President Cyril Ramaphosa has called on the ANC to find solutions to crises dogging SA, including the high unemployment rate, an embattled economy and corruption.
Officially opening the governing party's policy conference, Ramaphosa also implored delegates to deal with the divisions tearing the ANC apart.
Those divisions, he said, were not necessarily driven by policy and ideology, but by political ambitions and a strong desire to gain access to resources.
“The conference will reflect on the state of unemployment in our country, the state of our economy, but more importantly, we should come up with what should be done. That should be our primary preoccupation that we are seized with,” he told delegates to the three-day conference at Nasrec in Johannesburg.
Last week, former president Thabo Mbeki publicly berated Ramaphosa for failing to keep his promises to tackle unemployment, inequality and poverty, which Mbeki said increased the risk of social unrest in SA.
Ramaphosa said the policy conference provided the party with an opportunity to right the wrongs that had crept into the ANC through state capture.
His speech presented a wish list of the issues he would like to see discussed at the conference. Among those was the issue of gender based violence, which he said was worryingly on the increase.
“We are also called upon to end corruption, strengthen the state at all levels to grow our economy and create jobs […]. ‘What is to be done?’ should be the primary preoccupation that we are all seized with,” he said.
He said the poor state of local government was a consequence of the ANC's faults and that those needed to be resolved.
“We are the problem,” he told the delegates.
He called for accountability and consequence management within the party as it sought to deal with the scourges of corruption and poor service delivery .
The president pressed for the ANC’s renewal, insisting that if the party’s leadership were not respected, “then we cannot lead society”. Ramaphosa said the movement’s unity could not be achieved at the cost of principles such as standing against corruption.
The ANC is saddled with factionalism, operational, administrative and financial problems, which have seen it fail to pay its staff salaries on time for several months.
These have also resulted in poor electoral performances with the party getting less than 50% of the vote in the most recent election, losing key metros such as Johannesburg, Tshwane and Ekurhuleni to DA-led coalitions.
Ramaphosa bemoaned the problems arising from coalition governments, saying the best way forward was for the party to win elections outright.
Mammoth task
Delivering a message of support at the conference, SACP leader Solly Mapaila said the ANC had a “mammoth task to rescue the ANC” from external and internal crises.
Mapaila slated SA’s neoliberal framework as unsuitable since it, he argued, “only serves big capital” to the detriment of the people.
“We need radical change,” said Mapaila. He argued that the Reserve Bank’s mandate be expanded to deal with unemployment. Mapaila also raised the land question and SA’s energy crisis in his speech.
He criticised Ramaphosa's plan to resolve Eskom’s load-shedding crisis, which the president unveiled early this week. “In the SACP’s view it places that in the realm of the private sector,” Mapaila said.
Cosatu president Zingiswa Losi said the conference “arrives at a difficult time” for SA, when there were sustained attacks on labour and collective bargaining.
“We want a pro-working-class ANC that does not waver when it comes to defending workers’ rights,” she said.
Cosatu and the SACP are part of a tripartite alliance with the ANC. But the two allies have been complaining of late that the governing party is slowly moving to the right. During his speech, Ramaphosa called for the reconfiguration of that alliance.
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