulus from the Natal Province)
  
  
• The ANC wanted one person, one vote multiracial democracy immediately, and many of its members were understandably anxious to embrace democracy for the first time.
  
  
• In Natal/KwaZulu Province Chief Buthelezi of Inkatha refused to have anything to do with constitutional negotiations and savage violence between ANC members and Inkatha broke out. This included the assassination of Chris Hani, a national hero of the ANC and member of the South Africa Communist Party. Only a prompt appeal to the nation by Mandela averted a massive reaction.

• The ANC seemed to be losing control of its political base. Many feared that extremist whites were supplying Inkatha with weapons and instigating the fighting between rival black political groups, to prevent South Africa’s march towards democracy.

South Africa’s first democratic Election 27th April 1994

South Africans of all races turned out determined to vote in their first non-racial election on the 27th of April 1994. People lined up in long queues which stretched for miles to cast their historic ballot. The ANC won the election and Nelson Mandela, after spending almost three decades in jail, became President of a free South Africa, F.W. de Klerk became the Deputy President.

At his inauguration as President on the vast lawn of the Union Building in Pretoria Mandela said:

‘Never, never and never again shall it be that this beautiful land will again experience the oppression of one by another… The sun will never set on so glorious a human achievement. Let freedom reign. God bless Africa’.6

Source: NSW HSC Online http://hsc.csu.edu.au © NSW Department of Education and Communities, and Charles Sturt University, 2011

French Communist Party backs killing of South African miners

The World Socialist Web Site notes with contempt the French Communist Party’s defense of the massacre of 34 striking South African platinum miners by police at Marikana.

After sympathetically quoting South African President Jacob Zuma and cynically expressing its “indignation and horror” at the violence, the brief communiqué published August 17 by the Communist Party (PCF) states: “The PCF reaffirms its solidarity with all the political and trade union forces in South Africa in their struggle to reduce inequality, for progress and for social justice under the true rule of law.”

It is public knowledge that the “political and trade union forces” defended by the PCF ordered and defended the massacre. The African National Congress (ANC) government’s national police commissioner, Riah Phiyega, declared after the massacre that she “gave police the responsibility to execute the task they needed to do.” She opposed any prosecution of those responsible for the miners’ deaths, saying, “This is no time for finger-pointing.”

The National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), whose former president Cyril Ramaphosa has gone on to amass a fortune of $275 million, has opposed the miners’ strike. NUM General Secretary Frans Baleni defended the police, stating, “The police were patient, but these people were armed with dangerous weapons.”

The PCF’s fellow Stalinists in the South African Communist Party (SACP), who historically have supported the ANC, dismissed the police killing of strikers as “worker-to-worker violence.”

The massacre of South African miners is an event of international significance, testifying to the murderous hostility of bourgeois “left” parties and the trade union apparatus towards any militant movement of the working class that threatens to escape the suffocating grip of the official unions. It is also a sharp warning to the working class internationally.

By praising police toadies in South Africa as fighters for justice and the rule of law, the PCF is signaling that it and PCF-affiliated unions like the General Confederation of Labor (CGT) will not object to similar acts of police violence to crush strikes in Europe.

The rest of France’s petty-bourgeois “left,” which operates within the CGT and with the PCF on the periphery of France’s social democratic government, is maintaining a telling silence on this outrage. As of this writing, five days after the killings, the New Anti-capitalist Party (NPA) has still not commented on the Marikana massacre on its web site.

As for the Workers Struggle (LO) group, the CGT’s most dogged promoter, it has published only one brief, eight-line news dispatch on the massacre. LO is totally silent on the role of the ANC and NUM, but concludes: “Whatever some kind souls may claim, the class struggle is still present, sometimes ferocious. This is proof.”

LO’s platitudes are calculated to allow the French petty-bourgeois pseudo-left to maintain its political support for the organizers of the Marikana massacre.

Source: World Socialist Web Site

Violence a relic from people’s war to make SA ungovernable

NUMEROUS types of chickens are coming home to roost in South Africa. During their long campaign to win power by making the country ungovernable via a no-holds-barred "people’s war", the ruling alliance made up of the African National Congress (ANC), the South African Communist Party and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu), injected into the bloodstream of the body politic a virus of violence that they cannot now eradicate.

Whether to enforce strikes or bus or school boycotts, protest against "service delivery" failures, back some or other demand on campus, or complain against trains that are late, violence in South Africa has become routine, not unusual. Nonstrikers are murdered (60 of them in the security guards strike in 2006), city centres or university buildings trashed, roads blockaded or railway coaches set alight. People from other parts of Africa who undercut local traders are threatened or even murdered in so-called xenophobic violence.

It is a tragic and bitter irony that all this is happening in a country that is second to none in constitutionally guaranteed and judicially protected democratic rights. The bitterest irony of all is how the virus of violence has corrupted parts of the trade union movement. During apartheid, when union officials were banned or detained without trial, and black unions frequently barred from factories by hostile employers, the emerging black union movement won its legal rights by a struggle that was essentially nonviolent.

Now, with a privileged position, plus organisational and strike rights that are also second to none around the world, unions have become increasingly intolerant, as the Democratic Alliance experienced during its recent march on Cosatu House.

Killing people in the context of inter-union rivalry at Lonmin is also a manifestation of a principle that the ruling alliance introduced during its people’s war, which was to eliminate rival political organisations as far as possible. One of the chickens that is now coming home to roost is that some of the rival factions within the ANC are now using violence — possibly even assassinations — against one another.

Another of the chickens is the poor quality of the police. Their behaviour at Lonmin is but the most lethal manifestation of a wider lack of professional skill, including frequent inability to master the basics of crime scene investigation.

Any intelligent leadership in the police force would have long ago foreseen the risks arising from our violent political culture. Proper training and equipment would long since have been provided to avoid precisely what happened at Lonmin. But, of course, the ANC has ensured that there is no proper leadership at the top of the police force. Instead, the police have become the plaything of rival factions in the ruling party, not to mention the victims of affirmative action and cadre deployment policies.

So South Africa is in a catch-22. The people’s war was part of the strategy of the national democratic revolution to make the country ungovernable. Continued adherence to the strategy of the national democratic revolution in the form of cadre deployment in particular results in a police force that cannot handle the violence that continues as a hangover from the people’s war.

One consequence of the ineptitude of the police is their inability to handle situations such as that at Lonmin without making things infinitely worse. Another is their inability to put a stop to the violence that now characterises so many demonstrations across the country. A third is their inability to secure prosecutions and convictions of violent demonstrators.

Over all of this presides a president out of his depth as CE of the state. His ministers take unto themselves more and more power. Yet, apart from collecting taxes, his government fails increasingly to get the very basics right, top of which is providing law and order under the rule of law. His fondness for singing about his machine gun while the whole nation listens symbolises the very culture of violence that is helping to ruin this country.

• Kane-Berman is CE of the South African Institute of Race Relations.

Source: Business Day

South Africa's White Elite: The Dog that Doesn't Bark

Keeping their heads down and operating behind the scenes, South Africa's white business elite have managed to maintain their economic position. When the curtain finally came down on South Africa’s apartheid in 1994, it happened in a way that none of the key players had predicted. Both the African National Congress (ANC) and its opponents in the white supremacist National Party were surprised that they could reach an accommodation through dialogue and negotiation rather than armed force.

In the negotiations that had followed the release of Nelson Mandela and unbanning of the ANC, the parties sealed an unspoken deal. This handed political power to the black majority and left economic power in the hands of whites. There was to be no seizure of white assets, although there were, of course, plans to gradually achieve a more equitable balance of wealth.

Black economic empowerment?

