For sale to highest bidder

THE divisive, immoral and unethical conduct of the current youth leadership is the most disturbing aspect of South Africa today. Unlike the youth of 1976, the current youth have no youth leadership who have national unity as a strategic vision and objective.

The youth of 1976 were driven by the politics of national unity, liberation, economic emancipation and the ushering in of a democratic society, where all people would enjoy equal rights and freedoms.

Differences were restricted to tactics, strategies, ideologies and philosophies.

The youth of 1976 were guided by elders who epitomised the freedom and the national unity they were espousing.

Today’s youth, as personified by ANC Youth League president Colleen Maine and his friends, are embroiled in the life-and-death struggle for material crumbs falling from the tables of those who milk our country dry.

Maine’s youth are schooled in the politics of factional battles and election manipulation.

Their primary service is to the unscrupulous commercial scum.

This current youth leadership stand ready to serve the highest bidder, whether he is from home, China, Russia, India or the Western world, for as long as they can be paid.

They are utilised in factional battles and in defence of the various divided factions, within the ruling and corrupt elite.

Surely if you have a youth leader who tells the nation that he owns a house that is valued at R5-million, then you should know that you are dealing with a fundamentally different youth than those who took on apartheid head-on.

They are unlike the youth who were displaying revolutionary morality that did not leave room for personal ambitions and factional conspiracies. The youth of 1976 were made up of people who would never defend traitors who were dividing and selling our poor people to the brutal regime’s grand apartheid scheme.

Their mission was to intensify the struggle of their own people with no expectation of any reward.

After all, apartheid was so strong that there were no signs of cracking it without maximum unity.

The youth of 1976 fought to destroy the divisive antics of the separate development policy, with the desire to unite our people the same way that our forefathers did when they spawned the ANC in 1912.

The ANC was founded on the bedrock of African unity and the restoration of our people.

Those leaders, though they were men of strong political integrity, had their own personal flaws, but on the whole they strove to serve the nation they sought to liberate.

A case in point is Pixley ka Isaka Seme, one of the initial founders of the ANC.

Nonetheless, he was praised as one of the greatest leaders of his time.

The unity of our nation was the driving principle of his mission.

Today’s youth seem to be functioning to break the unity of our people.

They show the scantest regard towards what the pioneers of our leaders called “imbumba yamanyama (unity is strength)”.

Instead today’s youth seem to clamour for divide and rule. No divided nation can excel in anything other than self-destruction.

In the chaotic ANC elective conference of 1930 in Bloemfontein, the unity of our people was relied on by then ANC president Josiah T Gumede, when he attacked the JB M Hertzog policies passed in parliament as a declaration of war. He called upon our people to rely on their own strength and unity to fight against those draconian laws.

He also appealed strongly to the “strength of the revolutionary masses of white workers world over with whom we must join forces”.

Gumede “demanded equal economic, social and political rights”.

He was of the view that those rights could only be obtained through us being “free from all foreign and local domination”.

The pragmatists of the youthful leadership of the 1930s returned a leader to the presidency after he was replaced for his minor mistakes, hence Seme was brought back to lead an ANC that was teetering on the edge of political extinction.

Bongani Ngqulunga, in his book, The Man who Founded the ANC, says, “On that dramatic note Seme’s improbable ascendance was complete – improbable partly because he had been absent from the ANC for almost two decades”.

He was brought back to the organisation “primarily to unite and guide the organisation after the deep divisions of Gumede’s presidency”.

The contestations in those days were not about corruption and national betrayal, they were about what was viewed as radical and moderates approaches to the struggle. That’s what was causing strife in the ANC. Today’s strife is about the protection of national looters, incompetent civil servants, and a totally unaccountable and highly flawed political leadership.

If South Africa is going to be saved, today’s youth must heed the words of Kgalema Motlanthe, as quoted in Khulu Mbatha’s book, Unmasked, Why the ANC Failed to Govern, “Reflections on odious acts in our past does not call for common interpretation of history. Instead, it encourages all of us to be candid and open about our shared past with the view to not only prevent repetition of such mistakes, but, more importantly, to use such mistakes to rebuild our nation.

“Our history when viewed in its entirety, offers us salutary benefits on how to deal with issues of racial politics, buildings programmes of unity and in forging ahead to build a society all its inhabitants can be proud of.” That captures the spirit of the 1976 youth. Today’s youth need to engage about the possibility of returning Thabo Mbeki, for the sake of the people of South Africa, and the country’s national sovereignty, unity and independence.