Daily Dispatch
Infected by factionalism
THE ANC Youth League of 2017 is very different to the organisation it once was. After it’s formation in 1944 by graduates of Fort Hare it operated with a coherent strategy to achieve “freedom in our lifetime”.
The subsequent evolution of the ANC mother body into a mass movement with a more assertive, militaristic stance is attributed in no small part to the influence of the youth league under the likes of Anton Lembede, its first president, Oliver Tambo, Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu.
It was this league that spurred the ANC to launch the Defiance Campaign of 1952 against the apartheid state, so mapping the way forward for the liberation struggle and the adoption of the Freedom Charter in 1956.
In the 1980s, in the absence of many banned ANC leaders, young black South Africans under the banners of Cosas and Sayco took up the mantle. Their brave, active defiance of the apartheid state provoked the exiled Tambo to label them “Young Lions of the Struggle”.
Post 1994, the league’s role was understandably less swashbuckling. The idea was for it to mobilise young people behind the ANC’s vision, to be a guardian of the socio-economic interests of the youth and to be a training ground for presidents.
But appalling leadership at the highest level of the ANC since 2007 has completely queered the pitch. The abuse and manipulation by President Jacob Zuma of all under his wing has decimated not only the party, but the league.
The ANCYL of 2017 may have copied, pasted and tweaked its old slogan so that it now says “economic freedom in our lifetime”, but noble purpose is so absent that the league in its present state is not even a shadow of the past.
Instead of brave and principled “young lions” there is “Oros”, the not-so-young Collen Maine whose chief and seemingly only function is praise-singer and mouthpiece for Zuma.
As for a sense of coherence, one need look no further than page 4 of yesterday’s Dispatch to see the manifestation of the total opposite:
In the Alfred Nzo District factionalised ANCYL members turned on each other on Saturday with such fury prior to a regional elective conference that they fired shots, hurled bricks and landed some leaders in hospital. The event had to be aborted;
In the W B Rubusana region, the league’s Mdantsane’s Raymond Mhlaba branch has also revealed that it is entangled in the factional war of its elders in the ANC caucus of Buffalo City Metro’s council; and
The ANCYL’s provincial task team (PTT) is also embroiled in a titanic tussle happening higher up. After opting to support Phumulo Masualle for a third term at the ANC’s June elective conference, Masualle’s rival, provincial secretary Oscar Mabuyane, responded by warning the PTT that any of their decisions were premature and would not be recognised.
The common denominator in all of this is the heightening contestation ahead of the ANC’s elective conference. But while competition is healthy, young people have nothing to gain when the model of political excellence that should be set before them is tossed out of the window and instead they are manipulated to serve the personal agendas of their elders.
If they are not spat out in the process, the young will emerge with a horribly warped idea of the purpose and practice of politics in democracy. Nothing presidential in that.