The ANC Youth League (ANCYL) is a political nuisance in this country. One wonders why the ANC continues to keep such an undisciplined troupe going when it generates so much negative news for the party. Politically stunted, they are a destructive force and, as an institution, they continue to survive, even as a travesty of their former self.

The ANCYL contributes nothing to South Africa, nothing to the development of youth leaders, and nothing to social development. Way past their sell-by-date, they force greatness on mediocrities like Julius Malema, Floyd Shivambu and their ilk.

The problem is this - the ANCYL is intrinsically handicapped by its historical origins. Similar youth movements disappeared with the demise of communism and fascism but here the National Democratic Revolution provides them with a lifeline.

A look at their communist and fascist antecedents explains it all.

Party controlled Communist Leagues were an invention of the Bolsheviks. They believed that youth were central to the building and survival of socialism. More easily influenced than adults into fervent communist discipleship, they were used to play a crucial role during the civil war in Russia in 1918. 

Their co-optation through political education, state-sponsored cultural events in schools and political campaigns succeeded as they infused the communist resistance movements with renewed energy and enthusiasm. Richly rewarded, of course, with entitlements to educational, professional, or political opportunities, they were expected to devote themselves to communism.

The shock troops of Lenin's Five-Year Plan, they confiscated grain, brutally enforced collectivization, and industrialisation by subjugating farmers and workers to their struggle for socialism. Lenin firmly believed that socialist societies can only be built by youth and he succeeded in his mission to mobilise them successfully to champion his cause. According to the Encyclopaedia,

"When civil war broke out in 1918, members of the newly established Communist Youth League (or Komsomol) defended the revolution in various capacities within the Red Army, and they were lauded by Bolshevik leaders for their courage, bravery, and self-sacrifice."

The very same lawlessness that drove them has been instilled into the ANCYL by the communists in the ANC since its formation. Their job was always to look more militant and in touch with "the masses" than its parent leader, so that the latter would seem more moderate and be supported by a broad base of the masses. It is a trick that has outlived its value. Mandela's Youth League at the very least was educated in the communist ideology and they had some level of education. The current lot is completely devoid of any sense.

While many of the east European communist youth became enlightened and disrupted by dissident movements and pop culture as in Czechoslovakia in the 1960s and China in the 1980s, communist youth movements came to an actual end with the demise of tyrannical regimes. Similarly, Hitler made his youth training programme, the essence of his campaign and in Mein Kampf he said:

"A violently active, dominating, brutal youth - that is what I am after. Youth must be indifferent to pain... . I will have no intellectual training. Knowledge is ruin to my young men."

Sound familiar? Mobilising the poor to get up at 4am to incite violence and destructive protests on the N2 in Cape Town, burning tyres on the road, smashing public property, and generating violence that resulted in the death of a black bus driver, the only breadwinner in a family, they make the Hitler Youth movement seem mild in comparison! This lawlessness will come back to haunt the ANC, but then it will be too late.

This article first appeared in Die Burger

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