Initial response to the State of the Nation Address
SACP Communications
South African Communist Party
Initial response to the State of the Nation Address
Saturday 14 February 2026:- The economic policy thrust of the State of the Nation Address delivered on Thursday, 12 February 2026, by President Cyril Ramaphosa reflected the same economic thinking as the one since the “structural reforms” were adopted in 2019. These reforms followed the neo-liberal prescriptions promoted by the imperialist-dominated Washington-based International Monetary Fund and World Bank and the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. They are designed to promote privatisation through liberalisation and competition for profit maximisation by insinuating private wealth accumulation interests into targeted network infrastructure sectors that were previously under state control and operations by state-owned enterprises such as Eskom, Transnet and Prasa.
What is called “Operation Vulindlela” is, in reality, the full steam implementation of such policy reforms. The United States-based GrowthLab project, associated with National Treasury policy procurement for many years, has been promoting the same agenda under the notion of addressing “binding constraints”. Its recent advocacy of this agenda appears in “Growth Through Inclusion in South Africa”. This template led to the government’s “Growth and Inclusion”. The neo-liberal economic policy thinking did not originate within the state. It originated from private wealth accumulation interests seeking to expand their fields of accumulation. They have pushed it intransigently and subsequently embedded it in dominant state policy thinking as part of their corporate state capture manoeuvres. Its purpose is to open up the state, particularly targeted infrastructure network sectors, and convert them into fields for private wealth accumulation. In short and simple terms, it is part of the new forms of privatisation and state capture.
The South African Communist Party (SACP) calls on the working class to build the widest possible programmatic unity to confront neo-liberalism in all its forms, including austerity. To this end, the SACP will continue to strengthen its efforts to build a popular Left front and a powerful, socialist movement of workers and poor. Immediate steps being taken at the moment include the convening of the Conference of the Left.
The SACP gives credit where credit is due while firmly critical of other aspects, such as neo-liberalism. When addressing the nation, President Cyril Ramaphosa started by recognising the role of women in our liberation struggle. The SACP welcomes this recognition, which deserves a more prominent place in our country’s recorded history. Arts and culture, including, but not limited to, publications, performing arts, fine arts, libraries and museums, and, equally important, education at all levels, can play a key role in giving the recognition of the role played by women in our liberation struggle the prominent place that it deserves in our history. This must also form part and parcel of our struggle for gender equality, the struggle to end capitalist and other forms of patriarchy and its relations.
The SACP welcomes the deployment of the military to support the police in combating crime in areas such as Gauteng and the Western Cape. Crime is the second focus in the State of the Nation Address, following the recognition of the role played by women in our liberation struggle. Nevertheless, in turning his attention to crime, the President should have recognised it as part of the capitalist system crises already afflicting our country and not just as a threat. Whether the measures he announced, important as some are, will address the crisis as urgently as is desperately required, or, at best, bring it to an end remains to be seen. This is because in his observations, the President did not go to the root of the matter: how the capitalist system has generated the crisis. He has not taken the nation into his confidence as to what, according to the government’s theory, is the root cause of crime and its systematic and structural drivers and its unabated crisis-high levels across the country.
While the President focused on organised crime, criminality in general causes sleepless nights in almost every community across the country, among others through drugs, theft, robbery, housebreaking, murder and social and infrastructure destruction and decay, all unabated. The key question that the President could have addressed is how South Africa got to this point while it has the state, including law enforcement authorities and the criminal justice system. Beyond this, fighting crime, including corruption, requires a multipronged approach that also recognises that part of its basis is the prevailing economic system, structure and social relations.
While it is important to improve supply chain management in the public sector and the state in general, problems will remain because of the privatisation of state functions. This includes unnecessary outsourcing and the tenderisation of privatised functions to the “highest bidders” in embedded corruption terms. We have seen how the privatisation of the security of public infrastructure, as in rail, and the privatisation of functions such as electricity distribution network repairs have encouraged destructive competition among beneficiary tender lords. This has engendered sabotage by some of them in order to be awarded the associated tenders.
