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The SA Communist Party (SACP) has accepted President Jacob Zuma’s apology to the nation, but has trained its guns on the ANC caucus at Parliament and a “circle of courtiers” around the president.
In a hard-hitting document after its leaders’ meeting on Friday, the SACP said the judgment and the support it had received “should be a clear warning signal to the ANC, to our ANC-led alliance and to the ANC-led government”.
It wanted to request an urgent meeting with the ANC’s top leaders, it said in a document prepared at the end of a fiery politburo meeting on Friday.
City Press has seen the document and it calls for the
ANC parliamentary caucus to do some “serious and collective soul-searching” about its defensive handling of the matter.
“The Constitutional Court judgment correctly found that Parliament had failed to exercise its constitutional responsibility in holding the executive to account in the Nkandla matter,” it said.
“Decisive action is now imperative, otherwise the continuing loss of moral authority, political paralysis and fragmentation of our movement will continue.
“The ANC leadership needs to reflect critically on the capacities and motives of a circle of informal presidential courtiers, flatterers, patrons, factionalists and hangers-on.
“It is a circle that, in our view, continuously and prejudicially exposes the presidency.”
The SACP called on the ANC to embark on a process of “self-introspection and self-correction”.
The politburo, meeting a day after the Constitutional Court ruled that Zuma had broken his oath of office by refusing to pay for non-security features installed at his Nkandla home, spent a lot of time discussing the “implications of the judgment and the collective responsibilities that must ensue from it”.
However, the SACP said Zuma’s public apology, broadcast live on Friday, and the judgment were “important moments in the reaffirmation and consolidation of constitutionality and the rule of law”.
SACP leaders believed that Zuma’s apology and his undertaking to implement the remedial actions proposed by Public Protector Thuli Madonsela, now upheld as enforceable by the ConCourt, were “important beginnings”.
However, Zuma’s acknowledgment that the matter could have been handled differently and should never have been allowed to drag on, could place him in a precarious position, the SACP said.
Its leaders believed this stance “lays the basis for a range of further lines of inquiry, reflection and, above all, corrective action”.
This is the strongest position the SACP, which was previously firmly in Zuma’s camp, has taken against the president’s behaviour.
The SACP has for years, since the Nkandla saga was exposed, been on the defensive and refused to find fault with Zuma.
Instead, it called on the officials and contractors responsible for inflating prices in the R246 million Nkandla project to be punished.
In another swipe at the ANC’s parliamentary caucus, the party said it was “unconscionable that opposition parties old and new, with tarnished origins, have been gifted with the opportunity to occupy the moral and political high ground within the National Assembly”.
The SACP said that the Nkandla matter should have been handled differently and more expeditiously.
Turning to the question of “state capture”, the SACP rejected suggestions by supporters of the Gupta family that those blowing the whistle were defending “established monopoly capital”.
The SACP has since late last year embarked on an all-out war against Zuma’s friendship with the Guptas, and the way they allegedly influence the president’s choice of Cabinet ministers and board members in some of the country’s parastatals.
“We cannot defend our democratic national sovereignty.
“We cannot staunch the massive illicit exodus of capital out of our country if critical state institutions like the SA Revenue Services are captured by corporate interests who are more interested in covering up wrongdoing and using state investigative capacity in factional battles,” said the SACP.
Its leaders, and those of other alliance partners, are expected to attend the ANC national working committee meeting tomorrow.
What form should the ANC’s self-introspection and self-correction take?
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