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SA Communist Party (SACP) general secretary Solly Mapaila has lamented a government that is good at planning and hosting summits but is unable to resolve the scourge of crime and unemployment in the country.
Mapaila decried the emergence of "stateless capitalist society" where criminals and the corporates do as they please because they knew government was dysfunctional.
He said:
Mapaila, who was addressing the Police and Prisons Civil Rights Union’s policing indaba in Boksburg on the East Rand on Thursday, said this was happening at a time when South Africa had a situation where the capitalist system was reproducing itself harsher due to a runaway free market.
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A free market system, he said, was a society in which the rule of law and the rule of economy are based on supply and demand principles.
“So, the working class, the poor can never be protected by such a system. This is why we see all these unpleasant realities in our communities. We can go to what causes that and other wrong policy choices that were made over the years that have not responded to the core crisis that we face,” Mapaila said.
He explained that one of these was South Africa’s diversion to "neoliberal discourses", with the country joining the World Trade Organisation (WTO) two years after the dawn of democracy in 1994 when it took countries such as China 14 years to discuss favourable conditions to join WTO.
“…and yet [China] is one of the biggest markets in the world but we just joined and got swallowed [up] in that space and lost our independence in that regard. At the same we have reached a point where there is reorganisation of politics in our country,” Mapaila said.
He added that the reorganisation of politics goes hand in hand with the dangers of the sustainability of the status quo, pointing to what he termed the rapture of the "moonshot pact" in South Africa.
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Mapaila said that this was "a cacophony of forces coming together as a possible rescue" for South Africa’s politics.
He said:
According to Mapaila, this coalition was coming together on the basis of free market system. He said in that space, the coalition attracted “the confused lot from the oppressed majority” and that these forces had revealed their mission as well as their funders.
