Johannesburg – The South African Communist Party on Saturday expressed deep concern about the "growing evidence of a reckless, parasitic network" within government and the African National Congress, and again called for a judicial commission of inquiry into corporate state capture.
"The [SACP] politburo noted with deep concern the growing evidence of a reckless, parasitic network within government and within the ANC that operates outside of any collective discipline of either cabinet, or of the ANC’s national executive committee and other constitutional structures. What is more, this network appears to enjoy the support, tacit or otherwise, of President Jacob Zuma himself," the SACP said in a statement issued following its political bureau meeting in Johannesburg on Friday.
Hardly a week went by without further evidence of structures gone rogue.
In the past week Northern Cape premier Sylvia Lucas fired members of the provincial government's executive council "in a blatant (and futile) effort" to influence the outcome of the ANC’s Northern Cape elective conference, the SACP said.
In the same week, having correctly stepped in to stop Eskom’s outrageous plan to gift former CEO Brian Molefe a R30 million payout package, Public Enterprises Minister Lynne Brown inexplicably did a U-turn and announced that it made “fiscal sense” to irregularly re-appoint Molefe as Eskom CEO.
"Molefe was hurriedly smuggled into Parliament a few months ago with the clear intention of making him finance minister. When this failed thanks to robust opposition from the SACP, among others, Molefe is now to be returned to a position which he disgraced in the first place.
The dark cloud of the highly suspect Gupta Tegeta coal deal still hangs over him.
"The original intention to controversially deploy Molefe as finance minister was surely to drive a nuclear deal that our country neither needs nor can afford. Back at Eskom he will still pursue that same ruinous agenda," the SACP said.
"This is the context in which we once more re-assert the call, originally made by the SACP, for a judicial commission of inquiry into corporate state capture. This was the principal (and mandatory, subject to legal challenge) remedial action recommended by the former public protector’s 'State of Capture Report'.
"At least one prominent constitutional expert has argued that given the fact that President Zuma is deeply conflicted in the matter, with one of his sons featuring prominently in the Tegeta matter, an alternative approach to appointing such a commission must be considered," it said.
The lawyer argued that the Constitution provided for the deputy president to appoint a judicial commission inquiry in cases where the president was unable to. This was surely an angle that should be considered by the ANC.
The SACP commended the ANC for formally condemning both the actions of Lucas and Brown. But the ANC needed to take matters further as a governing party.
The ANC’s major partners the SACP and the Congress of SA Trade Unions (Cosatu) had called on Zuma to step down – in the interests of the ANC itself, of the movement, and indeed of the country and its hard-won democracy.
Zuma had said he would not go unless asked to do so by the ANC. The ANC NEC needed to convene as soon as possible to address the problem that the ANC, and by extension all South Africans, now confronted.
"The SACP re-affirmed the party’s decades-long commitment to a radical national democratic revolution which deals, among other things, with the extraordinary high levels of monopoly concentration in our economy and the doleful legacy of a colonial and apartheid past that continues to reproduce crisis levels of black poverty and unemployment, along with racialised inequality.
"It is precisely for this reason that we reject the false 'radicalism' of those whose intention is radical looting. We cannot deal with the skewed, racialised, and monopolised realities of our society if public resources in Eskom, Transnet, Prasa, Denel, the social grant system, and the PIC are looted by a parasitic elite.
"The first step in advancing a second, more radical phase, of our national democratic revolution, including real radical economic transformation, is, therefore, dealing decisively with parasitic state capture," the SACP said.