ANCYL gets mired
THE ANC Youth League hit a new low at the weekend when it took that tired old line of an enemy being a tool of the Central Intelligence Agency. In the case of the ANCYL, it launched this attack on Public Protector Thuli Madonsela on Sunday after the conclusion of its national executive committee meeting, labelling her a CIA spy.
This isn’t the first time individuals within the ruling party’s structures have tried to discredit Madonsela in this manner. The last time was when Deputy Minister of Defence and Military Veterans Kebby Maphatsoe accused her of being a CIA plant and of undermining the ANC and the government to create a puppet regime for the US.
It’s laughable, of course, that Maphatsoe, and now the ANCYL, can imagine we’d buy into the smear, as if people have no independent thought, no access to resources that have taught them something about conspiracy theory and haven’t previously come across this facile means of trying to bring down those who threaten ANC hegemony.
A few weeks ago, Maphatsoe had to retract statements he made in 2014 when he accused former minister and activist Ronnie Kasrils of being a counter-revolutionary and orchestrating a conspiracy against President Jacob Zuma. One might have thought the ANCYL would have learnt something from that, but apparently not.
While its former leader Julius Malema makes progress with the EFF, the league is sinking deeper into a mire of confusion around its role. When Malema and other then-ANCYL leaders were expelled from the ANC in 2011, it was partly because of the threat they posed to the ruling party’s entrenched hierarchy. They wanted to see a change in leadership, and that was apparently too difficult a position for some of the party’s elders.
The bottom line, though, was that the ANCYL was, at that time, exercising its right to question the mother body, in the same way Nelson Mandela and other leaders had done when they were the ANC’s young firebrands. The problem with the current ANCYL is that we don’t see that level of intellectual prowess. If it’s there, they’re hiding it very well indeed.