It is easy to dismiss the ANC Youth League as the comedy wing of the ANC. Each week brings a fresh outburst of absurdity from Julius Malema or spokesperson Floyd Shivambu, or another outbreak of flamboyant behaviour.
Antic disposition notwithstanding, this is a serious group of youngsters who have real influence and who are able to treat important government structures as their jungle gym — and they are limbering up for an assault on the commanding heights.
The youth league is the only ANC structure that embarked on a preparatory meeting — its first national general council — to prepare for the ANC’s national general council next month in Durban. And although a fair amount of partying and drinking was done at Gallagher Estate in Midrand, delegates were this week carefully prepared for the onslaught against the youth league’s Grand Idea — the nationalisation of mines — at the meeting of the mother body.
No matter how marginal their policy pronouncements may sound, Malema’s statement that 70% of delegates to the ANC’s NGC in Durban next month will be young people ought not to be taken lightly. If he really is capable of marshalling a large proportion of that vote, the league will have an impact out of all proportion to its size. Whether he can pull it off, given the internal challenges he faces, is another question.
The brazenness with which Malema and the league campaign for Deputy Police Minister Fikile Mbalula to take over the secretary general position in Luthuli House come 2012 is refreshingly honest in a party given to reticence about “ambition” and shows there is no crisis of confidence in their ranks.
And serious money swirls around the league — thanks, allegedly, to its proximity to wealthy government contractors.
Even the ANC secretary general, Gwede Mantashe, was annoyed this week when his age — 55 — was brought up, unprompted, by ANC spokesperson Jackson Mthembu at a press conference. Malema’s new hobby horse — intergenerational mix — obviously hit a nerve. What Mantashe knows, and the rest of us would do well to remember, is that these kids are not playing around.