ANCYL has too much rabble, too few radicals

Though it is easy to understand how the ANCYL might fail to appreciate the impact of their repeated threats to bring nationalisation to South African mining, what is incomprehensible is their continued calls for violence in Cape Town over the toilets issue when the Grabouw and Gugulethu wards clearly demonstrated that their efforts are undermining their party at the ballot box.

If regard is to be had to the results of the 2006 elections in those wards, and then compared to the outcome of this week’s by-elections, then the shift from ANC to Democratic Alliance is staggering. The Independent Electoral Commission confirmed that the DA had polled 60.3% in Gugulethu-Heideveld, up from 26.2% in 2006, while the ANC managed only 37.7%, down from 53% previously.

Apparently anarchy and vandalism doesn’t go down too well with the voters
In that instance, ANCYL Dullah Omar regional secretary Loyiso Nkohle was quoted in media reports saying that: “We are going to destroy everything and make the city ungovernable. We are calling on all youth to do this, especially those living in informal settlements.”

While the national office of the youth league denied these reports, there were many accounts of mobs allegedly led by the ANCYL tearing down new toilet structures.

Regardless of the outcome of that conduct, there was a clear shift in voting trends to such a degree that DA leader Helen Zille was able to conclude that her party could no longer be tainted by the lie that they were a white party.

Current threat
On Sunday, having learned nothing from the above, Cape ANCYL members once again threatened “violent” protests over the great toilet debacle.

IOL reports that Chumile Sali, deputy secretary general of the league in the Dullah Omar region, said the march was “going to be violent. It is going to be bad. We’ll have 3 000 members of the youth league, community members and members of the SA National Civics Organisation”.

Sali said they had met Science and Technology Minister Naledi Pandor, whose constituency office is in Khayelitsha, and that she had promised to speak to President Jacob Zuma on their behalf. Sali added: “But you can’t expect anything from them [the government] because they tell us that it is a recession, yet their salaries are increasing.”

Andile Lile, treasurer of the league in the Dullah Omar region and chairperson of the 95 Ward Development Forum, said the league had been misrepresented in last week’s row. “This is not a political thing and they are trying to make it political by blaming the ANCYL for destroying the corrugated structures.”

ANCYL far removed from reality
Perhaps it’s time the ANCYL faced up to a few facts:

1. The Western Cape is one of the better provinces in terms of service delivery. What will happen if the masses — looking at this ridiculous example — start behaving like that in all provinces? The DA will be left with one headache and the ANC at least eight times that on a far larger scale. It’s like a bank robber in prison becoming the party responsible for corruption oversight. That they can’t see this is staggering.

2. If the ANCYL national office denies that it is them stirring this up then only two options are available — firstly, that they are lying because it is so blatant that their denials are ludicrous or secondly, that they have no control over their Cape branch which is even more embarrassing.

3. The approach taken by the ANC to service-delivery protests has been to call on communities to spell out their problems to local government and afford them the opportunity to deal with the issues. This Cape nonsense completely undermines that effort and suggests to residents that the way to deal with that is anarchy. Who is the biggest loser? The government and the ANC.

4. As described above the ANC suffered a major setback in the areas where this ridiculous approach was tried last week.

Yet none of this has sunk in
It’s as if the ANCYL doesn’t live in the same country, read the same newspapers or attend the same meetings as the ANC. Whenever they go off on a tangent, it is one disaster after another.

As we have reported over the past few days, Secretary General Gwede Mantashe is in London calming investors, NUM are pointing out that ANCYL President Julius Malema’s ideas about nationalisation are wrong — with sensible suggestions being put forward to the parliamentary portfolio committee by them — and President Zuma has called the youth league leader’s views on the subject, his own and not the ANCs.

I have written before about the greats who have risen through the ANCYL ranks and gone on to achieve greatness and compared them with the current leaders of this movement.

Perhaps I can simplify it further: the ANC leaders who fought apartheid and seized control of the ANC were radicals, rising to meet a vital challenge that required their courage and insight. The current leaders are not radicals, they are simply a rabble who don’t understand that when great men like former president Nelson Mandela speak about the fight against poverty and an unequal society they are seeking men and women with the courage to build and the insight to do it within the framework of the circumstances that they find themselves in.

Any moron can destroy and lead a rabble but it is the man or woman who stands ahead of that seething mass and says no, there is a better way, which stands apart. That is your radical — not the idiot screaming kill and destroy — he is just a populist milking people’s fears to create bedlam to his own advantage.

Learn the difference.