Young Lions no longer roaring as ANC Youth League congress teeters

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Thursday.

Like many of my fellow South Africans — or, to be precise, those among us who are participating in or tasked with covering the ANC Youth League’s long-awaited and repeatedly postponed national congress this week — I’m wondering if the event will actually go ahead.

Arsène Wenger was still the Arsenal coach the last time the youth league successfully held an elective national conference — or congress, if you’re that way inclined — and the  ANC’s youth wing hasn’t exactly grabbed the public imagination since.

Nobody appears all that interested in the conference beyond those involved in running it — and covering it — the ANC leadership included, who haven’t been bubbling over with excitement about the event that they will be paying for.

Except, of course, ANC secretary general Fikile Mbalula, who won’t pass up any opportunity to test his grasp on the levers of the party’s organisational machinery. He has left his fingerprints all over the process thus far.

Mbalula aside, it appears safe to assume that there will be no mass of interested observers at Nasrec this weekend — if the conference actually sits, no horde of young people lined up to catch a glimpse of the new leader of the governing party’s youth. 

It’s hard to imagine the nation, its young people in particular, spending their weekend glued to the TV screen or social media, waiting breathlessly for the conference outcome, to see who has emerged triumphant from the elective meeting; flocking to Cubana for the all-night afterparty.

Those days are gone.

It’s not just the fact that the youth league — like the ANC and the rest of us — is broke.

The Young Lions stopped roaring the day that the then ANC youth league president, Julius Malema, was booted out of the governing party, taking any sense of militancy and organisational ability with him to the Economic Freedom Fighters and leaving behind some serious legal bills for his successors to deal with.

Collen Maine and Njabulo Nzuza, who were installed as part of a new leadership two years later, failed to rebuild the league — or capture the support of young people inside and outside the ANC — and were unable to stage its 26th national conference in 2018.

The following year the ANC national leadership disbanded the league — some of whose members were by then far closer to the retirement village than they were to any university campus — because of political and money problems.

The national youth task team appointed in their stead lasted until 2021.

It was also disbanded over age dramas and replaced with a conference preparatory committee, which was, of course, eventually disbanded and replaced with the current formulation — headed by a leadership too old to stand for election this weekend — which may or may not deliver a successful meeting.

The events of the past week — an apparently unauthorised provincial conference in the Eastern Cape and drama in Gauteng and the Western Cape over the branch auditing processes — make the scheduled Friday kick-off at Nasrec seem particularly unlikely.

So, too, does the series of lawyers’ letters sent to the organisers by the league’s Vhembe region in Limpopo, which claims that the regional secretary has gone rogue and has caused chaos among its delegation.

Its leaders were threatening court action if the organising committee didn’t intervene, which it hadn’t done by Wednesday night.

Factor in dissatisfaction in provinces such as KwaZulu-Natal, which failed to hold regional general councils — or a provincial conference —and haven’t been able to hold branch general meetings to take mandates on issues or candidates, and a no-show (or a festival or chairs) appears to be the more likely outcome.

There has also been drama about invites to the auspicious event, which used to be quite an affair — socially, politically and financially — back in the day when the Young Lions still roared.

Malusi Gigaba and other previous youth league presidents and secretaries general who historically make the VIP section on the guest list were invited, uninvited and re-invited all in the course of about 72 hours.

The conference preparatory team quoted money as the reason for pulling the invites — and trimming the programme for the conference — when they sent out the Don’t Come Friday letters to the league’s former leaders.

They didn’t go down well — after all, how much can a former youth league president eat — but the debate became academic after the rescission of the invitations was, like so many leaderships of the league, itself rescinded by Wednesday, clearing the former presidents to once more attend the gathering.

If it actually takes place.