Communist Party of Swaziland
Friday 16 December 2022:- The Communist Party of Swaziland (CPS) will convene its Annual Summer School for 2022 from 20–30 December 2022 in Mpumalanga, South Africa. This year’s Summer School takes place in a rapidly changing situation.
Our country is undergoing a difficult phase of transition from autocratic rule towards a democratic dispensation. A war has been imposed by the regime against our people and the people are resisting this war in desperate, but brave, ways.
The working-class people have demonstrated the will to fight for the attainment of the goal of democracy with huge sacrifices already undertaken and more sacrifices yet to be made. The obstacle to a peaceful democratic transition in Swaziland is the attitude of the regime and its imperialist backers to resort to using state violence, holding back the process.
Swaziland is undergoing a militarisation phase where the Mswati autocracy enjoys dominance. It has fully converted its military state power to be an instrument of forced rule against the oppressed struggling people. Our task is to balance this force equation with revolutionary force oriented to peace. Our country cannot be turned into a war zone. Our struggle has now adopted a new demand apart from the struggle for democracy, economic social justice. We need to also struggle for peace against state sponsored violence. Our call for peace does not mean that communities targeted by state violence should not defend themselves. But it does mean that we recognise that a peaceful resolution to the conflict in our country is in the best interests of our people. We need therefore to make clear that state sponsored violence must end and that non-violent direct action by all progressive forces, including protests, strikes, stay-aways, are a tried and tested way to thwart the aggression of the state.
The desperation of the regime should not be allowed to destroy our country. The regime has ruined our country, plundered its resources, destroyed, exploited our wealth and its people for all the years.
Now it wants to destroy our country by imposing war on our country which we must reject with revolutionary solutions and well applied tactics of a people’s war for people’s power. The target of this revolutionary war must be to saturate, subdue and exhaust the offensive strength of the dictatorship, deplete its resources, destroy its political formidability, its institutions and functional bodies. We must deny the regime any form of external support by targeting its imperialist and sub imperialist support base. At the same time, we must exploit all differences between the regime and its imperialist backers, as the latter are often uneasy with the extremes to which the regime is prepared to go. This needs to be debated.
The CPS 2022 Summer School will focus on this important subject of how to introduce revolutionary methods that will help win the struggle under these circumstances and survive our country from destruction from tinkhundla capitalism. The school will build theoretical capacity and understanding of Party cadres on how to mobilise the majority oppressed people to build a sustained momentum of the campaign for democracy, and how to use the anti tinkhundla elections campaign to consolidate the resistance movement of the people.
The Conference for Democracy must begin its preparation alongside the program to totally end the autocratic rule for the establishment of an Interim authority to mark the smooth transition towards the establishment of the People’s Democratic Republic of Swaziland.
All the pillars of the Conference for Democracy must be mobilised and set up the military, political, diplomatic, organisational, structural and, more importantly, mass popular power.
The CPS’s task is to continue to give direction, support it with leadership and organisational strength to achieve the Democratic Goal Now. The internal bearer of progress will be analysed by making a thorough assessment of the state of the pro-democracy movement and its components, unmasking the obstacles to genuine unity of the oppressed people.
Above all, the Summer School will produce a framework of activities for the year 2023. A year which coincides with the 50 years of state of emergency in our country where political parties were banned and the establishment of the absolute monarchy. Tinkhundla autocracy must not celebrate this oppressive milestone. Our call for rendering the country ungovernable must take its practical line in 2023.
Delegates will constitute CPS activists, fraternal organisations and representatives of the international solidarity movement of our struggle.
ISSUED BY THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF SWAZILAND
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Contacts:
Thokozane Kenneth Kunene
General Secretary
(+27)72 594 3971
Pius Vilakati
International Secretary
(+27)81 353 3383
Email: cpswa.org@gmail.com
Facebook: Communist Party Of Swaziland – CPS
Twitter: @CPSwaziland
Website: https://cp-swa.org/