Serious about taking South Africa forward? We need Meritocracy

Do the current ANC Youth League NEC members deserve to be Members of Parliament? What is it that they have done to champion the interests of young people in South Africa? The ANC seems to be awarding mediocrity at times.

The struggle has always been about serving the people and not about money, as we have seen over the years. Why are we doing this to the young people of South Africa? What did they do to deserve this ANCYL leadership that seems not to care about the youth of the country?

How do you lead the revolution if you don’t love your people? Che Guevara once said:

“The true revolutionary is guided by strong feelings of love.” What are we saying to South Africans when we reward people who failed to even deliver a national elective congress in September 2018 when their term came to an end? To date, we don’t even know why the national congress did not take place in 2018. How do we trust them to do the right thing in Parliament?

Meritocracy is needed moving forward if we are serious about taking the people of South Africa forward. It is clear that the principle of meritocracy does not apply with regard to the ANCYL, as we see people who finished a term without even building branches of the league being rewarded by being included on the list for Parliament. What are they going to do in Parliament when they have failed us as members of the Youth League?

The revolution has been reduced to tenders and deployment. We have killed the activism in the ANCYL and have become an organisation that is not active in our communities. There are so many social ills affecting young people and the ANCYL NEC is nowhere to be found. But come deployment, they are the first ones who want to be in line.

Thomas Sankara warned us when he said:

“Who feeds you, controls you.” The ANCYL has been reduced to people who want to wear Louis Vuitton belts and drink expensive whisky in nightclubs. We need to go back to what the generation of 1944 stood for when the ANCYL was launched. The Youth League used to be a body of opinion. Today it no longer brings new ideas to the ANC and this is because of the politics of the stomach.

The current ANCYL NEC speaks about the generational mix, but they know it’s about them. They started this rhetoric going to the ANC conference in Nasrec.

They don’t recognise those who led before them, starting from 1991. They think that they are the first leaders of the ANCYL. When we speak of the generational mix, we need to go to the SA Youth Congress and the ANCYL in 1991 if we are to be honest, but the present leaders like positions more than the ANCYL. DM