Johannesburg - The ANC Youth League must get its act together, strengthen its members’ political education and elect a leadership by the time the ANC holds its national general council at the end of June.
The ANC has laid down the law after its 11th-hour intervention to prevent the league from electing new leaders at its national consultative conference held in Soweto last week.
Its deputy secretary-general, Jessie Duarte, said the party wanted to avert the creation of the same “style of youth league” as it had disbanded at the beginning of last year.
“Red flags were going up all over the place. We were noticing (campaigning) laced with exclusion,” she said.
“We also felt, (with) some of the style of leadership that was being projected, there (needed) to be more discussion… This is the future leadership of the ANC and it would be completely wrong to know there is a difficulty and not raise it.”
While no names were mentioned, Duarte said the ANC had been told there were people who were “throwing money about” in campaigning for places in the league leadership.
“A number of young people said money was a problem, that money was being thrown about. The availability of money determined whether people were able to participate in the youth league.”
Exacerbating matters was the fact that only five of the league’s nine provinces had held provincial congresses before conference.
The Eastern Cape congress had been mired in violence and its results were being disputed. Limpopo, KwaZulu-Natal and the Western Cape would hold their conferences before the end of next month.
Although the youth league’s national task team had set up organisational infrastructure, the ANC wanted to see the election of leaders strong enough to lead the league to the ANC’s next elective conference in 2017 and to the 2019 general elections.
The league’s outgoing national convener, Mzwandile Masina, said it had been agreed at the conference that political work would be intensified at branch level.
This would include political education programmes that would be held over weekends and led by ANC national executive committee member Nathi Mthethwa, who is also the minister of arts and culture, in co-operation with the party’s former deputy president, Kgalema Motlanthe.
Motlanthe left mainstream politics earlier this year with the stated aim of establishing the ANC’s political school.
Independent Media