Corruption and crime, along with the austerity policies advanced by the National Treasury, have left many communities and South Africa as a whole weaker than before. This has also undermined the capacity of national defence, as highlighted by at least two senior defence leaders, and has contributed to setbacks in peacekeeping efforts on our continent.
Corruption in tenders and chronic failure in the water sector, including in communities such as Giyani that the President has referred to, have directly contributed to the water crisis. The Giyani bulk water project, which the President did not mention while referring to this as one of the areas affected by the water crisis, now costs more than R4 billion. It was launched in 2014 to supply water to 55 villages. Progress in it has been crippled by corrupt procurement and tender practices, among others. What began as a R90 million project was inflated into far more than that in multibillion-rand terms through acts of corruption, governance failures and mismanagement, with private interests, the so-called service providers, feeding off taxpayers’ money in pursuit of self-enrichment.
Investigations by the Special Investigating Unit in that project exposed unlawful contracts, with multi-millions paid for infrastructure that failed to provide a reliable supply of safe drinking water for the affected working-class communities. Simply replacing “service providers” in such projects will neither recover the stolen resources nor undo the hardship inflicted on affected communities. The corruption-prone tender system must be scrapped, and those responsible, including former ministers, must be held to account if they committed wrongdoing or benefitted, either directly or indirectly. The national water crisis intervention must prioritise this action.
In the electricity distribution network, the more breakdowns that occur, the more job cards are allocated to the private interests awarded tenders for repairs. Their accumulation regime depends, among other things, on the destruction that generates the job cards they receive. Therefore, the higher the number of breakdowns, the more infrastructure destruction and sabotage become part and parcel of the political economy of the tenders they have been awarded and the job cards they are allocated. In water, the same dynamic has led to infrastructure sabotage by sections of those who are then appointed as suppliers through water tankers.
Often, the resulting crisis has been used as a pretext to introduce other “private service providers” and competition for profit maximisation by the private interests in the affected network infrastructure: it appears it is by design. Bringing about privatisation, including through liberalisation, is the direction of neo-liberal structural reforms. Also, there is something fundamentally flawed in a state where even courts of law, police stations, government offices and state properties are guarded by private security interests, and fake forensic investigators are engaged by public establishments.
Improving regulatory administration, without in-sourcing all unnecessarily outsourced functions, might have some impact, but it will not address the root causes of the problem. Therefore, the SACP reiterates its call for the in-sourcing of all functions that the government or broadly the state can and should perform on its own: this is one of the commitments from various Alliance-endorsed manifestos that have not been implemented, eroding trust and contributing to the electoral decline that emerged. In-sourcing also requires building internal state capacity at every level, ensuring discipline and decisive consequence management. Corrupt tender interests, their political benefactors and neo-liberal agents have actively worked against in-sourcing. Hence, it has largely remained an unimplemented manifesto commitment.
South Africa has experienced long-term, stagnantly low economic growth under conditions of extreme inequality. We are not out of this situation, and the de-industrialisation that the neo-liberal playbook has not only failed to stop and replace with industrialisation but has in fact sustained. From 2015 to 2024, the economy grew at an average rate of less than 1 per cent, at about 0.76 per cent to 1 per cent a year. The fragile and, for that matter, fractional recovery in 2024, following the decline of peak load shedding, is not something to celebrate without breaking it down in class terms.
The class disaggregation of growth distribution must show how much accrues to workers as their share of total national income and how much is captured by private capitalist profit interests. The prevailing policy trajectory, now including “Operation Vulindlela”, favours private capitalist accumulation, while the workers’ share of total national income has sharply declined. Unemployment affects between 10 million and 12.5 million workers under the expanded definition, and poverty remains at crisis levels. Both unemployment and poverty, along with inequality, continue to severely impact the working class.
