Politics
Young Lions meow as ANC clears its throat
As the ANC’s national executive meeting (NEC) kicks off in Pretoria on Friday, nobody’s talking about the Youth League elephant in the room. At least not to bladdie agents like CARIEN DU PLESSIS.
There’s some rebellion in the ANC Youth League’s threat of “mass protests” to “strategic sectors of the economy”, including the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, Chamber of Mines, AgriSA, and, we kid you not, the “UNION Building” (sic), where frienemy President Jacob Zuma lives.
The mass action is, of course, to support their programme of economic freedom in our lifetime and nationalisation. The kids decided on this during their national working committee (NWC) meeting on Thursday.
They will probably use the marches – more details to be announced on their 12 September birthday – to measure their grassroots support and perhaps to put pressure on the ANC if and when the disciplinary hearing against Julius Malema and his league starts.
There’ve been no public pronouncements on it yet, but senior ANC sources have confirmed charges will be instituted soon.
At their meeting, the league charted a way forward in their “political, organisational and ideological work” and they considered report-backs.
There’s a slightest hint of recent tremors in their “unshaken” soldiering on with their economic freedom programme, nationalisation and expropriation without compensation campaigns, and the faintest hint of a roar in their plans for marches.
Thursday’s statement from the league has been the first since its apology on Saturday for its plans to work with the opposition in Botswana to effect regime change there.
There’s been no peep about the B-word since.
Meanwhile the ANC’s scheduled NEC meeting does not have the disciplinary action on its agenda, seeing that the party’s top six leaders (they met on Monday) are handling these.
But the league might just find a way to sneak it onto the NEC agenda, where it has more friends than among the party’s stern top dogs. DM
Photo: Reuters.