Indeed, there were already plans afoot to bring the leadership of the ANC into the fold. White business magnates had begun to transfer assets into black hands in order to incorporate those at the top of the new political order. The new policy was ‘Black Economic Empowerment’ (BEE). As the commentator Moeletsi Mbeki put it: “BEE was, in fact, invented by South Africa’s economic oligarchs, that handful of white businessmen and their families who control the commanding heights of the country’s economy, that is mining and its associated chemical and engineering industries and finance”.

He pointed out that the policy was adopted well before the ANC came to power. In 1992, Sanlam Limited, a cornerstone of Afrikaner capital, helped create the flagship black empowerment company New African Investments Limited – led by Nthato Motlana, Nelson Mandela’s former doctor. Further deals followed and soon the new BEE elite were well-entrenched.

On the face of it, the policy was a success. A more equitable sharing out of the spoils of economic development came about, creating a new black bourgeoisie. At the same time the ANC abandoned its more radical economic policies allowing rich whites to continue enjoying a very pleasant lifestyle. A considerable proportion of South African assets were transferred to the BEE elite, but even at their height, these transfers were smaller than they appeared. As my colleague Paul Holden points out, the total value of BEE deals were around R250 billion ($30 billion), still a drop in the ocean when compared with the total value of private sector resources of R6 trillion ($700 billion).

Worse still, the BEE transfers were loans, not gifts. The companies had to earn profits and from these profits the loans would be repaid. That was at least the theory. In reality, many of the new black elite had little or no experience of business and a good number of the BEE companies were soon in difficulties. As the government’s own assessment of the problems of BEE rightly put it, this led to contracts being signed by people who lacked the necessary capital: “This has encouraged debt-driven deals that are likely to work only when the economy is growing rapidly and company profitability is expanding significantly”.

Soon the new elite were scrambling around to find a way out. They hit on a plan to nationalise the mines. This would transfer a sizeable chunk of their problems onto the shoulders of the state, which could buy them out at favourable rates. At this point they hit a stumbling block. The ANC’s left-wing allies, the unions of COSATU and the South African Communist Party opposed this solution.

The Communist Party openly attacked those who called for nationalisation. The party declared that it had warned against the use of state finances to bail out the new rich and came out strongly against “diverting billions of Rands of public funds to serve the interests of a narrow black (and white) capitalist stratum”.

Nor was it just a question of “bailing-out debt-ridden BEE capital”, according to the party. They reported that mine union officials had been quietly approached by members of the new black elite, asking for their support. They were told, “Why don’t you support the nationalisation of the mines? If government takes over the mines they will turn to us to run them.” The Communist Party accused the right in the ANC of being seduced by the emerging black capitalist class.
White business

While black business is in a relatively precarious position, their white contemporaries have worked hard to secure their privilege. For a start, they have kept their heads down and operated behind the scenes. Business South Africa, which whites controlled, merged with the Black Business Council in October 2003 to form Business Unity South Africa. Not all black businesses appreciated the change, and some broke away from the new body in 2009. Nonetheless, the white business community had found a convenient new home for their interests. From here they could lobby the ANC government.

Some in white business went further, joining the ANC’s Progressive Business Forum. Its stated purpose is to open direct links with the ruling party. Within a year of its formation, the forum was being portrayed in the press as a means of “buying face-time with cabinet ministers and senior government officials”. The ANC responded briskly that there was “nothing untoward about this”.

Today it is clear that the Progressive Business Forum is a potent means of raising money for the party. A seat at President Zuma’s table at a banquet held in Johannesburg in June 2012 was going for no less than R500,000 ($60,000).

This is not the only way the ANC has raised money from business. An investigation in 2006 by the Institute of Security Studies revealed the existence of a group of companies controlled by a firm called Chancellor House, which quietly accumulated stakes in minerals, energy, engineering, logistics and information technology. This has been a major source of funding for the ruling party and has resulted in inevitable conflicts of interest. “More often than not, these business opportunities have been dependent on the government’s discretion – the award of state tenders, mineral rights and the like. The ANC, as ruling party, has been both player and referee”, says the report.

“As it has always been”

Nearly two decades after the ANC came to power, the black middle class is both powerful – through its influential role in the ANC – but also dependent on the party for its position. It is insufficiently well-resourced to stand on its own feet and reliant on state contracts and BEE legislation for its positions. The white elite, on the other hand, are better endowed and better resourced. Some have moved to become consultants rather than hold formal positions in companies. Others have moved some or all of their wealth offshore – treading the trail blazed by companies formerly listed in South Africa like Old Mutual and Anglo-American, which are now listed on the London stock exchange. At the same time, white business has learnt to live with the ANC in government, working behind the scenes rather than raising their voices in public.

President Zuma summed up the situation rather astutely when he addressed ANC’s policy conference on June 26, 2012. Much had been achieved since taking power in 1994, he said, but much still had to be done. The president went on to outline the key issues that had to be tackled – among them were economic relations, which, he said, were still largely unchanged.

When the end of apartheid came, he said, “We had to be cautious about restructuring the economy in order to maintain economic stability and confidence at the time. Thus, the economic power relations of the apartheid era have in the main remained intact. The ownership of the economy is still primarily in the hands of white males as it has always been.”

Further reading: Think Africa Press' review of "Who Rules South Africa?" and interview with the authors Martin Plaut and Paul Holden.

Source:

South Africa: The Unholy Trinity - the Roots of Corruption in Our Society

The scourge of corruption in South Africa has tightened its grip on our society over the past decade, threatening our democratic achievements, eroding the capacity of the state to advance serious socio-economic transformation, and often undermining the solidarity culture of our broad movement.

The SACP was amongst the first formations to actively launch a mass campaign against corruption - A Red Card Against Corruption. Tragically, there are already martyrs in the struggle against this corrosive evil - among them Mpumalanga SACP cadre, Radioman Ntshangase, and Rustenburg municipal councilor and former NUMSA shopsteward, Moss Phakoe. Both were gunned down for their courageous stands against corruption.

But what lies behind this terrible contagion?

Various explanations are advanced in the South African public debate.

Often it is reduced to bad individual behavior calling for moral condemnation - a "few bad apples", of whom "an example" must be made.

Clearly this is not entirely wrong - those involved in corruption must be dealt with, regardless of who they are, regardless of their political affiliations. In fact, we should expect and demand a higher level of conduct from those who are members of our broad democratic movement and especially from those in public service.

But, sadly, we are dealing with something much more systemic than simply a "few bad apples". In an attempt to find a more generalized explanation for corruption we sometimes encounter syndicalist left-wingers unwittingly echoing "free market" right-wingers in their exaggerated suspicion of the state (or at least the democratic state in a capitalist society) defining it as inherently and in its totality "corrupt". "Power corrupts", we are frequently told - often by an oligopolistic commercial media that likes to conceal its own massive market power.

The idea that politicians and the state are, more or less by definition, corrupt is liable to undermine our determination to use state power (along with social activism) to deal decisively with corruption. It also helps to obscure the fact that where corruption occurs in the public sector there is, invariably, a private sector corrupter, a Glenn Agliotti or a Brett Kebble. For every black property tycoon working in collusion with senior public servants to lease buildings at hugely inflated prices to government there is typically a big bank. The bank might well not literally be breaking the law, but its own senior staff involved in the lease will know exactly what is going on. They will quietly earn inflated bonuses for bringing in business, while the bank chairman publicly condemns the corruption of the new "extraordinary breed of politicians."

Other explanations for corruption in our society belong to the anti-majoritarian pseudo-liberal current of thought. Corruption is blamed on some supposed generalized tendencies within post-independence, Third World liberation movements, for instance. Other explanations border on racial stereotyping, on the supposed propensities of the "new elite" (as if the old elite were not often deeply complicit in past and present corruption).

As it happens, the "new elite" is the key focus of two recent thoughtful interventions by Professor Njabulo Ndebele and cde Joel Netshitenzhe.

