By Amy Musgrave
The SA Communist Party has called on South Africans to increase their support for the National Health Insurance (NHI), as they did with the Basic Education Laws Amendment Act.
It its year-end statement, the SACP said that the country needed large-scale public and social infrastructure development and maintenance, a thriving public economy and a caring social policy.
SACP spokesperson Alex Mashilo said that should include decisive implementation of the NHI to ensure quality healthcare for all, and a comprehensive social security system with a universal basic income grant.
“In this regard, the battle for uncompromised holistic implementation of the Basic Education Laws Amendment Act is as crucial as the battle for uncompromised holistic implementation of the National Health Insurance to intensify,” he said.
While there is opposition to the NHI from some quarters, the Health Department recently announced that an NHI board was expected to be appointed by November next year, and the draft regulations would be published soon for public comment.
The SACP warned that the coming period, which included confronting poverty, inequality, unemployment and crime, required maximum working-class unity and independence on all fronts.
It reiterated that domestic economic ownership and control predominantly continued to reflect the legacy of colonial and apartheid oppression, super exploitation of the majority and associated patriarchal relations.
“Along with this, the capitalist system generated mass unemployment, poverty and inequality continue at crisis rates, affecting millions of working-class people,” Mashilo said.
“While moderating in certain categories during certain quarters, crime increases in the same and other categories during other quarters. As a result, it remains at a crisis level as well. While there are other factors, there is a causal relationship between the crisis levels of unemployment, poverty and inequality, on the one hand, and the high rates of crime, on the other.”
On the country’s new administration, the SACP reiterated its disappointment that neo-liberal structural reform ideology and political direction driven by imperialist-controlled institutions and monopoly capital were increasingly being embedded in the policy space under the Government of National Unity.
“The imperialist forces and both the domestic and foreign sections of capital promote this agenda and seek direct control of our country’s policy space through the right-wing, neo-liberal DA.
“This is in the interest of insinuating private accumulation in and through the private capture of what was hitherto state-owned network infrastructure sectors, among others, such as electricity generation, railways, the ports and foundational telecoms infrastructure (the high radio frequency spectrum was privatised through an auction to the highest bidders, for example).”
Mashilo said that in intensifying the battle against neo-liberalism and its policy prescripts, including austerity, the working class must strengthen its struggle for broad-based industrialisation.
This must integrate growing working-class and democratic state control and participation – on behalf of the people as a whole – in the economy, he said.
Driving structural transformation across the economy was essential, and must include domestic minerals beneficiation, and agro-processing development and diversification as part of broad-based industrialisation, Mshilo said.
At the same time, the country needed to see progress towards a state banking sector, a public banking system and growth in the worker- and community-controlled co-operative banking sector.
The SACP said that this should be an apex priority towards financial sector transformation.
The party also called for an end to all forms of interpersonal and gender-based violence, and the clamping down on crime in general.
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