Factious: Youth league leaders
The Young Communist League has launched a scathing attack on their alliance partner the ANC Youth League, after the latter accused finance minister Pravin Gordhan and deputy president Cyril Ramaphosa of protecting white monopoly capital.
The ANCYL’s spokesperson Mlondi Mkhize chastised Gordhan and Ramaphosa at the league’s briefing at St George’s Hotel in Centurion this week. He accused the pair of blocking black companies from access to contracts at the South African Airways (SAA).
This is because Gordhan instructed SAA to seek help with its turnaround strategy from aviation consultants Bidvest after the national treasury took over management of the state airline last year.
“Among those that we know is at Bidvest is the deputy president of the ANC and that of our government, Comrade Cyril Ramaphosa. But who else is there? It is the minister himself, Pravin Gordhan,” Mkhize said, before accusing the minister of benefitting from Comair taking over lucrative SAA routes.
“Who are the stakeholders at Comair? It is Bidvest and Comrade Pravin who owns nothing less than 20% of Comair,” he added.
The youth league is believed to be in support of a faction opposing Ramaphosa’s bid for the presidency at the ANC’s national conference in December, and it’s eThekwini region in KwaZulu-Natal has already called for Gordhan to be sacked.
Meanwhile, the SACP is one of Gordhan’s strongest supporters and embraced Ramaphosa’s call for lifestyle audits in the highest echelons of the ANC’s leadership.
YCL spokesperson Molaodi Wa Sekake said the ANCYL is hypocritical.
“The ANCYL remarks that it won’t elect anyone who protects “white monopoly capital”; such remarks are questionable at best and hypocritical at worst,” Sekake said.
The YCL believes the ANCYL has been relegated to a defence for the ANC’s older leaders currently embroiled in a battle to take over from party president Jacob Zuma.
“Signs of a youth elite that barefacedly panders to neo-colonial politics and has become the defensive ‘barking dogs’ of the neo-colonial and neo-liberal political elite… are palpable,” he said.
“When serious questions and critical debates… are shunned at and everything else conveniently yoked to a momentary hype and a factional streak, what comes out is… a competition as to who is more loyal to the old guard or the elderly political elite than the other,” Sekake added.
The YCL went further, saying the ANCYL is dividing poor young people through their insistence to support an “old guard”.
“There is really nothing that divides the poor youth besides being used by those who are pocketed by old people and have come to believe that they have arrived or they are on top of the world.
“The tired bodies and minds, albeit experienced in good and bad things, are using fresh bodies and minds to sustain the status quo,” Sekake said.