“It is important that on this special occasion, we offer a public apology to everyone who was insulted and wronged by the organisation,” said the league’s national task team convener, Mzwandile Masina.
He was speaking at the league’s 69th anniversary celebration in Joburg.
“The ANC finds itself in courts as a result of our actions. More recently, we lost a case lodged by a journalist at The Star newspaper, who was called a drunk by this very organisation of ours,” he said .
The league did not have the money to pay the journalist, but could only apologise.
At the Durban celebration, former national police commissioner Bheki Cele said young people should pay no heed to the league’s former president, Julius Malema.
“If we allow the youth league to go astray we are stifling our youth. Be militant, but with respect,” he said.
It was “unAfrican” to insult older people, even when this made you popular.
He said Malema’s call for economic emancipation was an abuse of the concept and that there were steps to achieve this, like studying.
“You don’t wake up and become rich. You work for it.”
At the Joburg event, ANC deputy president Cyril Ramaphosa pleaded with the interim national leadership of the league not to behave like Malema.
Ramaphosa – who fired Malema from the ANC – did not mention him by name but cautioned Masina’s leadership against being disrespectful towards the ANC leadership. He said the past leadership of the league had developed a “personality cult” and was a “be all and everything of the ANC Youth League”.
He warned: “The ANC is about collective leadership. You should guard against shouting at the ANC leadership and insulting them. It is un-ANC.”
It was Ramaphosa – then the ANC’s national disciplinary committee of appeals chairman – who decided to terminate Malema’s membership of the ANC, because of ill-discipline, in February last year.
At the time, Malema’s membership was suspended for five years by the ANC’s national disciplinary committee under Derek Hanekom, but Ramaphosa and his team overturned Hanekom’s ruling and found that Malema’s expulsion was the only appropriate sentence.
It was clear from Ramaphosa’s address that the ruling party was expecting Masina and his team to toe the line or face the same fate as Malema and his supporters – who have since formed the Economic Freedom Fighters party.
Ramaphosa urged youth league members to do serious introspection.
“It was the first time that the ANC Youth League was disbanded. You must ask yourself why a decision was taken to disband you. You must ask yourself why. You must reposition the ANC Youth League,” Ramaphosa said.
He said it was the new leadership’s duty to rebuild branches of the youth league and improve its brand name.
Ramaphosa called parties like the EFF, which were calling for “economic freedom in our lifetime”, “plagiarisers” who borrowed dangerous ideas.
“The ANC Youth League must give substance of what economic transformation is. You are the inheritors of this land and the economy. The ANC is the only party that can deliver economic freedom,” Ramaphosa insisted.
However, he urged his members to innovate ideas and develop new ways to build the ANC. “You must create your own business. Do not become tenderpreneurs, which are going to fizzle out in the near future,” Ramaphosa said.
Meanwhile, President Jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma will deliver a key note address at the ANCYL celebrations in Limpopo this weekend.
