“KEY levers of public power” are still in the hands of people beholden to big business, South Africa’s communists warned today.

Following a plenary meeting, the South African Communist Party’s central committee pointed out that Cyril Ramaphosa’s election to the African National Congress presidency had been by the “slimmest of margins,” showing the continued role of “personalities historically implicated in ‘state capture’ networks.”

It called on Mr Ramaphosa, now president of South Africa as well as the ruling ANC, to “press ahead unsparingly” with the drive to sweep out the corruption associated with ousted president Jacob Zuma and his shady big-business backers.

The party said the ANC-headed alliance, of which the SACP is a part, along with progressive worker and student bodies, needed a “reconfiguration.”

“There are organisational practices and emerging class forces that have allowed this 106-year liberation organisation, our ANC, to become the entry point for the parasitic looting of public resources,” warned the party.

It pointed out that an estimated half of the budget deficit is “directly attributable to the parasitic looting of public resources by the state capture phenomenon.”

That deficit has led to a planned rise in VAT from 14 per cent to 15 per cent, which Finance Minister Malusi Gigaba insisted would not affect the poorest fifth of the population.

But “the working class and poor do not live on bread and pap alone,” stormed the SACP, pointing out that other indirect taxes, including a rising fuel levy, would hit the poor hardest.

The ANC’s national executive committee meeting today urged the government to do more to protect the poor from the VAT rise.