17 November 2019
By Pule Monama
The chaos, mayhem and anarchy within the ANC ranks, and now its youth league, can no longer be ignored. It is not surprising either.
It is a historic pattern which at least some of us are still alive to give a perspective to. The behaviour of any youth is a direct reflection of the adult the youth is surrounded by.
When the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) was at its peak, the Charterist-aligned organisations were unable to intellectually engage in what they now famously call “the festival or contest of ideas”.
The Charterists opted to physically attack members of the BCM who engaged in political debates and education, they disrupted our meetings, saying they were a waste of time and, in certain cases, forced our members into exile. They even called us intellectuals, thereby attaching a negative meaning to this noble achievement – intellectualism.
The only reason for the attacks was because we were politically clear, we were able to clearly articulate our vision. The BCM’s main task was to conscientise, mobilise and instill a sense of psychological liberation among black people, as well as ensuring the training and development of leadership, particularly among the youth.
This was done for two main reasons. First, it was to ensure no vacuum is left should we be arrested or killed by the apartheid regime. Second, it was to create a pool of leaders to allow for succession. In the early 1980s, our mobilisation slogan was “educate to liberate”, which was the anchor of the above ideas.
While the charterist-aligned organisations were intellectually below par, they had financial and material support for food, transport and jambories at their rallies. They rallied people around the slogan of “liberation now and education later”, which then responds to what we are witnessing now.
Their youth, not schooled in the political objectives of the ANC, are now used as proxies in the “factional” battles of their adult leaders.
At a time when we expect the youth to be preparing for national leadership, ANC youth can hardly sustain an intellectual political discussion to this day. They have been conditioned and trained to defend human beings and not ideas.
The various factions have also armed them with deadly weapons instead of intellectual capabilities that can move the country forward.
If you zoom at the reason for their quarrels, you’ll find nothing that has to do with service to the country and its people. Just corruption.
In the era where our country is in an economic quagmire, it is not the youth that is grappling with solutions that could fix those problems. Instead the youth has been systematically removed from that debate which essentially has a lot to do with their future.
That debate is steered by people whose future has all but ended. The youth have been successfully de-educated and demobilised in the selfish interests of those who use them.
- Monama is a Black Consciousness activist
