The revival of the ANCYL provides a window to build a cadre of special type.
There is a Nguni idiom that says "zibanjwa zisemaphuphu" [catch the birds while they are still fledging].The current renewal and revival of the ANCYL across the country under the auspices of the National Task Team [NTT] provides another important window not for the ANCYL but of the ANC as a whole to plough a seed in the bed for what will be a future ANC leadership, future cadre and membership underpinned by revolutionary tasks and urgencies that have come to redefine the political requirements of the terrain as we interact with the environment since electoral breakthrough in 1994.
It is trite that the cadres of the ANC at all times, their steeling and political tempering, have been the product of the hitherto terrain within which the movement find itself and the most urgent strategic questions of the time. The movement has always produced cadres who got nurtured into correspondence into the lofty tasks thrown up by the terrain and therefore capacity to unleash the trajectory with all the elasticity that this brings whether tactically or strategically.
It is true that each phase of the struggle has produced different cadres of the ANC in tandem to its epochal metamorphosis.
There has been wider lamentation in the movement after the ANCYL began to show signs of downward spiral in terms of political quality [at all levels] and the relegation into backburner the political aspect in imbuing the young so that ANCYL, true to its status as a preparatory school of the ANC, that it fulfils this mandate.
To that extent, the lamentation has been on the sequel of organisational and political problems that has caused its moribund that this will inevitable create a discord in the future quality leadership of the ANC at all levels. ANCYL, like the YCL in the SACP, have a mandate of unstoppable production of young emerging quality cadres for the ANC capable of understanding ANC policies and programs; the acquisition of the art of translating these to government implementation if the ANC deploy them in the various levers of the state and government.
And so, this revival of the ANCYL should not be a mechanical exercise where the focus is on building structures for re-launches from branches, regions, provinces to national. But important that task as might be, this phase provides a window for building an ANC cadre that the 53rd Conference directed the movement to build. The primacy must be to answer a question what type of an ANCYL cadre must we have in 2013 onwards and by implication, the cadre that will be delivered to ANC?
As we build structures all over the country, but what intense and unrushed deeper corresponding political and technical program must we unleash, at all levels, in building a quality cadre steeped in building leadership and thought leadership, revolutionary morality, full capacity to comprehend and interprets ANC and alliance policies and of ANC government. There should be an effort, for instance, to educate cadres about government and government leadership as a public servant and as a public representative. Teachings on the need to transform the economy and the revolutionary tasks of those in the private sector and economy through various professional pursuits. Nothing is neutral in a revolution.
The emphasis on the young cadres to be educated must find expression like a clarion call. This country, without option, requires educated public representatives with some levels of technical knowhow, senior public sector cadres of unquestionable academic standing. The world has changed and still is changing.
Of cause all of the above tasks are a tedious exercise that cannot be exhaustive prior re-launching the League from the organisational front but its integration, in this moment of reconstruction, becomes an important Launchpad for this paradigm.
I would have wished that such a renewal process and suss that this is generating on the ground throughout the country, that the Young Communist League, would have embarked on the same revival exercise from below to the top so that these two formations as senior members of progressive youth alliance rise again to the occasion, organisationally and politically, at equal terms. But it is interesting that the SACP in affected provinces is hands-on in the rebuilding process.
The need for the creation of advance cadres, beyond reproach, incorruptible and sophisticated for this revolution that is being besieged like never before by liberal actors who have invested so much energy and propaganda to defile the ANC and its legitimacy cannot be over emphasized. By this is not to say we are being on the run because reactionary liberals and DA are setting dogs on us. But we need the second layer leadership steadily nurtured in the structures of the leagues for higher responsibilities, imbued with cadre sober-mindedness.
The ANC Secretary General, Gwede Mantashe, captured this perspective more forcefully in the online ANC today [ Cadres must be equipped to tell the story of our country, 07 June 2013]:
" ......The Conference gave us specific tasks for this decade. It directed we continuously produce a contingent of cadres who are conscious, competent, committed, discipline and conscientious.
This begs the question as to who a cadre is, as distinct from a member. This requires all of us to appreciate the journey one must travel from being a member to being a cadre. Only when we are clear of how the movement would produce such a contingent of cadres can we really talk of fulfilling the task of executing the second phase of the National Democratic Revolution.
"......The conference called on all of us to ensure that any deployment is preceded by systematic academic, ideological, ethical training and political preparation........ ..This decade of the cadre should prepare a cadre of a governing party, whose responsibility includes effective and efficient governance in all three spheres of government"
These are cadres of special type. Cadres who will have a stamina to sustain the movement as a whole and youth organizations must be in the front line, by virtue of being preparatory school for the mother bodies, that they become the cooking pot within which what the Secretary General makes assertion as the type of cadres that the conference directed to be produced.
It is always easy to capture the young minds and imbue them with all ethos, revolutionary templates and quality organisational and technical skills than the elders who are sometimes conservative to change. As the saying goes "zibanjwa zisemaphuphu".
Khaye Nkwanyana is the former Deputy National Secretary of the Young Communist League, ANCYL member. He is a PEC member of the SACP in KwaZulu Natal. He Writes on his personal capacity.
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