The ANC Youth League goes to its national general council this week aiming to flex its muscles against its mother body, the ANC.
The league plans to call for a generational mix in the ANC top leadership, demand its autonomy from the ANC and press again for the nationalisation of mines.
The Mail & Guardian has established from senior members of the league that it will seek in the council to endorse the campaign to elect former league president Fikile Mbalula, now deputy police minister, as the next secretary general of the ANC.
Youth league president Julius Malema has of late been stressing the need for a second layer of leadership and a generational mix in the ANC’s national executive committee (NEC).
The league apparently wants most of its “products” in the top echelons of the ANC, including the top six, by 2017.
Lobbying for Mbalula would be part of the push for a mixed-generation ANC leadership.
Former league president Malusi Gigaba is also in the Cabinet, as deputy home affairs minister.
The league wants its secretary general Vuyiswa Tulelo — who cannot serve another term in the youth league because of the age limit — on the NEC.
A source close to the youth league leadership and the lobbying group for Mbalula told the M&G: “If you look at the top six [ANC leaders], when we get to 2017 Zuma [who is now 68] will be old, Kgalema [Motlanthe, the deputy president, who is currently 61] is going to be old and Gwede [Mantashe, the ANC secretary general] will be old. If we do not save them, the ANC is dead.”
But some senior ANC leaders frown upon the idea of Mbalula as secretary general.
Albeit in hushed tones, they say the youth league threatens to undermine the older generations that, in long party tradition, are supposed to produce its leaders.
But the youth league feels justified in skipping generations, said sources in the league, because the gap has been created by senior leaders who failed to organise themselves.
Lobbyists for Mbalula as secretary general originally wanted former police commissioner Jackie Selebi to be elected to the position in Polokwane in 2007. But his name was abandoned at an early stage after corruption allegations came to the fore.
“That generation [in the ANC] was not united after Selebi’s name was dropped. There was now a generational gap,” said a source who is lobbying for Mbalula.
He added that many of the leaders in that generation later left the ANC to form the Congress of the People: “That is when the Mbalula group came in.”