Jaspreet Kindra
South African Communist Party members are planning to haul communist Cabinet members over the coals this weekend for defying the party line by supporting and implementing the state’s privatisation policy.
There is a groundswell of protest from almost all provincial structures over the role of SACP central executive members and party officials including the party’s deputy chairperson and Minister of Public Service and Administration Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi, Minister of Public Enterprises Jeff Radebe and Minister of Provincial and Local Government Sydney Mufamadi.
Also in the firing line are the party’s national chairperson, Charles Nqakula, now deputy home affairs minister, and deputy general secretary Jeremy Cronin, who is an African National Congress member of Parliament. Most of these members also sit in the ANC’s national executive.
Gauteng’s MEC for Finance Jabu Moleketi will also come under party scrutiny at the party’s central executive committee’s three-day meeting, which started Friday. At issue are remarks made to the Mail & Guardian earlier this year, in which he accused the party of being stuck in a time warp and of failing to keep pace with communist regimes in Cuba and China, which had embraced privatisation.
A report on his conduct is also on the agenda.
However, there seems to be some nervousness about taking on the Minister in the Office of the President, Essop Pahad, because of his closeness to the presidency.
“We do not expect people [communists in the Cabinet] to hide behind the collective decisions taken by the Cabinet, we expect them to make public statements about how they are trying to engage the government on the party line,” said Smiso Nkwanyana, provincial secretary of the SACP in KwaZulu-Natal.
The KwaZulu-Natal region has set the ball rolling by publicly questioning the contradictory role of communists in government who are at the forefront of the privatisation thrust.
Nkwanyana said Radebe’s recent angry attacks on the SACP’s anti-privatisation stance, and his remark that the “SACP is caught between a hammer and a sickle”, had brought the party into “disrepute”.
There was particular anger over Fraser-Moleketi’s hardline stance on the public sector wage negotiations.
Nkwanyana did not rule out calls for disciplinary action against Radebe and Fraser-Moleketi. He said the membership had been defending stances taken by their leaders in government, but Radebe’s public condemnation of the SACP was the last straw.
SACP representative Mazibuko Jara said the issues raised by the KwaZulu-Natal party structure had received widespread support from all the provinces.
Mufamadi that said “in the more than 20 years that I have been a member of the SACP, I have never been asked by the party to explain the position I take as a Cabinet member.”
He added that while a member of the ANC and the Congress of South African Trade Unions he had never been asked by either body to explain his position.
He said he did not operate in a “mechanical manner.For me being a communist means building a society in which humanity is not alienated from production.”
SACP leaders Blade Nzimande and Jeremy Cronin did not want to be drawn into a debate.
Nqakula, who served as Mbeki’s parliamentary counsellor until he took over the deputy minister of home affairs portfolio, told the M&G earlier this year that he debated issues with Mbeki and there had been occasions when the president accepted his view. He also defended Mbeki as a “leftist at heart”.