Thursday 26 June 2025; Erratum: SACP statement on the 70th anniversary of the Freedom Charter
SACP Communications
Erratum: SACP statement on the 70th anniversary of the Freedom Charter
Thursday, 26 June 2025; - The South African Communist Party commemorates the 70th anniversary of the People’s Congress which took place in 1955, Kliptown, Soweto, Gauteng province and its adoption of the Freedom Charter - the most far-reaching vision of national liberation. The SACP recognises the memorable contributions of the generation of activists and citizens who shaped the content of the people’s demands as embodied and articulated in the Freedom Charter. It is that vision and its inherent aspirations that have served as a guiding light to national liberation forces in their various representations throughout time leading to the people’s victory against the inhuman racist minority rule.
The working class as the leading revolutionary class in the struggle against colonial oppression and apartheid has particularly used the various expressions of the freedom charter as living tools in their daily struggles thereby giving the freedom charter a practical translation in their lived experience rather than an abstract idea. The South African Communist Party understands the Freedom Charter and its clauses as an effective summation of the aspirations of the people of South Africa from condition of oppression to a reality of total emancipation.
As such the freedom charter serves today as a barometer with which the people can measure progress and development in the post-apartheid South African society. In this manner the freedom charter is not an artefact that belongs to history, but it is a relevant document that is of immense value in understanding and analysing the present political situation with a sound and historically accurate understanding of the present social and political manifestations. Therefore, the commemoration of the Freedom Charter today must answer questions for the present generation of citizens and activists that were first asked by the generation of 1955.
The Freedom Charter declared that “The People Shall Govern” positing itself and the content of its ambition against a racist minority government of the time. The freedom charter also said “All national groups shall have equal rights” thereby stating a vision that was unimaginable for a ruling racist minority whose power was built on discrimination, white supremacy and legalised segregation. The freedom charter further said that “All shall enjoy equal human rights”; in doing so the Freedom Charter was articulating a vision of rights that the world was yet to bring to practicality the ideological proclamations of liberals at that time. These three clauses articulate a vision of the Freedom Charter on the foundation of which the present national democratic system stands. These clauses of the Freedom charter, represent political and legal principles by which our democratic institutions are built. Political freedoms that flow from these clauses find expression in the rights to vote, the right to be equal before the law, right to fair treatment by the state, the right to stand for elections imbued upon every citizen, right and of freedom of expression, right to protest and the right equal citizenship. These rights are generally protected and available to citizens in the present-day South Africa.
However, these rights do not exist without threats of restriction or limitations, and it is upon an active citizenry to protect and guarantee the continuation of these rights through civil action and activism. The working class has more to gain in keeping these rights untainted by influence and power of the bourgeoisie whose interests always lean towards limiting these rights than expanding them. Overall, the democratic dispensation of the last thirty years has delivered equitably on political rights thereby nearly removing all the legal and political barriers or limits to democratic existence and full citizenship for the people.
On the other hand, the socio-economic rights that the Freedom Charter espouses have not been attained; on the contrary those that have been attained have been gradually reversed leading to deep seated grievance by the previously oppressed sections of the republic. The rights to work and security, right to shared wealth, right to housing, security and comfort as well as the right to sharing of the land continue to be inaccessible to the working class who face great hardships.
The unemployment rate in South Africa has deepened in the medium term and now stands at a staggering 43 percent, reflecting an economic crisis of great proportions showing for all to see that the neoliberal strategy has not borne any fruits as anticipated by the freedom charter. The unemployment among the youth is higher, placing before us a much gloomier outlook for the future of the country. This of course is not an accident but is intimately connected to a historically distorted economic structure that continues to exist and that does very little contain, let alone to reverse, the legacy of colonial economic ownership and control and its patterns that effectively relegate blacks in general and Africans in particular to subservience and conditions of economic exclusion. This of course favours the ruling class and negates the interests of the working class.
The land question continues to be a sore point for the country. The land ownership continues to favour a white minority while the majority continue to experience landlessness on a great scale that amounts to nothing short of a national crisis. 72 percent white ownership reflects abject failure to move policy in the direction of change on the question of land, among others. It is for this reason that the SACP has called for a referendum on land because it has become clear that the trajectory of land ownership and use is unsustainable for a country that has a vision for transformation and development.
The gap of wealth and control in the economy paints a picture of wealth concentrated on a minority in which it has always been concentrated during the Apartheid government.
South Africa is a country that generates immense amounts of wealth in the monopoly sectors such as banking, mining, real estate development sector, retail sector and private health all coordinated in the interest of monopoly capital and therefore guaranteeing South Africa the unenviable position as the most unequal country in the world. This of course stands opposed to the aspirations of the freedom charter.
The government of the liberation movement has presided over this economic and political framework from which coexistence of extreme wealth and extreme poverty has occurred and deepened without effective intervention. At the centre of this outcome has been a consistent and uncritical reliance of the ANC government on neoliberal policies as anchor principles governing the national economy. This has led to a weakened state, the gutting of state enterprises, the increasing financialisation of the economy and failure to industrialise; all of which have combined to create an unresponsive economy that cannot meet social and economic demands of the country.
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