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President Cyril Ramaphosa is delivering the State of the Nation Address on Thursday, 9 February 2023. The SACP expects a decisive statement on the way forward to solve the problems affecting our country and the majority of the people, the workers and poor, as well as a progress report since the last State of the Nation Address in February 2022.

Electricity crisis

The measures introduced during the last State of the Nation Address have not resolved the energy crisis. Hence, load-shedding not only continued but also worsened.

Under the circumstances, considering declaring the energy crisis a national state of disaster has become necessary. The importance of wider consultation through government structures cannot be overemphasised, while ensuring decisiveness to through progressive policies and interventions to achieve the desired outcomes under the national state of disaster if declared. 

Politically, within the Alliance there must be consistent, extensive consultation on the direction that should inform the national state of disaster and the content of policies and measures to be implemented. Collective political leadership on this issue and other matters of national importance is critical in terms of the principles of a reconfigured Alliance.

Also, we do not want what happened under the national state of disaster during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic—where a nexus of unscrupulous government officials and leaders colluded with the profit-driven private sector interests in corrupting and exploiting government procurement. 

The government must combat corruption and strengthen accountability. Also, Parliament must play its oversight role strictly. Our role as the people in our various organisations in the community and the workplace will be critical.

Maintaining the current fleet of Eskom power stations to original equipment manufacturer specifications and securing the entire network of Eskom electric power generation, transmission and distribution will go a long way in reducing the high levels and frequency and eventually stopping load-shedding.

In policy terms, the development of the current energy crisis and load-shedding conditions in our democratic dispensation can be traced to the aftermath of the White Paper on Energy adopted in December 1998 under the auspices of the neoliberal economic policy introduced in 1996 as “non-negotiable” and “cast in stone”. The shift in policy emphasis in favour of the liberalisation of energy generation destined for electricity procurement from profit-driven private power producers has come at a great cost to the nation. This includes the evident deterioration and collapse of the productive capacity inherited in Eskom without successful replacement since the adoption of that White Paper, and the aftermath of load-shedding going back to where electricity shortage started in 2007. 

A skills revolution and investment into new productive state capacity, generation and transmission infrastructure included, are important.    

For any national democratic revolution to succeed, it has to increase total productive capacity as rapidly as possible. Looking at the energy sector, the productive capacity of the state, for example, in Eskom, has to be superior, productively and technologically, and more reliable than in the past under the successive colonial and apartheid regimes that prevailed in our country up to April 1994. This must be a key priority for the government to pursue, for the majority of our people, the workers and poor, to be happy when they compare the productive capacity of the state to serve their needs and drive transformation and development. 

The measures the SACP has called for and wishes to reiterate include a massive rollout of the household solar system, including solar geysers, where possible gas geysers, focusing on the workers and poor. This must be anchored in localisation to manufacture and assemble the components into the completely built-up units in South Africa, also, to create employment and reduce the crisis-high level of unemployment. 

Tackling the unemployment crisis

National-revolutionary democratic actions are required to expand key state interventions that matter to the workers and poor, the majority of our people. The decisiveness is more urgent in our context, where the capitalist labour market is incapable of absorbing the large number of the unemployed, including the youth. 

The government should expand the Presidential Employment Stimulus Programme. This should include making socially useful employment and other related programmes continuous, as opposed to temporary. 

A new macroeconomic framework, which can only be one suitable to the conditions of our country, is needed to roll back de-industrialisation through supporting industrialisation as a key employment driver based on the decent work agenda. This requires a strengthened industrial policy and its employment creating impact, as well as a review of our international trade policy case by case in favour of localisation and domestic production expansion, diversification and growth. 

Also, instead of being relegated to a mandate of one department with industrial development and incentives deprived of adequate resourcing, industrial policy requires adequate resourcing and a whole-of-government approach, with the Department of Trade, Industry and Competition playing a co-ordinating role. 

Our approach should include strengthening efforts to promote and adequately support co-operatives, as well as SMMEs, to thrive. We need an increased focus on townships or villages as a critical pillar to resolve the unemployment crisis. 

Countries that have been successful in creating high employment for their people include those that moved away from fiscal austerity or “fiscal consolidation”. Austerity includes the massive budget cuts affecting development and tax cuts for the rich.

Those countries adopted an expansionary fiscal policy that helps stimulate employment and economic development, including industrial transformation. They made creating sustainable employment a monetary policy mandate and shifted from an obsession with narrow inflation targeting through interest rate hikes regardless of the costs to the expansion of domestic productive capacity and employment growth. 

Our ability to support state-owned enterprises or public utilities, such as Eskom and Transnet, as well as infrastructure development and our social programmes will continue to be eroded unless the macroeconomic framework is changed to drive structural transformation to make our economy work for all the people, especially the majority, the workers and poor.  

We need a clear, national-revolutionary democratic policy pathway to overcome the economic crisis indicated by the persistent high levels of unemployment, poverty and inequality.

High costs of living

The SACP expects the President to announce the extension of the Social Relief of Distress Grant. We want the Social Relief of Distress Grant to be both maintained and improved to lay a firm basis to advance to a universal basic income grant. The “red tape” that prevents unemployed South Africans from accessing the grant must be removed. This is critical in the face of the rising cost-of-living and persisting high levels of unemployment, poverty and inequality. 

The cost of almost everything we need is rising. This is driven by factors with external as well as domestic origin. 

The external factors include the imperialist NATO-provoked war in Ukraine and the unilateral sanctions imposed by the imperialist United States-led regimes on oil-producing countries, such as Venezuela, which has the largest proven oil reserves in the world, and Russia, which is a major oil producer. 

The unilateral sanctions, which the imperialist regimes use as weapons of war, have far-reaching extraterritorial impact, including the global cost-of-living crisis. Oil remains a major input in both production and transportation. The oil price increases caused by the imperialist sanctions and associated changes in oil availability conditions in the global market culminated in increases in the prices of other goods and services.

The domestic factors include the Reserve Bank hiking interest rates in response to the externally driven inflationary pressures, among others, instantly increasing household debt through the ripple effect of the interest rate hikes. Decisions by NERSA to increase electricity tariffs are part of the domestic factors that contribute to the rising cost-of-living, badly affecting the workers and poor as well as the economy.    

This year will see the passing of the National Health Insurance Bill by Parliament. That will usher in a new era in the struggle to transform the health sector at large. The government should accelerate the preparatory work for implementing the National Health Insurance to ensure access to quality healthcare for all. The preparations should include increased training and employment of health personnel, doctors, nurses and community health workers.

Clamping down on corruption

SACP expects the President to report on progress from implementing the recommendations of the Commission of Inquiry into State Capture, especially those relating to recovering stolen funds, seizing ill-gotten wealth and prosecuting and holding to account through other consequence management those who were involved.  

The fight against corruption and crime is more than adequately resourcing law enforcement authorities, important as this is. In addition, resourcing law enforcement authorities adequately, the measures required should combine effective state capacity and mass mobilisation. Included in this are interventions that will support community policing, strengthen community policing forums and street committees, protect whistle-blowers, among others. 

Fighting crime and corruption must include more effectively combating illicit transactions and flows, as well as tax evasion, among others.

Issued by SACP