South Africa needed to relook at the policy of narrow Black Economic Empowerment (BEE), the South African Communist Party (SACP) said on Sunday.

Speaking after the party's Central Committee meeting in Johannesburg, deputy general secretary Jeremy Cronin said the SACP felt that certain "taboo questions" needed to be asked in order to put the country on a new growth path.

One of these was whether narrow BEE has worked to create jobs. "We need to have a relook at narrow BEE and whether it has influenced at all in job creating and more equal accumulation and development of jobs," said Cronin.

Referring to the minerals industry, Cronin said that certain BEE quotas have not been fulfilled.

"If these quotas had been fulfilled, would our mineral sector or our economy be on a better basis in terms of job creation or on a worse basis? There's no easy answer to these types of questions but [we] certainly need to begin to answer these types of questions," he said.

He questioned whether some businessmen who gained from BEE practices were really "patriotic", in terms of what they contributed to job creation in the country.

"The presumption is that BEE shareholders are patriotic and will create jobs and do all kinds of other things is something that needs to be very very seriously interrogated," he said.

Cronin said that despite the fact that South Africa had a growing economy between 1994 and mid-2008 there had been a growing divergence in income levels and that divergence is racialised. The absolute poor, he said, were growing poorer.

"We need to step back and say why despite all of those measures: despite the three-million RDP houses, despite the moving social grant beneficiaries from just over two-million in 1994, to over 11-million by 2008, why despite all of those measures did we have such yawning crisis levels of inequality and racialised inequality," he asked.

"The realisation that we all come to, is that there's something wrong with the accumulation path that we've all come to."

The party's general secretary Blade Nzimande said that the SACP was aware of "a small grouping" of people within the African National Congress-led tripartite alliance, who wanted to "destabilise" the alliance and its fight against corruption.

"Some of these elements are in such a hurry to get rich quick, that we feel that some of them actually are willing to sacrifice the unity of this alliance," he said.

"We are committed also in ensuring that our organisations are not used as a refuge for tenderpreneurs who want to capture our organisations in order to actually further their own needs."

Referring to inroads made against the ANC by the Democratic Alliance (DA) in the Western Cape, Nzimande said this was "not only because of DA's popularity, but we are paying for some of our own mistakes".

Cronin said that one of the mistakes was "wild, chauvinistic, demagogic statements" directed at minority groups by political leaders.

"I think that there has been some very serious mistakes from the side of a certain organisation that's a league of the ANC, and certain personalities in this area... cost us huge numbers of votes in the Western Cape," he said.