Cape Town – An MP on Parliament’s ad hoc committee was prevented from asking a candidate for the NYDA board a question about politics, during interviews on Wednesday.
DA MP Yusuf Cassim raised questions about the politics of the NYDA, and said there were incidents where it was seen as an employment agency for the ANC Youth League and its alliances.
He was questioning political analyst, Siyaduma Biniza, who has a Masters of commerce in development theory and policy.
The committee’s chairperson told Cassim they had to stick to the prescribed questions, which they had discussed on Tuesday.
Committee co-chairperson Phillemon Mapulane said the platform was not intended to attack political formations and he would not allow “this line of questioning”. He apologised to Biniza.
The committee is interviewing 13 candidates for the seven positions on the National Youth Development Agency board.
The first candidate to be interviewed on Wednesday was ANCYL national executive committee member Sfiso Mtsweni. He joined the league at age 14 and was the youngest member of its Western Cape executive committee, he told MPs.
He said the NYDA had been faced with an identity crisis due to the fact that some had come to see it as extension of a “particular youth formation”.
“But I must say, over the last two years or so, the agency began to go into the right footing. Notwithstanding the fact that the agency has funding constraints, and the funding mostly goes to salaries, and the money left for youth development is small,” he said.
Another candidate, Yershen Pillay, the last chairperson of the NYDA board, told MPs that a lot of work had been done to stabilise and improve the agency. It was time to build on this by making the agency more accessible to rural youth and extending its footprint, he said.
The EFF boycotted Wednesday’s meeting. The party said it did not want to “legitimise partisan deployment of pure mediocrity happening there”.