Writing in the City Press ("A meditation on corruption", 22 January 2012), Ndebele argues that the "new elite", since being installed in power in the post-1994 reality, has been tugged between competing imperatives - individual redress versus substantial social development, redistribution versus systemic transformation. Although he doesn't quite say this, Ndebele correctly implies that the competing logics of these very different imperatives were often blurred in language as if they were one and the same thing. "Transformation", for instance, came to mean not the radical transformation of the systemic features of apartheid-colonialism, but a touch of racial representivity within essentially the same unchanged realities - the same boardrooms, the same wealthy suburbs, the same elite golf clubs.

Ndebele argues that the "new elite" was increasingly torn between its own "personal material needs...shaped by historical deprivation" on the one hand, and the "social commitment that once gave meaning to the struggle for liberation" on the other. In Ndebele's view, "access to state wealth" meant that relatively quickly individual redress became individual entitlement and these values then trumped social transformation, side-lining it into little more than a "niggling ethical burden".

Writing in ANC Today ("Competing identities of a national liberation movement and the challenges of incumbency", 15 June 2012) Cde Joel Netshitenzhe follows a similar trajectory to explain corruption. He invokes concepts like the "sins of incumbency" and the problem of "growing social distance" between the new political elite and its mass base. Like Ndebele, he analyses the roots of corruption in the psycho-sociological challenges confronting an "emerging middle class" without historical assets to support large extended families, leading it to take on excessive debt. "Having dipped their toes in that lifestyle, but with no historical assets as are available to the white middle and upper strata, some then try to acquire the resources by hook or crook."

There are certainly strong elements of readily recognizable truth in both Ndebele and Netshitenzhe's descriptions. But that is also part of the problem - they tend to remain descriptions, and somewhat one-sided descriptions at that. As a result they are also unable to offer serious anti-corruption programmatic interventions, beyond the very important but limited pedagogical appeal for a change in moral values.

In the public discussion in SA about corruption insufficient attention has been paid to class struggles within our movement, and between our movement and incumbent capital, over the direction of our post-1994 democracy. In particular, there is a failure to recognize that the established white bourgeoisie did not stand idly by in the face of the new, post-1994 political reality. They continued to pursue the agenda of late-apartheid, namely to build a relatively substantial "buffer" black middle strata. This was already the agenda of big capital in the early 1990s negotiations period, for instance. It was no longer a question of preventing the ANC coming to power, but rather to ensure that the ANC that came into power would be hegemonised by the "doves", the "sensible moderates" who would distance themselves from the dangerous "radical populists" and their volatile "mass base".

Much has been made in certain anti-alliance quarters about the woeful consequences of "cadre deployment" - as if (as ANC secretary general, cde Gwede Mantashe likes to point out) the corrupt promotion of someone ill-suited and unqualified for a position on the grounds that they happen to be a political associate was "cadre deployment". But in all of this debate very little has ever been said about the systematic "cadre development and deployment" that key circles of big capital (both domestic and international) implemented in the immediate pre- and post-1994 period. How many key ANC-aligned individuals, for instance, were quietly taken out for internships in arch neo-liberal corporations in the United States, like Goldman Sachs? (Goldman Sachs has recently been deeply discredited, by the way, for its role in provoking and in profiteering from the Greek debt crisis.) Those who "benefited" from this neo-liberal cadre development were then deployed back into strategic positions in government. If I am not mistaken, at least two recent Treasury DGs were graduates of the Goldman Sachs cadre school.

The "social" (and of course ideological and moral) "distance" that cde Netshitenzhe evokes might not have been a conspiracy, but it was certainly part of a deliberate strategy. It was not just an inevitable psycho-sociological syndrome related to historical deprivation, to large extended families, and to the newfound privileges of incumbency.

By the mid-1990s, a key strategy for engineering "social distance" and for consolidating a buffer black elite stratum was the policy of "black economic empowerment". This amounted to a social pact between elements within the new political elite and established big capital. From the side of established big capital it represented in many respects a re-run of how mining and banking capital had once accommodated itself to the 1948 Afrikaner nationalist political victory. But it was also a strategy that was embraced and actively developed by a dominant tendency within the ANC and government (what the SACP has described as the "1996 class project"). For this revisionist tendency within the ANC and government, the creation of a new BEE elite was seen as an active counter-balance to the influence of the SACP, COSATU and the ANC's own township and rural mass base. The strategy found active ideological expression in key ANC documents, including the vulgarization of the concept of "revolutionary motive forces" - with the argument being advanced that all forces that "stood to gain" from the national democratic revolution "were motive forces". This amounted to a local version of the free market "invisible hand" credo that the selfish pursuit of individual satisfaction inevitably leads to the greater good of all.

The first wave of BEE advancements were not necessarily all corrupt (although many questions still surround key early BEE-related moves - notably the arms deal). But the canonization of "BEE" as a central programme of government brought into play a dangerous nexus between political office, personal enrichment, and established capital. The narratives of Ndebele and Netshitenzhe tend to leave out the critical last component of this corrosive, unholy trinity. Let me underline that I am not evoking established capital in order to deflect attention from the culpabilities of the other two components - those who brazenly declared that they "hadn't struggled to be poor".

However, unless we grasp the triadic nexus, this unholy trinity, we will not begin to understand the systemic roots of corruption in our society.

Nor will we be able to develop an effective multi-pronged counter-strategy. For instance, the "social distance" that cde Netshitenzhe and others invoke is not just a metaphor - in South Africa, in which we have not transformed apartheid colonial spatial injustices, social distance is also a yawning geographical reality. For those familiar with the childrens' board-game, our untransformed social reality can easily pitch the new middle strata into a political game of snakes and ladders, in which the snakes and the ladders are exaggeratedly long. If you land on the right square, by securing a regional chairpersonship in the ANC for instance, you might suddenly find yourself on a heady upward ascension. But if you lose your footing, you are liable to fall rapidly down a very long snake, back to zero and abject poverty.

This heady, insecure world of rags-to-riches and riches-to-rags opens up enormous possibilities for strategic (including corrupting) leverage over the new democratic state and over our own alliance formations by those who are well-established and well-resourced. The struggle against corruption and the material conditions that foster it has, therefore, to be a struggle for a much more egalitarian society. We have literally to abolish, amongst many things, the social distance engraved in our persisting apartheid spatial patterns through the accelerated planning and implementation of mixed-used, mixed-income settlement patterns. But this means taking head-on the vested interests of the established capitalist class (the value of their residential properties, for instance), and the venal interests of a comprador elite that has been promoted as a buffer against serious transformation.

Asikhulume!

Jeremy Cronin is SACP 1st Deputy General Secretary.

Source: All Africa

And what is our government doing (about education)?

As thousands of pious (and often well-meaning) citizens across South Africa congratulate themselves for contributing 67 minutes of their time to a worthy cause on Nelson Mandela’s birthday today (perhaps unconsciously trying to absolve themselves from responsibility for redressing the inequality of opportunity in our country on the other 364 days, 22 hours and 53 minutes of the year) I wonder what our government is doing every day of the year to promote the vision of Nelson Mandela to achieve a just, fair and egalitarian society.

Surely, one of the most pressing priorities for any government in South Africa must be the improvement of the education system and the provision of better education to a far larger range of pupils to ensure that the life chances of all children are not largely determined by how much money their parents can spend on their education, but are rather determined by the talent, hard work and enthusiasm of the children themselves.

After 18 years we are still very far from this ideal and might, in fact, have gone backwards. A child who happens to have a Cabinet Minister, Member of Parliament, City Councillor, or tenderpreneur as a parent or whose parents happen to be relatively wealthy because they had benefited from the apartheid system, has every chance of receiving a relatively good education. But many children in South Africa will never flourish and will never achieve their full potential merely because of an accident of birth.

