Cape Town - With its youth league and alliance partner Cosatu in disarray, the ANC will be unable to rely on these once “dependable muscles” to mobilise on its behalf in next year’s elections and will have to devise a new strategy.
This was the opinion of independent political analyst Somadoda Fikeni after the ANC Youth League caretaker task team announced on Monday it was disbanding four of the league’s provinces – Limpopo, Free State, North West and the Northern Cape.
National task team co-ordinator Mzwandile Masina said in Joburg the league was at its weakest since its national executive committee was disbanded in March – a move seen by many as a purge of leadership loyal to the league’s expelled former president, Julius Malema.
“A culture of gate-keeping, divisions, patronage, membership manipulation and institutionalised factionalism has deeply entrenched itself,” Masina said.
Drastic measures were needed.
The league’s KwaZulu-Natal, Western Cape and Mpumalanga provinces are already being run by task teams.
Masina said assessments of Gauteng and the Eastern Cape had not been completed.
Fikeni said the ANC had always relied in elections on the energy of the league, some of whose members were unemployed and therefore free to campaign to rally voters on its behalf.
The league and labour federation Cosatu, which were both well organised and resourced, had been the ANC’s “most dependable muscles”.
With Cosatu also divided, over reported attempts to oust general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi, who is seen to be too vocal in his criticism of President Jacob Zuma’s government, the ANC “ought to be worried” about its election strategy, said Fikeni.
He said the league was divided on the work of the task team, with some feeling it was “about time” as the previous leadership had itself frequently resorted to disbanding structures at any hint of resistance.
However, many were still shocked by the decision to disband the national executive committee.
In this group, even those not aligned to Malema would see the move as confirmation of their suspicions the ANC intended to convert the league into a toothless “youth desk” .
He said the symptoms described by Masina were part of a “genetic disease” of the mother body which had begun to “percolate and spread” to the affiliates.
Concerns about factionalism, patronage and manipulation of membership had featured consistently over the years in political reports and reports by secretaries-general at ANC conferences at all levels.
If the task team was serious about stamping out factionalism, the solution would not be to “drive away those you see as protagonists”, but to convince them to do things differently.
The only hope for healing the league would be for a new leadership to be elected with a new purpose and mission that rejected the crass materialism that had afflicted the Malema regime.
But Fikeni said this was unlikely to happen in the absence of a “dramatic change of the value system” in the ANC.
“You can’t create an oasis of virtues in an ocean of vices,” he said.
Political Bureau and Sapa