Youth League backs call to pull up its socks
FOLLOWING ANC Deputy Secretary Jessie Duarte challenging the ANC Youth League to pull up its socks, the structure in KwaZulu-Natal has vowed to focus on “bread-and-butter” issues and concerns facing the youth.
This comes after Duarte told leaders of the league on Tuesday that their sole focus should not just be their quest for 40% youth representation in both party and government structures, but the social upliftment of ordinary young South Africans.
Duarte was speaking at the ANC’s 107th birthday celebrations in the ANC’s General Gizenga Mpanza region in KwaDukuza on the KZN North Coast, where she also warned ANC leaders not to be preoccupied with convoys while they left people eating dust in their wake.
Although she initially told the league that the future of the ANC was in its hands, she went on to say that the shaping of that future was its responsibilitye.
“It is not good enough to say ‘we must have 40% of youth representation in every leadership structure’, and that’s the only work you’re doing.”
Duarte said the league should be at the forefront of fighting issues around education and the prevalence of high school drop-outs and drug abuse problems engulfing communities such as KwaDukuza.
“The Youth League must be a Youth League campaigning for the issues of the youth, not only for the 40% representation,” Duarte said.
After the KwaZulu-Natal ANC provincial conference in July last year, at least 20 of the elected 35 provincial executive committee members, including chairperson Sihle Zikalala, provincial secretary Mdumiseni Ntuli and his deputy Sipho Hlomuka had all served in various Youth League leadership positions in the province.
The chairperson of the ANCYL in KZN, Kwazi Mshengu, said Duarte was spot on in her assertions on the direction of the Youth League, because their task was to champion young people’s interests, both those inside ANC structures and those outside.
“The 40% campaign is not only an inward-looking campaign, we are also calling for the 40% in the administration to be populated by qualified and also competent young people.
“We need to redouble our work in that regard – we are reorienting our structures to be solution-oriented and to focus on bread-and-butter issues, because our structures should be the first point of call for all young people,” Mshengu said.
He said that they had already started to help the youth by spearheading the scrapping of experience in all entry-level government posts, while they had also successfully campaigned for the establishment of the Youth Business Fund, for grant funding.
Mshengu said they also agreed with Duarte that the Youth League needed to be vigorous in tackling social issues and that the criticism of a lack of visibility of the structure in communities to tackle youth concerns was fair.