That is why I was rather surprised to hear that the Western Cape government is considering closing 27 schools in the province. It became even more perplexing to me when I read that Western Cape Education MEC Donald Grant had said at a media briefing that he had drawn up a rough estimate on what the cost savings to the department would be should all the schools be closed and “they were insignificant when one compares that with the (provincial) education department’s R14b budget”.

In a fact sheet, the Western Cape Education Department cited a rather surprising Department of Basic Education statistic that between 2006 and 2010 about 1000 schools were closed across the country. Our education system is in a crisis, yet more than a 1000 schools have been closed across South Africa, a fact that warrants further investigation, it seems to me. Mr Grant said it was not his idea to close the schools and that the national department recommended the closures.

Several reasons have been offered for the possible closure of schools. Some of the schools slated for closure in the Western Cape are situated on private land and the argument is that they need to be closed because government finance regulations prohibited any further investment in the facilities by the department.

Why these regulations could not be changed to facilitate investment in schools on private land, is not explained. Why the common law rules on property rights could not be developed to bring it in line with the spirit, purport and object of the Bill of Rights – which guarantees basic education for all – in order to address concerns about investing in school buildings on private property is also not explained. People, we are never going to solve the problems associated with the provision of education to pupils in deep rural areas, if we do not stop thinking like rule-bound bureaucrats and if we do not begin to think innovatively about problems and how to solve them.

Closing smaller schools, so it is argued, would also save cost in terms of services such as water and electricity. But to what extent such a move would effect access to schooling for especially children living in sparsely populated rural areas is not considered. Sometimes one must incur extra cost to ensure equal treatment of all children as far as access to schooling is concerned. The failure to do so would often discriminate against rural children who might not be able to attend school because they are unable to get to and from the school due to lack of transport or lack of funds to pay for the transport.

Some schools are said to face closure because many of their pupils do not live in the area in which the school is situated. But there might be many reasons why parents send their children to a school in an area in which they are not domiciled. The child may informally stay with a grandparent or another family member who lives close to the school, or the school might be closer to the place of work of the parent and it might be easier for the parent to get the child to the school close to his or her work. The school in the catchment area where the parents live might also be dysfunctional. Closing a school and in effect punishing children for not living in the area in which the school is situated (or living in an area where a school is dysfunctional) seems not to take into account the complexities of people’s lives and their needs as parents and pupils.

Other schools are said to face closure (or have been closed in other provinces) because they were identified as consistently having a high failure rate or a high failure rate in core subjects. While closing such schools will “solve” the immediate problem of the failing school (and is much easier to do than actually turning around the culture in the school and making it succeed), it once again seems to ignore the human element, the needs of parents and pupils and the possible complexities of their lives that led to the children being schooled at that particular school in the first place. Even when schools are therefore closed “for the benefit of the pupils”, it is often done using the cold-hearted logic of a bureaucrat and not focusing on the peculiar and often complex needs of children and their parents who attend that school.

There might well be cases where the only sensible thing to do would be to close a particular school, but surely the assumption must be that this is seldom the right thing to do. Where the National Education Department or Provincial Education Department proposes the closure of a school, the onus should be on them to provide cogent, convincing reasons not merely based on bureaucratic considerations about saving money or about problems with government regulations (which can always be changed). Neither the National Department nor the Western Cape Education Department has really provided cogent reasons, based on the actual needs of the children and their parents, of why these schools have to be closed. (I am not saying such reasons might not exist in individual cases, but if these reasons exist, they have not been properly communicated to the public.)

This, I think, is also what is required by our Constitution. Section 29(1) of the Constitution states that everyone has the right “to a basic education, including adult basic education”, and unlike many of the other social and economic rights in the Bill of Rights, this right is not qualified by the proviso that the state only had to take reasonable steps within its available resources progressively to realise the right. Last year in a judgment in the case of Governing Body of the Juma Musjid Primary School & Others v Essay N.O. and Others the Constitutional Court confirmed that this means that the right to basic education places an immediate obligation on the state to provide such education to all:

Unlike some of the other socio-economic rights, this right is immediately realisable. There is no internal limitation requiring that the right be “progressively realised” within “available resources” subject to “reasonable legislative measures”. The right to a basic education in section 29(1)(a) may be limited only in terms of a law of general application which is “reasonable and justifiable in an open and democratic society based on human dignity, equality and freedom”.

But even if this was not so, section 29(1) places a negative obligation on the state not to interfere with the existing enjoyment of the right to education. Where the Education Department proposes the closure of a school, it will have to demonstrate that this closure is not going to make it more difficult for the children at the school that is to be closed to access education. For children attending farm schools, for example, the closure of a school might well infringe on their right to education by making it more difficult if not impossible for them to attend another school that is far less accessible to the child. And where a child attends a school because it is closer to the place of work of the parent, the closure of that school might well infringe on that child’s right to education because it would become more difficult for the parent to get the child to school and will potentially limit that child’s access to schooling.

Has the Western Cape Department of Education considered the individual needs of the children attending the schools it now wishes to close? And did the National Department do likewise when it closed more than a 1000 schools over the past five years? I can’t imagine that they have, suggesting that there might well be a legal basis for challenging these decisions on school closures. In the absence of clear reasons, based on the actual situation and needs of the pupils and tehir parents, the closure of existing schools will be unconstitutional as it will infringe on the right of access to education.

Of course, this is a small matter compared to the larger, clearly catastrophic, failure of our education system to provide all children regardless of their race and financial circumstances with at least a basic quality education, a failure shockingly illustrated by the Limpopo textbook scandal. But news that so many schools have been closed and that more closures are to follow does seem to illustrate – in its small way – the rather cold-hearted and bureaucratic manner in which various spheres of our government deal with a pivotal issue around the improvement of our education system.

Instead of bending over backwards and working feverishly to provide more pupils with better access to higher quality education, our politicians and bureaucrats fold their hands and shrug their shoulders, pointing to technicalities and blaming others to evade responsibility for the improvement of education. Running up against government regulations, they throw their hands in the air and decide to close a school, rather than to do the obvious thing and change the regulation to allow for investment in schools on private land.

How can our cabinet – both collectively and individually in the form of the Minister of Basic Education – justify this state of affairs? Why are we – as parents, as citizens, as individuals with even a smidgen of humanity – allowing this to happen? Why did the SACP at its recent conference not produce a ten point plan for the improvement of our education system over the next five years and why did it not set an ultimatum for the ANC-led government to implement this plan or face a breakup of the alliance? Why did the ANC delegates at its recent policy conference not take a stand on the failures in education by refusing to leave the conference hall or to endorse any of the resolutions until the Minister of Education and other Cabinet Ministers had provided them with concrete plans for the immediate improvement of the education system (or had promised to resign)? Why did Cosatu not organise an indefinite strike to achieve the same goals?

Oh yes, I forgot, most of our leaders send their children to private schools or to the best government schools and are therefore not affected by the failure of so many of our schools. It’s “only” the poor, the very poor they profess to respect and serve, who are suffering.

Source: Constitutionally Speaking

Cato Manor cops hit with 71 charges

Twenty former members of the disbanded Durban Organised Crime Unit face 71 charges, including 14 of murder, the Durban Regional Court has been told. One of the members, Captain Neville Eva, told the court he intended pleading not guilty to all the charges. Also on the provisional indictment are 14 counts of defeating the ends of justice, as well as 14 charges of unlawful possession of weapons and ammunition.

The court was packed for the bail hearings of the 20, who stand accused of being part of a hit squad.

Eva said that when the Sunday Times published an exposé alleging the existence of the hit squad, all members of the unit promised the then Independent Complaints Directorate – since renamed the Independent Police Investigative Directorate (IPID) – they would cooperate with the investigation. “Our attitude was to assist the investigation in any way possible.” Eva said the members were ordered to hand in their weapons, laptops and cellphones earlier this year.

