MESSAGE OF SUPPORT TO THE ANC YOUTH LEAGUE 24TH NATIONAL CONGRESS HELD AT GALLAGHER FROM 16-20 JUNE 2011 by Buti Manamela National Secretary of YCLSA, June 17 2011
Members of the NEC of the ANC Youth League
Delegates to the 24th National Congress
Leadership of various alliance structures
Comrades and friends, our worthy and reliable revolutionary cousins
Receive revolutionary greetings from the leadership and membership collective of the Young Communist League of South Africa, uFasimba.
The 24th National Congress of the ANC Youth League remains an important platform to express the democratic zeal within the structures of the Mass Democratic Movement. We pride ourselves at all times within the fold of the liberation movement to display our commitment to democratic practices and show that our organisations are a reflection of the kind of society we want to build.
As Young Communists, we also pride ourselves to be associated with the youth wing of the national liberation movement. We see the hundreds and thousands of members of the ANC Youth League as the epitome of our National Democratic Revolution.
We place firmly as youth formations at the centre of our youth struggles the attainment of the goals fixed on the agenda of our national liberation movement by the generation of 1922 that formed the YCLSA and that of 1944 that formed the ANC Youth League.
These generations of fearless and committed cadres that laid the basis of our existence had a singular objective in mind, the liberation of our people from national, class and gender oppression.
In their time, the founders of both the ANC Youth League and the Young Communist League became a determined collective force to overthrow colonial rule and all its manifestations. Albeit their sharp ideological differences on the destiny of the South African revolution, which they overcame through constant reminder of who their real enemy was, the generations that ascertained our historical significance knew that the overthrow of their colonisers and the constitution of a democratic, non-racial and non-sexist dispensation is the first step towards liberation.
Many young communists and members of the ANC Youth League took common court in the early fifties as the frontiers for the Congress of the People in Kliptown and the final draft of the Freedom Charter. At all times, both the ANC Youth League and the YCL became the champions of a very conservative National Liberation Movement.
The ultimate burden for the pursuance of a popular programme of action that mobilised and united the entire Congress Movement was the sweat and blood of heroes and heroines such as Ahmed Kathada, Walter Sisulu, Ruth First, Ben Turok, Dennis Goldberg, Oliver Tambo, Joe Slovo and many others whose vision was as far advanced as the institutions of oppression of the time.
History has kept records of how, at the time, many within the Congress Movement urged unity at the height of splits and ideological fracturing led by those who did not believe in the Charter, and the Congress Movement, as the organisational platform for building a better society for all.
Many have left our ranks with the hope of pursuing immediate and quick political fortunes but to no avail as their formations collapsed parallel to a strengthened Congress Movement. This has been the hallmark of our history as modern day splitters are collapsing in the shadow of those who came before them.
As the youth of 2011 we hold the burden of the successes of the Congress Movement as led by the ANC to ensure that we complete the tasks they set for us. Our inevitable unity, built in action, remains the fundamental ancestral obligation that we carry not as our own choosing, but as imposed by those who build the foundations in which we stand.
Both the ANC Youth League and the YCL, together with our allies in SASCO and COSAS, represent the future of the Alliance and society. As our predecessors understood the role and place of each of the Alliance partners in the revolution, and the interconnectedness of the struggles they were pursuant, we hold their baton in the continuance of the traditions that they established and are the current incumbents of the fort to ensure that the struggle continues.
Even when the YCL was banned and not re-launched, it was young communists and young lions who envisaged the dirty tactics of the apartheid regime and prepared a fertile underground for the continued prospering of the ANC and the SACP.
At all times, the ANC and the SACP sought to set aside perceived differences and maintain union on the struggle faced by our people at the time.
Today, as part of the burden of ancestral command, we face new and complicated challenges. The struggle against national oppression, although long and ardours, will be defined by generations even after us, as the simpler compared to the class struggle that has endured countless generations.
In the struggle, just as was the case with national liberation, we will need allies firstly within the national liberation movement and the mass democratic movement. As young people, we have various and sometimes conflicting needs, interests and aspirations. We will never constitute a class but can always rely on class formations and class institutions in order to revolutionise our demands.
The ANC and the SACP, our mother bodies, and in their unity, will forever remain the guiding light as we radically, impatiently and militantly pursue the transformation of our society. Acknowledging this historical fact and tradition can never imply conformity even when faced with adversarial class or ideological enemies within the fold of the alliance.
However, at all times, when we aim at changing our organisations and the priorities that they have identified, we should at all times ensure that we insist on their unison.
As Oliver Tambo retorted, there can never be an ANC without a Communist Party and conversely, there can never be a Communist Party without an ANC. Put to test in relation with our alliance, the campaigns of the YCL will never find resonance without our alliance with the ANC Youth League, and similarly, most initiatives of the Youth League will be won if fought together with a reliable ally found within young communists.
Criticism amongst ourselves as allies will only serve to please our detractors if done with no intention of being constructive. We must never regard as praise accolades presented by those who have no interest in the unity of struggle within the movement utterances assumed as undermine the integrity and place of each within the struggle.
Similarly, we must treat as suspect those whose intentions are to encourage us to work for the weakening of our allies. No genuine friend will celebrate the weakening of those whom we share the trenches in the struggle for the total emancipation of our people.
As the YCL, we remain convinced of the revolutionary national democratic role that the ANC has played, and will continue to play, in transforming our society from apartheid to democracy. There can never be another ANC and the role that it has played and continues to play remains irreplaceable.
We also remain convinced that the revolutionary trade union movement, whose mandate is, in the immediate, arbitrate in the struggles between the working class and the bourgeoisie whilst maintaining an interest in the political dispensation of our people.
In the same vein, we remain convinced that the SACP has earned and remains the vanguard of the working class struggles. All of these battles are interconnected and remain the political fabric that forge our society together.
Both the ANC Youth League and the YCL represents an array of interests within and amongst our youth. The greatest threat for all these diverse interests remains unemployment, poverty and inequality; which constitute the beast that capitalism feeds itself on.
If we are to remain relevant to the majority of young people in our country, we have to maintain our resolve to the resolution of these struggles facing the youth of 2011.
All other challenges that face young people-such as:
- Teenage pregnancy and backyard abortions,
- HIV/AIDS and circumcision of young boys,
- Alcohol and Drug Abuse,
- Climate change,
- Access to sanitary towels, and many others remain a manifestation of these three problems of youth.
Our relevance as youth formations can only be sustained if we resolve all of these.
As the YCL, we remain committed to the building of a PYA that is premised on the struggle for free education, skills development, a National Health Insurance, a revolutionary and planned economic growth path, the intensification of a national democratic society and the socialisation of the means of production into the hands of our people.
We further believe that the revolutionisation of the commanding heights of our economy and the transformation of ownership in the Mining-Energy-Finance complex remains a pedestal for the total transformation of our society.
We remain fixated as young people of the tradition of Mandela with the uprooting of greed, conspicuous display of material gains, abuse of power and political office for accumulation of personal wealth, abuse of office to stifle organisational debates and the manipulation of organisational processes in order to guarantee ascendancy into office. All of these are foreign to our shared traditions of the Congress Alliance and should at all times be fought in defense of the revolution.
The pursuit of these goals will forever keep our common friendship and alliance. We hope that, as we near the conclusion of this Congress, the ANC Youth League will emerge with resolutions that take our youth and our movement forward.
We wish you all the best in your deliberations.
Aluta!
Issued by the YCLSA, June 17 2011
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