According to the latest Quarterly Labour Force Survey, nearly one in three people willing and able to work are without employment. This narrow definition understates the depth of the crisis, however. As just highlighted, when discouraged work seekers and others marginally attached to economic activity are included, the expanded measure of unemployment rises to approximately 42.4 per cent. This broader measure exposes the systemic inability of the South African capitalist economy to absorb unemployed workers into socially necessary and remunerative work.
The existence of millions of discouraged work seekers reflects structural exclusion created by the dynamics of capitalist accumulation, not individual failure. The President did not address this directly, even while correctly noting that unemployment remains far too high. Private wealth accumulation interests continue to pursue gains through strategies that suppress workers’ share of income, including retrenchments.
The SACP calls for the turnaround and diversification of the state-owned enterprise sector and the public economy more broadly. This must prioritise the development of thriving public utilities, rather than the neo-liberal structural reforms that open the state to profit-making exploitation by private capital. More than 70 years after its adoption, and 31 years into the democratic dispensation following our hard-won April 1994 breakthrough, the economic clauses of the Freedom Charter must be realised in tangible progress that can be celebrated.
The Freedom Charter demands state ownership of all monopoly industry on behalf of the people as a whole, not the opposite dictated by neo-liberal reforms. People-as-a-whole ownership is essential to ensure that the revenue generated serves national transformation and development imperatives, delivering a better life for all, rather than enriching a tiny minority. The Freedom Charter must guide practice, including in infrastructure development and critical networks such as rail, ports, water, roads and high radio-frequency spectrum sectors.
In education, the correct focus on early childhood development must be matched by greater investment in the school system, the recruitment of properly qualified teachers and the provision of quality learning and teaching materials so that education meets the needs of our people for a better life.
While the improved average matric pass rate has been welcome, the quality of outcomes remains a serious problem. Many learners have been steered away from subjects such as mathematics, science, engineering, technology and accounting. This has resulted from pressure on schools by upper education authorities and competition between schools, districts and provinces to achieve high average pass rates under severe capacity constraints to produce passes in the subjects from which learners are steered away. Schools therefore prioritise “easy passes” rather than building real critical competence, with learners deliberately diverted from subjects considered to be demanding, to the detriment of their future and that of our country.
As a result, many learners pass with subject combinations that are misaligned with the critical skills and qualification requirements of the economy and post-school education and high-value innovation, research and development. A significant proportion of the learners then joins the growing mass of young people who are not in employment, education or training. Instead of uncritical celebration, there must be investment in the key subjects from which learners are being pushed out so that the country can perform at a higher level and in pursuit of scientific and technological advances and sovereignty in strategic fields. The number of good-quality bachelor passes, followed by good-quality diploma passes, must far exceed that of higher certificate passes as a reflection of quality.
The post-school education and training system, including technical and vocational education and training colleges and universities, is overwhelmed by the number of learners and workers seeking to obtain qualifications or further their education and training. South Africa requires more public colleges and universities and high-performing sector education and training authorities so that no learner or worker is excluded or locked out.
Some years ago, a commitment was made in a State of the Nation Address to establish a university of science and technology in Ekurhuleni. It still does not exist. Promises to expand post-school education and training must not repeat the pattern of unfulfilled announcements made in a State of the Nation Address and then quietly abandoned, as has happened in the case of that promised and never established science and technology university in every subsequent State of the Nation Address up to the one delivered on Thursday.
In the healthcare sector, the state of many public hospitals and clinics and their resourcing leaves much to be desired. Long queues and waiting lists are the order of the day, and some patients die while waiting for care. The President has not outlined any serious plans to address this crisis or to push forward with the implementation of the National Health Insurance to fulfil the promise of quality healthcare for all. The conditions many of our people face in public hospitals discourage many from seeking admission. Public primary and other healthcare clinics also require urgent attention.