The South African Communist Party (SACP) will participate in the ANC’s national general council (NGC) in order to help strengthen the leadership and unity of the ANC and the alliance, secretary general Blade Nzimande said on Sunday.
“We will vigorously struggle against all attempts to divert the NGC from its critical policy consolidation role by diverting it into factional power plays and unseemly and premature 2012 electoral battles,” he told reporters in Johannesburg after the SACP’s central committee meeting.
Nzimande, who described the tripartite alliance as being better at national level, said some of the discussion papers dealing with challenges of factionalism, ill-discipline, corruption and tenderpreneurship within the ANC were to be commended.
He said missing in the discussion papers was the link between these problems and some existing government policies, such as the BEE [black economic empowerment].
“In the course of the run-up to, and in the proceedings of the NGC, the SACP intends to engage with what we believe is a very wide consensus that narrow BEE is not only perverse and non-transformational, but also at the root of many of our own movement’s internal problems,” he said.
“We need to use the NGC to build a wide consensus in favour of genuine broad-based empowerment and affirmative action and against the current perverted narrow BEE practices — much of which is written into law.”
He said the party’s struggle to abolish BEE was a principled one and should not be confused with current factional attacks on leading ANC and government comrades. — Sapa