The Young Communist League has launched a scathing attack on their alliance partner, the ANC Youth League, after the latter accused Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan and Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa of protecting white monopoly capital.
This week youth league spokesperson Mlondi Mkhize chastised Gordhan and Ramaphosa at a briefing in Pretoria. He accused the pair of blocking black companies from getting contracts at SAA.
When SAA was moved from the public works department to the treasury last year, Gordhan instructed the state airline to seek help with its turnaround strategy from aviation consultants Bidvest.
“Among those that we know is at Bidvest is the deputy president of the ANC and that of our government, Comrade Cyril Ramaphosa.
But who else is there? It is the minister himself, Pravin Gordhan,” Mkhize said, before accusing the minister of benefiting from Comair taking over lucrative SAA routes.
“Who are the stakeholders at Comair? It is Bidvest and Comrade Pravin who owns nothing less than 20% of Comair,” he added.
The youth league is believed to be in support of a faction opposing Ramaphosa’s bid for the presidency at the ANC’s national conference in December, and its eThekwini region in KwaZulu-Natal has called for Gordhan to be sacked.
The South African Communist Party is one of Gordhan’s strongest supporters and embraced Ramaphosa’s call for lifestyle audits in the highest echelons of the ANC.
Young communists spokesperson Molaodi Wa Sekake said the youth league is hypocritical.
“The ANCYL remarks that it won’t elect anyone who protects “white monopoly capital”; such remarks are questionable at best and hypocritical at worst,” Sekake said.
The young communists believes the youth league has been relegated to a defence for the ANC’s older leaders currently embroiled in a battle to take over from party president Jacob Zuma.
“Signs of a youth elite that barefacedly panders to neocolonial politics and has become the defensive ‘barking dogs’ of the neocolonial and neoliberal political elite … are palpable,” he said.
“When serious questions and critical debates … are shunned at and everything else conveniently yoked to a momentary hype and a factional streak, what comes out is … a competition as to who is more loyal to the old guard or the elderly political elite than the other,” Sekake added.
The young communists went further, saying the youth league is dividing poor young people through their insistence to support an “old guard”.
“There is really nothing that divides the poor youth besides being used by those who are pocketed by old people and have come to believe that they have arrived or they are on top of the world,” Sekake said.
“The tired bodies and minds, albeit experienced in good and bad things, are using fresh bodies and minds to sustain the status quo.”
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