SACP+CC+Press+Statement,+2005-05-22



=SACP Press Statement=

Central Committee Meeting - 20-21st May 2005
The SACP Central Committee met on the 20th and 21st May 2005 in Johannesburg. This meeting of the CC is the first after the SACP's Special National Congress (8-10 April), and it also comes shortly after a series of important intra-Alliance engagements. This weekend's CC, therefore, provided the leadership of the SACP with an opportunity to reflect upon and to take forward the key resolutions emerging from these meetings. The CC also had a briefing on plans for a National Land Summit from the director general of the national Land Affairs Department, and an interaction with Earthlife Africa on the challenges of energy policy in South Africa.

The situation in KZN
A central theme of the SACP secretariat's political report to the CC was the current situation in KZN. In the view of the SACP, we are now witnessing the next important stage in the downward spiral of IFP decline. With the death of the NNP, the IFP remains the last significant party political institutional remnant of the apartheid era. This downward spiral carries with it threats of heightened tension and of violence in the province of KZN but, if properly handled, it also presents important opportunities to carry forward the struggle to ensure that our new democracy indeed liberates hundreds of thousands of rural people from a persisting Bantustan bondage. It is for this reason that the CC agreed that the unfolding situation cannot be left to the structures of the SACP and Alliance in the province alone. The challenges are of national importance.

At the heart of the current turmoil within the IFP is the long present fault-line between traditionalists and modernisers. Mangosuthu Buthelezi is leading a retreat back into Zulu tribalism in ways that are not too dissimilar to the period between 1990 and 1994. In a little noticed but significant speech that Buthelezi delivered to the KZN House of Traditional Leaders on 22 March 2005, he is quoted in the Daily News as having said that "he may have erred in the early 1990s by not opting for (and listening to those who were pushing him towards) the path of secession and declaring KwaZulu-Natal a separate state".

However, sections of the IFP-aligned petty bourgeoisie, supported by significant sections of IFP youth, realise that the future of the IFP does not lie with traditional Zulu institutions and symbols, but in modernising the party in a democratic dispensation. It is this that is at the heart of the tension within the IFP. It is not a new tension, but it is now reaching even higher levels after the IFP lost the elections last year.

The following are some of the current manifestations of the deepening crisis within the IFP: the contradictory approach to the question of the constitutional recognition of the Zulu monarch; petulance over the writing of the KZN Constitution; and the expulsion of no less than 18 of its local government councillors, ostensibly for defying the party line.

Faced with this unfolding situation, we believe that the SACP and its alliance partners need to bear in mind several important issues. While aspects of Zulu tradition and custom have been perverted and exploited by colonialism and by its "traditionalist" proxy forces in the former Bantustan apparatus, these traditions continue to have an important resonance among millions of working class and rural poor. In respecting these realities, it would be an error, however, to simply and uncritically seek to appropriate the mantle and create a new kind of ANC-aligned Zulu tribalism. It is equally important that our response to the IFP crisis does not narrowly rely on a strategy of floor-crossing and intra-elite deals. We must use this IFP crisis to reach out to rural communities (and our land campaign is an important weapon in this regard) fostering development, democracy and popular power on the ground.

National Land Summit
One of the central demands of the SACP-led 2004 Red October Campaign on land and agrarian reform was for a National Land Summit to be convened by government. We are pleased to report that our government has embraced the idea and is actively running with preparations for such a Summit.

The CC received a report from the director general of Land Affairs, Glen Thomas, on government's perspectives on such a Summit, which will be scheduled for later this year. The CC engaged with the report and committed the Party to an active role within the Alliance and among rural communities, faith-based organisations and progressive NGOs in mobilising for the Summit to ensure its success.

In the course of June the SACP will be convening provincial Peoples Forums on Land and Land Reforms as part of our ongoing mobilisational efforts.

The SACP believes that it is important to ensure that the land question is fully integrated into agrarian reform, and the strategic perspective of changing our current growth path, fostering sustainable communities and local economies, and ensuring food security for all our people.

A growth and development path for jobs and decent work for all The Ekurhuleni II Alliance Summit and the follow-up extended Alliance Secretariat were fundamentally focused on building alliance consensus on a growth and development path that will create jobs, retain jobs and assure decent work for all. This will also be a key focus of the forthcoming ANC National General Council.

Over the past year and a half, we have succeeded in consolidating an important converging consensus within our Alliance. The Ekurhuleni II Summit and the follow-up extended secretariat, amongst other things, have helped to confirm and consolidate this reality. Among the principal features of this deepening convergence are: the commitment to a strong State Owned Enterprise (SOE) sector to drive infrastructural development; agreement that our society is characterised by systemic socio-economic polarisation ("two economies"); the need for a developmental state of national democracy; the need to submit macro-economic policy to the test of its impact on the "real" or "micro" economy (jobs, growth, competitiveness) - rather than seeing it as an off-limits technical realm on its own; the priority of job retention and creation and the broader commitment to creating decent work for all; increasing commitment to the concepts of sustainable households and communities, as well as an acceptance of the importance of cooperatives. The gathering critique (in leading circles of the ANC) of narrow BEE is also a relatively new and welcome development.

The Party's perspective is that the present growth path remains essentially unchanged from the colonial and apartheid era - it is excessively export oriented and import dependent; the leading capitalist corporations are highly concentrated, crowding out middle and small scale entrepreneurship; it is a capital intensive and labour shedding growth path; it is predatory in our region and the post-apartheid opening up has been used, in part, to project its profit maximising activities into our region and continent without an effective developmental impact. Above all, this growth path is actively reproducing the poles of development and underdevelopment in our society - the dual economy.

Within the emerging Alliance-wide economic consensus there are, however, differences. One concerns the role of the SOEs. We all agree they need to be reinforced and used strategically, but to what end? The idea that the major infrastructural development programme is essentially about "lowering the cost of doing business" remains a business oriented agenda, and does not sufficiently address the developmental challenges of our society. The SACP is also concerned that there may be impending sales of so-called "non-core" SOE functions. We call on government to ensure that any contemplated moves in this direction are fully negotiated, especially with the trade union movement. We also call for working class vigilance to protect what is, essentially, public property from the predatory ambitions of certain well-placed groupings with access to government. The Telkom fiasco is surely not something that we can allow to be repeated ever again.

Energy Policy
In the course of the CC meeting, there was an interaction with representatives from Earthlife Africa. The CC agreed that the SACP would more actively engage with evolving national energy policy. This is an absolutely critical area for the future of our society and its people, and policy formation needs to be transparent and democratic, with the advantages and challenges of different energy sources and technologies more effectively understood and debated by all South Africans.

One of the concerns that the CC noted is that the present housing of energy within a Minerals and Energy Department carried the inherent danger that energy policy could unduly be dominated by the powerful mining corporate sector. The SACP will continue to interact with Earthlife Africa, particularly around our shared concerns of fostering sustainable local communities and economies.

Email: kaizer@sacp.org.za Fax: 011 339 4244/6880, Website: [|www.sacp.org.za]**
 * CONTACT: Kaizer Mohau, Media Liaison Officer, Tel: 011 339 3621/2, Cell: 073 571 7528,