Johannesburg – The ANC this week introduced the members of its new national youth task team comprising young men and women under the age of 35.
After months of being led by elders, the ANC Youth League looks set for a resurrection following years of being moribund, or to put it crudely, dead.
At the outset, the governing party should be commended for ensuring that both the coordinator and convenor are women in the 35-member task team.
This affirms the centrality of women in leading the struggles of the country in every facet of life. The selection of Nonceba Mhlauli as convenor and Joy Maimela as coordinator, respectively, should be celebrated.
A body of opinion in the ANC, the youth league’s historical role in shaping the character of the ANC, its policies, as well as being a kingmaker in deciding the leadership of the organisation, is well recorded.
@MYANC Secretary General Cde @Magashule_Ace adressing the inaugural meeting of the newly appointed ANC National Youth Task Team pic.twitter.com/SVq455W1Yt
— African National Congress (@MYANC) April 9, 2021
It was the youth league of Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo and Walter Sisulu that changed the ANC from a gentlemen’s formation of petitions to a massbased activist organisation in the 1950s.
This saw the roll out of campaigns such as the Defiance Campaign in 1952 and the adoption of the Freedom Charter in 1955.
This golden generation of 1944 would continue to change the course of history, producing the longest-serving ANC president in Tambo and the country’s first democratic president, Mandela. Successive generations of the youth league continued to influence the ANC to varying degrees, although not as successful as the 1944 generation.
It was the 2008 youth league of Julius Malema that brought back sharply the discourse of land and the nationalisation of mines.
Malema and his generation forced the ANC to adopt the expropriation of land without compensation resolution at its 2017 elective conference. However, the youth league completely lost its way under the leadership of Collen Maine.
Maine served the narrow interests of former president Jacob Zuma, and the league was reduced to toy soldiers for the Guptas.
Since then, the young lions have stopped roaring and have become irrelevant, but the election of the new leadership should resurrect a sleeping giant and restore it to its former glory. It is from this generation that another Mandela, Tambo and Sisulu should emerge – not another Maine.
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