They were also instructed not to take on any new cases, but to continue with pending cases. Eva, a veteran of 27 years, said if they had intended to tamper with evidence, they had had six months in which to do so.

IPID spokesperson Moses Dlamini confirmed the 20 were arrested on Wednesday in a joint operation by the Hawks and the IPID. Protesters supporting the 20 men stood outside the court building with placards.

People had to stand outside the court in the hallway, because there was insufficient space for supporters and families of the accused, while police monitored the crowds inside and outside the building.

Magistrate Sharon Marks threatened to have the people removed if they did not keep quiet.

Source: Mail & Guardian

It's just a case of putting them in their place

Princess and the peeve

AS Vera was floating about at defence headquarters in Pretoria she came across a woman sobbing inconsolably. On closer inspection it turned out it was none other than Princess Nonceba Lindiwe Sisulu. People in the corridors were whispering that she had just been moved from the glamorous Defence Ministry to the gritty Public Service ministry. So she would now no longer be able to wear those sexy military uniforms to state events. She would no longer be saluted by generals and admirals. She would also no longer be in a position to refuse to answer questions for "security reasons". No longer will she be able to scream at the DA's David Maynier.

Aaagh shame, poor thing.

Wardrobe malfunction

Adding to the princess' misery is that she will now have to hang around Zwelinzima Vavi, Sadtu's Thobile Ntola, Nehawu's Fikile Majola and those guys from Solidarity. And instead of slapping striking soldiers with court-martials, she will have to accept memoranda from angry workers. Vera can't wait to see which fashion label she'll be wearing when she addresses workers from the back of a truck.

Blunt Blade cuts losses

Vera's favourite bourgeois communist put on his boxing gloves and went to Durban recently to put workers in their place. After angering the workers by chastising them for demanding that he leave his cushy government job and lose his flashy car, he then tried to charm them. He did many Phansi! slogans and got the enthusiastic Phansi! responses from the workers. But being a cabinet minister he could not bring himself to say Phansi !nge e-tolls Phansi!, prompting workers to shout him down.

The bourgeois communist, who had never been booed by unionists before, ended up in hospital recovering from the emotional breakdown. But as soon as he heard that some ANC leaders planned to take on President Jacob "I know what I'm doing" Zuma at the NEC meeting, he got out of his pyjamas and ran off to defend his paymaster.

Know where your bread is buttered...

Cop is being caught up

THE new top cop, Mangwashi Phiyega, started her career on a high note this week by feeding the media with nice sound-bites. Quizzed about her lack of policing experience, she simply said: "You do not need to be a drunkard to own a bottle store." She may as well have continued to say you do not need to be a drug addict to push drugs. Nice start, but Vera thinks she will need a lot of work to catch up to Bheki Cele, the master of great quotes.

Vera would like to share a little observation. When Maria Ramos arrived at Transnet in 2004, she and Phiyega were immediately at each others' throats. Phiyega jumped ship and went to Absa. Then Ramos left Transnet to head up Absa. Phiyega was forced to jump ship again to flee her nemesis. Based on this pattern, Vera predicts that Ramos' next job is minister of police.

Vera's Question of the Week: Will the new top cop be patrolling the streets of Hillbrow on New Year's eve?

Source: The Sowetan

The communists have got this right

Here’s something important to read and understand. From a South African Communist Party Central Committee statement  released today – I just caught it on Politicsweb here.

You can disagree with the communists about a range of points of strategy and of principle, but they accurately and urgently identify populism as exemplified by the ANC Youth League ruling faction (and be clear, this is what they are talking about) as the greatest threat to the ruling alliance and, more importantly, to the South African democracy.

This is their call to arms:

We are dealing with an anti-worker, anti-left, anti-communist, pseudo-militant demagogy that betrays all of our long-held ANC-alliance traditions of internal organizational democracy, mutual respect for comrades, non-racialism, and service to our people. It has created substantial space for an anti-majoritarian, conservative reactive groundswell that seeks to tarnish the whole movement, portraying us all as anti-constitutionalist and as narrow nationalist chauvinists.

It was only a matter of time before a rescue attempt of the sliding democratic project was launched from within the alliance. It was always going to come either from Cosatu or the SACP – and despite its lack of a mass base, the SACP is more venerable and respected within the ANC

The communist leadership has dissipate into government and its voice has been softer and more defensive as a result. It remains to be seen if the party is still able to crack the whip loud enough to drive our domestic version of Zanu-PF back into its cage.

Source: Nic Borain

Mdluli meddling exposed in prosecutor's attack on NPA

Advocate Glynnis Breytenbach has launched a devastating attack on the acting national director of public prosecutions, Nomgcobo Jiba, accusing her of acting with “an ulterior purpose” in suspending her, allegedly to stop the prosecution of crime intelligence supremo Richard Mdluli. Breytenbach’s allegation forms part of a challenge to her suspension lodged a week ago with the Labour Court in Johannesburg.

Breytenbach was suspended by Jiba on April 30 this year, purportedly in relation to a complaint about her conduct in the prosecution of Imperial Crown Trading (ICT), the company accused of fraud and ­forgery in its battle to secure mineral rights over the giant Sishen iron ore mine. “Her [Jiba’s] real purpose was to stop me from prosecuting a senior police officer, Lieutenant General Richard Mdluli, on charges of fraud and corruption,” said Breytenbach. “She used the ICT complaint against me as an excuse to suspend me.”

The National Prosecuting Authority has denied that the disciplinary steps against Breytenbach have anything to do with the Mdluli matter. Breytenbach’s court papers deliver an indictment of the prosecuting authority’s two key decision-makers in the Mdluli matter – Jiba and advocate Lawrence Mrwebi – both appointees of President Jacob Zuma. Breytenbach’s application signals that judicial and public scrutiny of the Mdluli scandal will expand to the prosecuting authority, notably through allegations of improper decisions by Mrwebi, supported by Jiba, to withdraw charges against Mdluli. It comes in the week North Gauteng High Court Judge Ephraim Makgoba delivered a hammer blow to attempts to politically manage the police side of the Mdluli investigation. Makgoba granted an urgent application by lobby group Freedom Under Law for Mdluli to be interdicted from carrying out any functions as a police officer.

Mdluli will be barred from office pending a full judicial review of the various decisions to abandon corruption and murder charges against him, to terminate internal police disciplinary steps against him and to reinstate him as head of crime intelligence. Now Breytenbach’s application has added fuel to Freedom Under Law’s fire by providing a detailed account of the way in which Mrwebi and Jiba appeared to bend over backwards to protect Mdluli.

The Breytenbach documents reveal that:

