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We are bracing ourselves for an exciting policy debate, Gauteng ANC chairperson Paul Mashatile said in an interview ahead of the start of the ANC national policy conference in Nasrec in Johannesburg over the weekend.
He oozed confidence too, despite being classed by some of his fierce rivals in the ANC as being among the so-called “denialists” of “white monopoly capital” or “a sellout”.
“We have a very strong history of debates on these concepts and I guess it will make conference quiet exciting,” said Mashatile.
Among the ANC’s nine provinces and leagues meeting in Nasrec, Gauteng has previously been touted as the province that boasts some of the best minds when it comes to “crafting political speak” and has been described as the “intellectual powerhouse” of the ANC.
“We are clear that monopoly capital remains the enemy of the [ANC’s] national democratic revolution. We are not interested in an emphasis on white and we are saying that whether black or white, we have to tackle monopoly capital in general,” Mashatile said.
“Monopoly can never be good even if it is by government itself [because] government monopoly can also create a lot of inefficiencies and you cannot call it white since it is predominantly a black government. So forget all this colour coding.”
He was also keenly aware of the “sellout” label.
“[Some people] are saying that those who deny that there is no white monopoly capital in the ANC vocabulary do it because they are benefiting or co-opted by big business, which is a silly argument.
“We must go back to those arguments in 2007 [when the ANC reviewed its strategy and tactics document] and say why we decided to part from that conceptualisation of white monopoly capital because once we did that we took it away from our vocabulary,” said Mashatile.
He said the 2007 strategy and tactics document, revised in Mangaung in 2012 was the authority on ANC policy, and that is why the phrase white monopoly capital was “no longer in our vocabulary”.
It did not matter whether our former leaders used this phrase many years ago, he said.
His views have been widely canvassed in Gauteng. At the provincial ANC policy conference last weekend, his deputy David Makhura told delegates that the focus on “white monopoly capital” was a distraction, adding that the ANC should be dealing with monopoly as a whole.
Mashatile also said that while Gauteng agreed with the notion of radical economic transformation, the content of the national democratic revolution had in itself always been radical “so this thing must not be made fashionable”.
“In fact a revolution in itself is radical. You can pick up the word radical whenever you want to emphasise something but I think we in the movement must not operate as if we are waking up today to think that we are radical. If we are in a revolution it means we have always been radical.”
He said that instead of debating concepts the ANC should rather be focusing on what needed to be done to improve the lives of poor South Africans, including reducing the high levels of unemployment, growing the economy, providing young people with skills, supporting small businesses, getting more back people in the economy to own and control business and factories and getting the financial institutions to support developement. Perhaps even create the state bank that we have been talking about, said Mashatile.
“We may be distracted by debates on the concept and thinking who is more radical than whom. But we are all revolutionaries in the revolution so we are all radical,” he said.
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