Forever young party leaders want piece of the pie
● One is, as the saying goes, as old as one feels. But according to Pule Mabe, as long as you are not Thabo Mbeki’s age you are young.
The ANC’s national spokesperson has suggested that people under 50 should be considered “youth”.
This is revealed in a leaked recording of last week’s special ANC national executive committee (NEC) meeting convened to update members of the body on nomination and election processes for the party’s 55th national conference scheduled for December as well as guidelines leading to the event.
In the leaked clip, Mabe can be heard addressing the ANC’s proposal to have 25% of the NEC positions reserved for young people.
“We clarified young people ... are not necessarily those up to the age of 35,” he said.
Mabe said the ANC constitution imposed a 10-year service period on those seeking to serve in the NEC.
“Obviously you would struggle to have someone in the youth league between the ages of 14 and 35 or 18 and 35 to have had 10 years of leadership ... because of their age.”
He urged the NEC meeting to define exactly what it meant by “a young person”.
Mabe cited the conventions of the UN on youth being between the ages of 14 and 25, and said it was “far [younger] than ... we have”.
“When we went to China, meeting with the CPC [Communist Party of China] we met leaders of the young communist league who are over 50,” he said..
“In Zimbabwe, the secretary-general of the Zanu-PF Youth League is well over 60, and this was at the time when we were leading the youth league ourselves.”
Mabe was treasurer of the ANC Youth League between 2008 and 2012.
He told the NEC meeting: “If we do not give true meaning to this, at the point of developing guidelines, it runs the risk of being defined differently.
“My concrete proposal is that all those who are younger than 50, [who] are not the age of Kgalema [Motlanthe], the former deputy president of the ANC, [and] are not the age of Mbeki, they are young people. They are not elders.
“If we want to enforce this in the guidelines, it should follow it should be all those who are younger than 50,” he said.
Mabe’s name appears in a list of 60 compiled by a grouping of ANC cadres calling themselves “Generational Mix 2022 and Beyond”, who are calling for young people to swell the ranks of the ANC’s highest decision-making body between conferences.
In a document penned by Tshilidzi Ratshitanga, Paseka Letsatsi and Abner Mossase, they call for ANC members who were leaders in its youth structure and were born in the 1970s and 1980s to “rise to the occasion” of being at the centre of political leadership within the ANC and the country.
Their vision, the document reveals, is “economic revolution” with an intention to “radically transform” SA.
This, they argue, can be achieved if the generation of ANC members born in the 1970s and 1980s can unite behind a common agenda and take the fight to the national elective conference in December.
Mabe, in the leaked recording, also raised concerns about male representation in the NEC, saying “already you’ve got a mandatory view which is in the constitution that 50% of those we elect must be women. Now you come back and say 25% of those you elect must be youth; what are you saying about all the wealth of experience ... by men in the ANC? Are you saying they must constitute 25% of the leadership of the ANC? You’re creating an unnecessary stampede.”
Mabe declined to comment.