• The stated basis for Breytenbach’s suspension was that she had “abused her authority” in the ICT case. It was based on a complaint laid by ICT lawyer Ronnie Mendelow in a letter dated October 31 2011, but she was suspended only six months later, after she had come into critical conflict with Mrwebi and Jiba over the Mdluli prosecution.
• Mdluli’s attorneys delivered representations by hand to Mrwebi in his capacity as national head of the Specialised Commercial Crimes Unit on November 17 2011, although he had not yet been appointed to that post and was officially appointed only on November 25. Mrwebi forwarded the representations to Breytenbach on November 21, requesting a full report by the 25th.
• The representations were based largely on what Breytenbach dismisses as “wild and unsubstantiated allegations” of a conspiracy by the Hawks and police management to falsely implicate Mdluli in the 1999 murder of his former lover’s husband and subsequently to nail him for taking a personal benefit from cars purchased by the crime intelligence secret fund. The latter formed the basis of the corruption case Breytenbach intended to prosecute.
• Much of the evidence for this “conspiracy” is drawn from affidavits by three crime intelligence agents and Mdluli himself. They repeat what Colonel Ronnie Naidoo of crime intelligence told them at a meeting with Mdluli at the Emperors Palace casino on October 27 2011, while Mdluli was ostensibly suspended.
• Naidoo reported to Mdluli that Hawks boss General Anwa Dramat and senior generals Mzwandile Petros and Godfrey Lebeya had begged national commissioner Bheki Cele to dismiss Mdluli before Cele himself was suspended.
• It appears these same affidavits were attached to Mdluli’s November 3 letter to Zuma, in which he made the same conspiracy allegations.
• In overturning Breytenbach’s decision to prosecute Mdluli, Mrwebi claimed to have “consulted with” the North Gauteng director of public prosecutions, advocate Sibongile Mzinyathi, as required by law, but this has been denied.
• Breytenbach alleged: “I later understood from advocate Mzinyathi that advocate Mrwebi had merely mentioned to him that he was considering the charges against General Mdluli and did not consult him on their withdrawal.”
• The sole reason Mrwebi advanced for his decision was that, in his view, the investigation of the corruption charges against Mdluli was the exclusive preserve of the inspector general of intelligence (IGI), an argument not contained in the representations from Mdluli’s lawyers.
• Breytenbach noted: “My understanding all along was that, contrary to advocate Mrwebi’s assertion, the IGI did not regard it as her function to undertake any criminal investigations. She confirmed as much in a letter to the acting national commissioner dated March 19.”
• In that letter, the inspector general stated: “The mandate of criminal investigations rests solely with the police. As such, we are of the opinion that the reasons advanced by the NPA in support of the withdrawal of the criminal charges are inaccurate and legally flawed.”
• When Breytenbach conveyed the inspector general’s letter to Mrwebi, his response was to demand to know why his confidential memorandum on the withdrawal of charges had been disclosed to the inspector general.
• In an extraordinary outburst, Mrwebi wrote back to Breytenbach: “The view of the IGI, following your solicitation of her opinion on the NPA decision on the matter, based on a document which the police or anybody else was not even legally entitled to possess, is for your consumption and does not affect the decision … That decision stands and this matter is closed.” Breytenbach commented: “This response ... was, with the greatest of respect, wholly irrational.”
• When Breytenbach and a colleague prepared a detailed appeal to Jiba to reconsider Mrwebi’s decision, it appears Jiba was content to let Mrwebi respond. That response makes it clear Mrwebi’s real reason was his acceptance of Mdluli’s conspiracy claims, relying on additional secret evidence.
• Mrwebi wrote: “Having been provided with further information on the matter and having been privy to other classified, confidential and high-level discussions with police management, I am concerned that our actions in the matter may be interpreted, justifiably, as amounting to serious abuse of the legal process and as being motivated by ulterior purposes. It is my considered view that it will therefore not be in the interests of justice for the NPA to be further involved in this matter.”
• Concluding that her suspension is unlawful, Breytenbach stated: “I submit that the ineluctable inference from the history of my suspension … is that its purpose is to remove me from office and so prevent me from proceeding with the prosecution of General Mdluli.”

The authority will oppose her application, but has yet to file its response.

The two interlinked cases – Freedom Under Law’s high court review and Breytenbach’s labour court challenge – threaten to expose direct political meddling in decisions about Mdluli.

Government may attempt to manage the fallout by appointing a new national commissioner and has already launched a ministerial task team in an apparent attempt to bolster Mdluli’s conspiracy claims, but the Mdluli tsunami seems unstoppable.

Source: Mail & Guardian

Democratic Left statement on ANC-SACP pro-Secrecy Bill march

PRESS STATEMENT: RESPONSE TO ANC-SACP-SANCO MARCH IN SUPPORT OF THE SECRECY BILL (THE PROTECTION OF STATE INFORMATION BILL)

The Democratic Left Front (DLF) condemns the ANC, SACP and SANCO for organising a anti-democratic march for today in Cape Town in support of the anti-democratic Secrecy Bill (the Protection of State Information Bill). Despite the fury of the anti-imperialist and revolutionary rhetoric used to justify this march, no democrat of any conviction in South Africa can stand silent whilst the ANC, SACP and SANCO threaten to use their mass power to trample on basic democratic rights to information. This march is the first warning shot in the use of the mass activist base of these organisations as storm-troopers for the authoritarian ruling elite. If ever there was ever a classic example of the extent to which the ANC and the SACP represent authoritarian populism, this march is it. This is typical of Stalinist propaganda that was used by anti-democratic regimes in the past. Today, the ANC and the SACP have created false bogeys of liberals, foreign infiltrators and aggressors, and espionage in order to clamp down on social dissent given their collective failure to transform capitalist South Africa.

The DLF stands unreservedly in full and firm support of the Right to Know Campaign (R2K), COSATU, the SA Human Rights Commission and other progressive organisations in South Africa who remain opposed to the Secrecy Bill. The DLF rejects the spurious allegations made by the ANC, SACP and SANCO in their statement announcing today’s march. The DLF fully endorses the R2K statement issued in response to the ANC-SACP-SANCO statement. The R2K is not dominated by foreign-sponsored NGOs and western-owned media agencies. The R2K is not misleading the public about the class orientation of the media. In fact, the R2K has not only opposed the Secrecy Bill but has also argued and mobilised for truly democratised and diversified media, something which the ANC government has failed to facilitate through the statutory Media Development and Diversity Agency. For all these reasons, the DLF reaffirms its endorsement of the R2K campaign.

The intention of the Secrecy Bill is to stifle the spaces that do exist for access to information and critically informed citizens. The Secrecy Bill is not fundamentally about protection information that threatens the security of ordinary working class South Africans, but about protecting spaces for the ruling elite to continue their plunder of the state. While recent concessions by the ANC have improved the Bill, it will still be extremely difficult, if not impossible to ensure transparency of the most shadowy of all state structures, the security cluster. The grounds for classification of documents, and the definition of national security, still remain overbroad, and will lead to documents that are of considerable public interest and importance being declared secret. The Bill also lacks an adequate public interest/public domain defence in case people come into possession of classified documents, or if they are released into the public domain. This has serious implications for activists, who may come into possession of classified documents exposing abuses of power.

The Secrecy Bill is merely symptoms of a much bigger problem. Jacob Zuma’s ruling elite, which was brought to power by the ANC’s Polokwane conference, is enhancing the coercive capacities of the state, and in the process centralising power in an increasingly unaccountable security cluster. The re-militarisation of the police, which has intensified state violence against protestors, attempts to drive unions out of the military, and the lockdown on transparency and accountability in the Ministry of Defence are also signs of the growing power of Zuma’s securocrats. The DLF fears that unless the growing power of the security cluster is checked, then South Africa may be well on its way to a national security state, which likely to contain growing dissent against service delivery and the capitalist system itself through repression.

Source: Constitutionally Speaking

Corruption, political killings linked – alliance partners

ANC alliance partners in Mpumalanga have taken a swipe at Premier David Mabuza’s “corruption-riddled” administration.

The SACP, Cosatu and the South African Student Congress (Sasco) said they would embark on a series of marches against corruption, to demand an outcome of the probe into political killings and the banning of labour brokers. They believe that corruption and political killings are linked.

“We want the police to come up with practical ways of investigating individuals who are implicated in corruption,” said provincial SACP secretary Bonakele Majuba during a press conference.

“The political killings come as a result of corruption. Tendering is becoming a problem for this country and is causing strain,” Majuba said.

Cosatu secretary Fidel Mlombo said whistleblowers were victimised for reporting corruption.

Mlombo mentioned cases which, he said, indicated that Mpumalanga was a capital of corruption:

» The auditor-general’s report according to which 80% of tenders in Mpumalanga were issued irregularly;

» Alleged corruption related to the R1.2-billion Mbombela stadium;

» The R230-million farm mechanisation tender that was awarded to Mabuza’s former business partner while he was MEC for agriculture;

» The R300 million that parastatal Mpumalanga Economic Growth Agency (MEGA) failed to account for;

» R2.7-million theft at Mbombela municipality;

» The withdrawal of charges against former Mbombela municipal manager Jacob Dladla and the golden handshake offered to him.

