The South African Communist Party (SACP) should also relinquish its stranglehold over the African National Congress (ANC), and free the ruling party to reflect the pragmatic policy preferences of most ANC voters.
The SACP is once again thinking of standing for election in its own name – though only in selected areas and solely at the local government level – instead of continuing to ride the ANC horse into power. However, it is also concerned about the likely limits to its electoral support.
As the SACP notes in a discussion document prepared for its forthcoming special national congress in December this year, Numsa’s Socialist Workers’ Revolutionary Party won only about 24 400 votes in the May 2019 election, not enough for a single seat. And this despite Numsa’s having more than 400 000 members, well over the 300 000 belonging to the SACP.
The SACP is also wary of jeopardising the benefits it derives from its riding of the ANC horse. As the party puts it, ‘thousands of SACP members…have been elected into the National Assembly, the National Council of Provinces, provincial legislatures and municipal councils’. In addition, ‘tens of thousands of South African communists have taken up the challenges of governance, as cabinet ministers, [in]…provincial executives, [as] mayors…[and] as officials and workers throughout the public service’.
Many of these closet SACP legislative and executive representatives have doubtless sworn oaths to respect and uphold the Constitution. Yet the SACP expects them all to act at all times as ‘exemplary communists’, with an overriding loyalty to ‘their own communist identity and principles’.
The SACP’s success in riding the ANC horse into power has thus given it enormous influence over the content and implementation of government policy – and this without the party’s ever having had to win a single vote.
The SACP’s domination of the ANC is the primary reason for the widening gap between the ‘business-friendly’ policies that most ordinary people (including most ANC voters) prefer – and what a narrow group of left-leaning ‘ANC’ leaders and activists decides.
Following the ANC’s most recent national conference (at Nasrec in December 2017), the ANC has pledged to introduce both expropriation without compensation (EWC) and the National Health Insurance (NHI) scheme. It also wants to change the operation of the South African Reserve Bank, and is investigating prescribed asset rules for pension funds and other financial institutions.
Following on from Nasrec, one of the SACP’s primary aims is to push the NHI Bill through Parliament as speedily as possible. However, the real purpose of the NHI is not to enhance the quality of healthcare – which the new system will inevitably fail to achieve – but rather to move South Africa closer to what the party describes as a ‘socialised’ society.
Such a society, says the SACP in The South African Road to Socialism, is one in which ‘social needs are placed before private profits’. This wording implies that generating profits is intrinsically immoral. It also ignores the fact that businesses cannot survive – or keep employing their staff – unless their incomings exceed their outgoings.
In addition, it is the government’s responsibility to use tax revenues to meet the healthcare needs of the poor. The government must also ensure that the 4% of GDP already being spent on public health is properly used. In practice, however, it has dismally failed at these core obligations, making little attempt to overcome the persistent inefficiency, often corrupt procurement, and pernicious lack of accountability that so plague public healthcare.
The SACP is also determined to have its way on the role of the South African Reserve Bank. The Constitution states that the Bank’s ‘primary object’ is to ‘protect the value of the currency in the interest of balanced and sustainable growth’. But the SACP wants the Bank to embark instead on ‘quantitative easing with South African characteristics’.
This, the party says, will make it possible for the Bank to print money which can then be used to purchase debt held by the Public Investment Corporation (PIC). The PIC, which manages public service pensions currently worth some R2 trillion, would then be obliged to invest the additional cash in what the SACP regards as ‘productive areas’. This, the party says, would bring about a ‘structurally transformative deployment of the massive wealth’ the PIC controls.
According to the SACP, the PIC should not be using the money of public servants and state pensioners to invest in ‘profit-maximising commercial assets’. Instead, it should be investing in ‘developmental initiatives’ – including, presumably, those put forward by Eskom and other SOEs. This proposal again aims to ensure that ‘social needs’ take precedence over ‘private profits’.
However, as the self-proclaimed ‘vanguard’ representative of the working class, the SACP might at least have some regard for what public servants want. Already, the Public Servants’ Association has warned against the NHI Fund, which the government sees as becoming the ‘single state-run medical aid plan’ for the entire country. According to the association, ‘its members would prefer [existing] medical aids’ as they ‘don’t want to find themselves in a situation where the NHI is the only option’.
Equally, public servants, whether working or retired, have little wish to see their pension savings diverted from investing in profitable private enterprises to propping up failing SOEs. Cosatu has recently insisted that pension funds should be invested solely in ways that ‘guarantee healthy, above-inflation growth’. The Association of Monitoring and Advocacy of Government Pensions agrees, warning that investments into Eskom or other SOEs are not ‘an option’ as this would bring about ‘a negative return’.
At the very least, the SACP should summon up the courage to put its claim to represent the working class to the test. It should stand in its own name in all future elections – not merely those at local level – and see how well it does.
The party should also relinquish its stranglehold over the ANC, so that genuinely ANC (and not also SACP) leaders can reflect the pragmatic policy preferences of most ANC voters.
But that, of course, the SACP is unlikely to do. Its control over the ANC horse gives it all the benefits of state power without its having to secure any voter endorsement at all. That is an enormous and profoundly illegitimate benefit the party would be most unwilling to surrender.
Dr Anthea Jeffery is Head of Policy Research at the IRR.
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