ANC secretary general Gwede Mantashe has warned the ANC Youth League that it could collapse if it insists on calling itself a “kingmaker”, it was reported on Sunday.
“If you are going out there as a kingmaker and saying the next president is so and so, actually you are sowing seeds for resistance — even if you come up with good ideas,” Mantashe told the City Press newspaper.
He said the league only got the right to vote at the African National Congress’s 2007 Polokwane elective conference, but warned that “king-making pride” came before a fall.
“But if you go around and say ‘stop thinking, the kingmakers have now arrived’, you are going to be surprised because you are bringing something that is not in the ANC tradition.”
The youth league was scheduled to host a national executive committee meeting in Johannesburg on Sunday, in the aftermath of league president Julius Malema’s suspension from the party.
Earlier in the week, league spokesperson Floyd Shivambu said the league would publicly communicate outcomes of the meeting, as well as its national working committee meeting, on Monday.
The ANC’s national disciplinary committee suspended Malema on April 4 after he called ANC president Jacob Zuma a dictator and said he was suppressing the youth league.
The conditions of the suspension prohibit him from exercising any duty as an ANC member, president of the youth league or member of the Limpopo provincial executive committee.
On Thursday Malema’s appeal hearing on his expulsion from the party was postponed.
Malema was expelled from the ANC in February for sowing division in the party and for bringing it into disrepute.
He remains youth league president until all options to overturn his sentences have been exhausted. — Sapa
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