Dladla was found guilty of tender corruption in 2010 but the council withdrew the charges last December and took a resolution to pay him about R2.1 million.

Mlombo said more than ten whistleblowers were killed in Mpumalanga since 2006.

The alliance partners said the police should report back on the progress of its 12-member team that was tasked with probing political murders.

Mpumalanga government spokesperson Lebona Mosia said it was untrue that the provincial administration was not fighting corruption.

“Just last week the premier announced the formation of the anti-corruption council and said its strategy has been approved by cabinet. It can't be true that we're doing nothing because officials and service providers have been charged in this province for corruption,” Mosia said.

Source: News 24

South Africans Suffer as Graft Saps Provinces

When she moved from a cramped room in a boardinghouse to her very own bungalow on a speck of land here last year, Jeanette Munyai became one of the millions of South Africans given a decent home by an ambitious government program inaugurated at the end of apartheid. House-proud for the first time in her life, she immediately planted corn, pumpkins and tomatoes on a patch of her yard. Only two things were missing: running water and electricity. “They told us water and light was coming, but we are still using the bush as a toilet,” she said. “We are waiting.”

Ms. Munyai and her neighbors are unlikely to get water or electricity any time soon. The provincial government is broke, and the dry pipes and powerless plugs have for her and many others come to symbolize the heavy toll graft and cronyism have taken in this impoverished northern province.

Corruption has long bedeviled South Africa, but the crisis here in Limpopo Province has pushed the common practice of doling out overstuffed government contracts to people with friends in high places to its logical conclusion: bankruptcy. Provincial officials overspent their budget by an estimated $250 million, much of it on questionable — or blatantly fraudulent — government payments and contracts with private businesses enjoying close ties to the politicians leading the province. “There is evidence emerging that some of these service providers are politically connected, and many of them may have gotten those tenders in dubious kinds of ways,” said Kenneth Brown, deputy director general in the Treasury Department.

Dan Sebabi, leader of Limpopo’s branch of Cosatu, the powerful coalition of trade unions that is allied with the governing African National Congress, put it more bluntly. “You have leaders who are politicians by day, businessmen by night,” he said. Graft and wasteful spending have sapped the government’s ability to tackle inequality. Only 3 of 39 government departments were pronounced clean in audits by South Africa’s auditor general last year. Only 7 of 237 cities passed muster the year before. “We thought that South Africa could be different from the rest of the countries that came before us on the African continent,” said Gilbert Kganyago, leader of Limpopo’s branch of the South African Communist Party. “But at the rate that things are happening, we have actually caught up to the African scenario quite more quickly than we might have thought.”

A recent report by the auditor general found that in the last fiscal year, government officials and their relatives won $15 million in contracts for work with the Defense Department, the Tax Service and the Department of Home Affairs, among others. And that does not come close to accounting for the many millions of dollars quietly awarded to friends and other associates, experts note.

Almost from the moment it was elected to govern in 1994 after decades of fighting to end apartheid, the A.N.C. has struggled with allegations of graft. Jacob Zuma, the current president, took office only after a bevy of corruption charges against him were dismissed amid accusations of prosecutorial misconduct. But corruption has become so entrenched that it is eating away at the nation’s soul, said Zwelinzima Vavi, secretary general of Cosatu, in a recent speech to announce the formation of an antigraft organization, Corruption Watch. “We are moving towards a society in which the morality of our revolutionary movement — selflessness, service to the people and caring for the poor and vulnerable — is being threatened,” Mr. Vavi said. “If we do nothing it will be swept away by a tidal wave of a culture of individualism, a ‘me first’ attitude and to hell with everyone else. Some argue that we are already a society where only the fittest survive and dog eats dog.”

Corruption is a particularly serious problem in provincial governments, which are responsible for delivering many of the services needed by the poor. Many powerful regional politicians use their offices to enrich their friends, forming a coterie of wealthy elites reminiscent of the tribal chieftains the apartheid government used to administer the tiny, nominally independent bantustans where blacks were forced to live.

Limpopo has the nation’s second-highest proportion of people living in poverty — 62 percent, according to the South African Institute of Race Relations. The average unemployment rate for the province is 40 percent, but it is much higher for blacks and young people. Signs of waste and fraud are everywhere. Pipes that were supposed to bring clean drinking water to parched, impoverished communities were laid improperly and burst, requiring the whole job to be done again, according to local officials. Tiny government houses like the one in which Ms. Munyai lives are crumbling only months after being built. Since she has no water, she uses her toilet as a storage closet and has to walk several blocks to a shared pump several times a day. Roads paved a year ago are already covered with potholes. “This road is not more than two years old,” said Geoffrey Tshibvumo, a local councilor from the Congress of the People, a party that broke away from the A.N.C., as he bounced along a rural road in the province one afternoon. “They spent millions on it, and it is already spoiled.”

The crisis here has been brewing for some time. Late last year, the province ran out of money and asked the central government to lend it about $130 million. But the central government balked at handing over such a large sum without first taking a close look at the province’s books. A quick survey of its accounts showed that the state treasury was in chaos. State officials had made $360 million in unauthorized payments, and millions of dollars’ worth of contracts had been awarded without competitive bidding, the central treasury said.

The Education Department had 2,400 more teachers on its payroll than it was budgeted for, and 200 “ghost” teachers, who drew salaries but did not actually exist. The department had overspent its budget by almost $40 million even before ordering textbooks and other supplies for the coming school year. In the Health Department, more than $50 million worth of goods had been improperly ordered, leaving almost nothing for salaries for government nurses and doctors. Public works contracts showed evidence that they had been manipulated, the Treasury Department said, to increase the cost of projects — and presumably the profits of the contractors. Consulting fees ate up a quarter of the infrastructure budget.

Big contracts tended to go to a small handful of companies, many of them run by close associates of the province’s top politicians, according to provincial government documents. Some officials had been warning that the province was headed for a crisis. One whistle-blower in the Health Department sent a memo to a senior official in February 2011 outlining major problems with a contract for medical supplies. The prices for bandages and dressings had been inflated, the whistle-blower said, and the department could not possibly use the quantities ordered.

In addition, officials ordered more than $30 million worth of items in the last days of the fiscal year, most of it “labels and forms that are not critical or lifesaving drugs,” according to the memo. Prices for other items were wildly inflated. The national attention to the crisis in Limpopo is in no small part a reflection of the politics of the province. It is the home of Julius Malema, the polarizing leader of the A.N.C.’s youth league, who was suspended from the party for five years for his incendiary remarks and harsh stance against the president, Mr. Zuma. Limpopo’s provincial leader, Cassel Mathale, is a close political ally of Mr. Malema.

But many other provinces face a lesser version of the same crisis, analysts say. “It is not unique to Limpopo — it is all over the country,” said Moeletsi Mbeki, a political analyst and businessman. “It is a general form of self-enrichment by the politically connected.”

Mr. Brown, the deputy director general at the treasury, said that politics played no part in the decision to intervene in Limpopo. The crisis threatened the country’s financial reputation. “If you are sitting in New York and you are an investor in South Africa and you see a provincial government that cannot pay its teachers and nurses,” he said, “what does that tell you about South Africa?”

Source: New York Times

Right-wing demagogy the greatest threat - SACP

Central Committee warns against dangerous tendency within ANC alliance

SACP Central Committee Statement

The Central Committee of the SACP met in Johannesburg over the weekend of the 10-12th June. An analysis of the May 18th local government elections, an interaction on challenges within the youth sector (in which we were joined by the national executive committee of the Young Communist League), further consolidation of the SACP's perspectives on government's New Growth Path framework document, and preparations for the commemoration of the SACP's 90th anniversary were among the main items under discussion.

