Johannesburg - Recent claims of "spies" within the ranks of the African National Congress and the liberation movement are intended to cause internal conflict and confrontation, the South African Communist Party said on Sunday.
"Often factionalism is fuelled by fights over positions through capture of our movement, with money underpinning the fights and being used to oil this factionalism," the SACP said in a statement marking its 98th anniversary.
That was why the fight against factionalism should also be combined with the struggle against corruption and the fight against the state capture fightback and the efforts by its networks against cleaning the state and the organisation of all the dirt and the rot, the statement said.
"Corporate capture of the state and sections of our movement, including certain leaders and members, down to the grassroots, has driven public entities and key state institutions into multiple financial and structural crises as we have pointed out."
State capture had weakened a number of state organs. The country had lost billions of rand as a result of corruption and its networks of patronage, factionalism, and fightback. This was the context in which internal divisions in the movement had become deeply entrenched, the SACP said.
"We must also refuse to be defocused from the tasks of uprooting state capture and dealing decisively with other forms of corruption. That is why we must not allow ourselves to be diverted by spurious 30-year-old claims about spies in our ranks. The sole aim of these claims is to defocus us and cause internal conflict and confrontation inside our movement.
"Our focus must remain on dismantling state capture networks and defeating their fightback. We must support the work of the Commission of Inquiry into State Capture, consistently until it delivers on its mandate successfully. We must tackle all forms of diversion, regardless of who is involved in the diversionary propaganda and its activities," the SACP said..
The SACP rejected the charge "by some of the parasitic networks" that the economy was in difficulties because President Cyril Ramaphosa was not implementing the ANC resolutions. This charge was nothing but part of the fightback campaign trying to derail the campaign led by the president to clean the state and its institutions.
The SACP welcomed and supported the efforts led by Ramaphosa to clean the South African Revenue Service (SARS), the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA), the Public Investment Corporation (PIC), and many state-owned companies, public institutions, and public entities.
"If anything the economic challenges we face are a direct result of the effects of state capture and its associated governance decay, over and above lack of structural radical transformation in the past and the ongoing endemic global capitalist system crisis."
The SACP also welcomed the efforts led by the president to mobilise both foreign and domestic investment into the economy, especially the productive sector to create decent work and employment for the unemployed. "We further call upon the financial sector in our country to release investment funds [to] stimulate the productive sector and our economy at large. The SACP is calling for an end to the investment strike by sections of capital since 1994," it said.