By Prof Dirk Kotzé
The revival of the ANC Youth League at its recent national conference is presented as a milestone for the ANC but its implications are not self-evident. The Youth League is one of the ANC’s three leagues (also for their women and veterans) but the oldest of them all.
The leagues are substructures of the mother body, can elect their own leaders and enjoy a degree of autonomy but it cannot wander beyond the confines of the mother body’s policies and political positions. In constitutional terms, the leagues are treated similar to provinces in the ANC. It means that they can send delegates to the National Conference in the same manner as the nine provinces and they can nominate candidates for the national positions.
The Youth League’s heydays were during the presidencies of Peter Mokaba and Julius Malema. The other presidents (Lulu Johnson, Malusi Gigaba, Fikile Mbalula and Collen Maine) did make the same impact on the ANC and South Africa in general. Mokaba created an identity for the youth league. He officiated over the merger with the UDF’s South African Youth Congress, which created an impressive youth movement known as the “young lions”.
After Mokaba, the Thabo Mbeki administration pulled the teeth of the lions and effectively co-opted Gigaba with positions in government. It was only in the Malema era that the Youth League asserted itself again at the Polokwane national conference when they campaigned against Mbeki for the election of Jacob Zuma as president. (Much later, Malema apologised to Mbeki for it.)
The Malema presidency radicalised the youth league again, called for more independence as an organisation and called for policies on land expropriation and nationalisation, which were opposed by Zuma. The expulsion from the ANC 10 years ago of Youth League leaders like Malema, Floyd Shivambu and others started a period of demise for the youth league. The current situation is a direct product of that.
The youth league was also the focus of a national task team, a popular mechanism used by President Cyril Ramaphosa also for the Women’s League and provincial executives. They are meant to defuse the factional nature of their leadership groups and at the same time bring them closer to the Ramaphosa way of thinking.
The latest election of a new national youth league leadership is an early indication of Ramaphosa’s success with his strategy. All six national leaders were elected unopposed and they came from the same slate. They do represent a perfect gender balance and provincial diversity. The top leaders are from Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal, the Eastern Cape and the Free State. The complicating factor is the role of the ANC’s Secretary General and former Youth League President, Fikile Mbalula. He is accused of interference in the in the latest conference and election processes. It is a continuation of a long-standing criticism that the national task teams of the past were not from the youth league generation but much older, and that they wanted to manipulate its relaunch and political positioning in line with their own interests.
The youth league will be faced with a daunting task of dealing with issues of which many are beyond its control. The first one is to many the Progressive Alliance consisting of the Youth League, Sasco, Cosas and also the Young Communist League. It affects student politics in particular, especially SRC elections. In the past, competition between the youth league, Sasco and YCL in these elections divided their votes. They are in direct confrontation with the EFF student structures, who are very effective in many higher education institutions. They are also in competition with the DA Student Organisation, the Inkatha Youth Brigade, Azasco and others. The youth league does not enjoy anymore the dominance of earlier years.
The youth league is also expected to be the ANC’s front line in mobilising the voters of 35 years and younger. They are the cohort who are not enthusiastic to register as voters, while many of them who are still registered are not motivated to vote in elections. The ANC’s decline in electoral support can only be mitigated if this tendency is turned around, and the league is expected to play a very important part in it. Its lack of organisational maturity over the last eight years will pose a major challenge for its mobilisation capacity before the 2024 elections. It will encounter stiff competition from movements converted into new parties, such as Rise Mzansi and Mmusi Maimane’s BOSA, for the young voters.
The party-political voice of the youth in South Africa has become subdued, despite the fact that the biggest national issues are directly related to the youth. Civil society organisations are much more vocal.
Not only the ANC’s youth voice is not prominent, but also those of most of the other main political parties. The youth league’s revival will therefore be measured by its success to create an independent voice for the youth. The political sentiments of the youth are often leftist in nature and therefore anti-capitalist, critical of the West and promoting policy changes in land expropriation and nationalisation, the Reserve Bank’s mandate and financing of education. The ANC’s mother body is more centrist in nature and the Ramaphosa policies are more pragmatic and investor friendly.
The youth league is probably expected to path the way for young party members to enter political domain and take up leadership positions in the government executive and parliament. The ANC is often criticised for being too “old” and its leaders being out of touch with the issues of the time. The youth league will certainly be under pressure to campaign on behalf of their members for senior positions. All over the world, but especially in the West, prime ministers and cabinet members are remarkably young.
South Africans want to be part of that.
The youth league is in the best possible position in about 10 years to win the respect of their supporters. Given the general state of the ANC, it will depend on how effectively they can avoid internal divisions, self-centred indulgence in the political spoils and becoming detached from their constituency.
*Prof Dirk Kotzé is a professor in Political Sciences at Unisa
**The views expressed here are not necessarily those of IOL.