The CC suspended deliberations for most of Saturday to enable CC members to join thousands of other South Africans at the funeral of our beloved leader, cde Albertina Sisulu. Cde Albertina was the second recipient (after cde Madiba) of the SACP's Chris Hani Peace Award. Hamba kahle, Mama Sisulu! May we never forget your inspiring example of courageous, militant and unassuming service to the people of South Africa - you passed on with your dignity and integrity intact.

May 18th Local Government elections

The SACP was an active partner in the ANC's local government election campaign from the outset with the development of the election manifesto, through the candidate selection process, and into mass mobilization and door-to-door work. The CC saluted the role played by our tens of thousands of activists in the campaign.

The CC also congratulated the many communist militants who, in their capacity as ANC members and leaders, have been elected as councilors. In particular, the CC congratulated CC member, cde Zukiswa Ncitha who has been elected mayor of the new Buffalo City Metro, and KZN SACP chairperson, cde James Nxumalo, elected as mayor of the eThekwini metro.

These positive developments which bring added responsibilities to the Party and its members are in line with our medium term vision of seeking to build progressive influence and working class hegemony in all sites of struggle. The SACP calls on all ANC councilors not to take the electorate for granted and to ensure that with our support we rise to the expectations expressed in the campaign.

The CC agreed that with 63% of the vote the ANC together with its alliance partners had, once more, received an overwhelming electoral mandate. The CC further noted that this significant electoral victory was achieved in challenging circumstances - in the midst of the local aftershocks of the global economic crisis, and in the context of many challenges in the local government sphere. In many other countries, from the US to Spain, previously incumbent political parties have suffered massive electoral defeats in the midst of the economic crisis. The ANC-alliance's sustained performance and continued overwhelming majority support from our core constituencies is, therefore, particularly noteworthy.

However, the ANC-alliance would also be seriously mistaken if we did not take note of many warning lights from this election campaign. There was, for a local election, an exceptional voter turnout.

Some of this was attributable to the DA's ability to turn out a very high level of support in so-called "minority", and particularly white areas. But the high turnout was also a popular response from our mass base in provinces and municipalities where the working class and poor sensed that their organizations and their struggle were under threat from an axis of anti-majoritarian forces that included the major media houses, right-wing NGOs like Afriforum, and the DA.

But in other provinces and municipalities there was a noticeable decline in ANC voter turnout, which is in part an indication of frustration with corruption and ineffective ANC performance in some municipalities.

The SACP welcomed the innovative ANC candidate selection process that involved active community participation. Amongst other things, this approach to candidate selection sought to bring popular power to bear in the struggle against organizational gate-keeping, tenderpreneurship, and money-politics. In some cases, regional gate-keepers and money politics still managed to either side-step or hijack the community participation process provoking some of the current popular anger - but, overwhelmingly, community participation proved to be a very positive process. The SACP will be strongly supporting this approach for future elections, while learning lessons and adapting where needed.

The CC noted the many subjective and objective problems in the local government sphere. Much criticism of local government focuses, often correctly, on subjective weaknesses - inappropriate deployments, corruption, tenderpreneurship, etc. However, we need also to look at the objective challenges in the current model of local government and the impossible challenges with which many local governments are confronted. The SACP supports the overall thrust of the Municipal Systems Amendment Bill that has passed through both houses in parliament and now awaits presidential proclamation.

We also support turnaround proposals from the Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs department . Amongst other things, we support the measure that office bearers (not members) of political parties should not occupy senior administrative posts in local government; and the need for a more clearly defined separation between the roles of elected councilors and administrators. The SACP strongly supports the critical need to strengthen popular participatory involvement in local government through, amongst other things, ward committees. These measures are not just legalistic and institutional responses to challenges.

They are aimed at professionalizing and greatly improving the efficiency and effectiveness of local government. They will also help to strike at the heart of areas in which corruption and tenderpreneurship have often proliferated. Other critical areas that require attention include the funding model for local government, and the key role of district municipalities in rural development.

Right-wing demagogy within the ranks of the broader movement - the greatest threat to the national democratic revolution

There are many lessons that need to be derived from the May 18th election campaign - but the greatest of all is that factionalism led by a dangerous right-wing demagogy within our broader movement is costing us dearly. This demagogy constitutes the greatest threat, not just to our electoral performance, but also to our hard-won democratic achievements as a country in general.

We are dealing with an anti-worker, anti-left, anti-communist, pseudo-militant demagogy that betrays all of our long-held ANC-alliance traditions of internal organizational democracy, mutual respect for comrades, non-racialism, and service to our people. It has created substantial space for an anti-majoritarian, conservative reactive groundswell that seeks to tarnish the whole movement, portraying us all as anti-constitutionalist and as narrow nationalist chauvinists.

The SACP calls on our Alliance partners to unite, to close ranks and to deal decisively with this grave threat. Closing ranks does not mean that various other debates and differences amongst us should be suppressed - but it does mean that within and across our Alliance we must not open up a dozen fronts of fractious public dispute, as if all differences and debates were of equal significance.

So how do we unite to confront the demagogic challenge? There is one fundamental response - across the Alliance we need to take up with renewed vigour the programme of action that we have agreed upon at the ANC's 2007 Polokwane conference and in subsequent Alliance summits. The programme of action embraces five key pillars - jobs, education and training, health, rural development and the fight against crime and corruption. It is a programme of action that must combine the determined exercise of state power and active mobilization of popular forces.

In the midst of media-supported diversions we often lose sight of very important gains made in these key areas of transformation. Popular mobilization and a change in government policy have seen, for instance, a very significant reduction of mother-to-child HIV/Aids transmission - saving an estimated 67,000 children. There have been important gains in funding students through a reinvigorated mandate for NSFAS. National Treasury has announced very important corruption-busting measures that name and shame fronting and other tenderpreneuring activities and prevent those involved in doing business with government. All of these measures have been won as a result of popular struggles and a more determined and strategic use of state power.

But these advances must be replicated across the board, and particularly in areas of burning concern - notably the crisis of unemployment (especially youth unemployment) and rural development - including the critical questions of accelerated land reform and sustainable rural livelihoods. The CC supports the Department of Land Affairs and Rural Development's intention to bring to cabinet the proposal of reopening the land restitution program. The SACP has resolved to pursue our cooperatives campaign linking this much more actively to prescribed state procurement policies. The SACP will also be closely studying the important Indian rural work-guarantee programme, we believe it has important potential application to SA when addressing rural development and youth unemployment.

The crisis in Swaziland

The deepening economic and social crisis in Swaziland in the midst of a ruling elite's squandering of resources, underlines the importance of increased pressure to ensure that this backward feudal dispensation is finally democratized. The CC noted and welcomed the recent launch of a Swaziland Communist Party which is already making an important impact in strengthening the broader democratic movement.

Forward to the 90th anniversary of the SACP!

The end of July marks the 90th anniversary of the Communist Party in South Africa. In the course of nine decades, the Communist Party has made an indelible contribution to the South African struggle and to our new democratic dispensation. The Communist Party was the first, and for many decades the only, political party in SA that not only aspired to a non-racial future, but had an active membership of black and white comrades shoulder-to-shoulder in struggle. The Communist Party pioneered militant trade unionism, and progressive journalism in SA. As many generations of outstanding ANC leaders, among them cde Nelson Mandela, have acknowledged, the Party has also made an outstanding contribution to consolidating and defending a mass-based and campaigning ANC.

The 90th anniversary celebrations will be launched on the 3rd July in Bushbuckridge, in Mpumalanga, with many Red Forums and other activities in all provinces, culminating in a main rally on 31 July at Sugar Ray Xulu Stadium, Clermont in KZN.

Statement issued by the SACP, June 12 2011

Source: Politicsweb