Nzimande lashed out at what he called a "dumbing down" of the Constitution by "a range of anti-majority conservative liberals from Afriforum, through the whites-only FW de Klerk Foundation to the DA, who now pose as the true defenders of our Bill of Rights and Constitution".

"[They dumb down] the Constitution into a narrow check-and-balance watchdog over the executive and a defender of existing powers and privileges," Nzimande said.

He was outlining the deliberations on the government's draft policy on land reform of the SACP central committee at the weekend.

Afriforum and the FW de Klerk Foundation have been critical of the government and the ANC, and have challenged their policies and practices in the courts. There has been litigation in connection with affirmative action, the Julius Malema hate-speech case, and human rights violations by the presidential protection unit against a Cape Town student said to have shown the middle finger as President Jacob Zuma's motorcade passed.

Afriforum has argued against the government's land expropriation policies, saying they would give the state the right to compensate the owners of expropriated property with any amount the state deemed fair, which amounted to "legalised theft of property by the state".

Nzimande praised a judgment in the Constitutional Court last week, which, he claimed, "implicitly recognised [that] the property clause is not a traditional liberal property clause - it allows for expropriation for a public purpose or in the public interest".

"While compensation is required, that compensation does not have to be based purely on market value."

Section 25 of the Constitution states that the amount of compensation the government pays must be "just and equitable" with regard to all relevant circumstances, including market value, the current use of the property, the history of the acquisition of the property and the purpose of the expropriation.

"Does this not require us to consider colonial dispossession, Group Areas [forced] removals, land used by the apartheid army or hurried privatisation before the democratic breakthrough of 1994," asked Nzimande.

He said the central committee of the SACP had also discussed the government's proposed national health insurance scheme and he welcomed the move to "decommodify the basic human right to healthcare".

He criticised the increasing "Americanisation of private healthcare" in South Africa, in which the beneficiaries of private healthcare were "private speculative investors" and "highly paid specialists".

Nzimande expressed concern about industrialisation lagging in South Africa after a "double-whammy of currency over-valuation and the impact of the global capitalist crisis".

He said the central committee had agreed to campaign for a "massive expansion of the expanded public works programme" because of the "tenderisation" of the state, which had become a major source of corruption.