Johannesburg – The ANC Youth League has rejected claims that it makes decisions based on instructions from other structures or elders in the ruling party.
“We know why we are doing what we are doing,” the league’s secretary general Njabulo Nzuza said on Tuesday.
He was responding to the SACP’s claims that the young lions had been instructed to attack the ANC’s critics, including Higher Education Minister Blade Nzimande, who is also SACP general secretary.
“This is the level of thinking we have been complaining about, faction this, faction that, faction here or there. All they see are factions,” he said.
Nzimande was the first recipient of a series of open letters the ANCYL planned to send to different ministers to tell them how they were doing in implementing ANC policy resolutions.
The SACP said there were factional battles in the ruling alliance.
“If the centre is holding, why is it that we having people in the same Cabinet saying different things?” its Mpumalanga spokesperson Lesetja Dikgale asked on Tuesday.
“If there are no factions, why are people feeling the need to march and some, in the very same organisation feel a need to attack those very members?”
Dikgale asked why, if the movement was unified, would the league launch public attacks against Nzimande.
He said young people needed to claim their own space and stop being used in fights by older members of the ANC to attack individuals.
“It’s through them you see the level of degeneration that factionalism has given the ANC.”
On Monday, September 5, a group of ANC members marched on ANC headquarters Luthuli House, in central Johannesburg, to call for President Jacob Zuma and his national executive committee to resign following the party’s poor performance in the August 3 local government elections. Members of the ANCYL and the ANC’s military veterans threatened and intimidated them.
