Whether it’s Benjamin Disraeli or Victor Hugo who said “any man who is under 30 and is not a liberal has no heart, and any man who is over 30 and is not a conservative has no brains” was attempting to answer the question of whether we become conservative with age and as a result, less interested in big changes.
Young people under 30 are expected to be idealistic, impractical, imaginative, courageous, adventurous, impatient with lack of change, the very qualities we need for progress. It is this idealism and courage that has given us the tools of commerce that run the world today conceived by young people trying to make their lives easy and refusing to be comfortable with struggling.
Young people have consistently harnessed our science and technology to give us some of our great sources of energy today and it is them that will give us new ones that will finally answer some of today’s problems. The Economy needs new technology and machinery for a new age and such changes must also close the digital divide that has been the defining feature of the world of our parents.
Our hopes for imaginative and innovative answers to these problems rests on young people.
IS THE ANC’S RULING ELITE READY TO PASS THE BATON?
It has always been the energy of youth, their probing mind, their dissatisfaction with the status quo, agitation for change, that has always given countries a leap forward and ours is no different as we march towards the new Jerusalem.
Young people, particularly young and black are fully conscious of the present realities faced by blacks and Africans, especially women. It is this consciousness that gives them the drive, the impatience and the sheer force of will to say their time is now, they cannot wait any longer.
In South Africa and in the one organisation that has been part of the dynamic South African story for over a century – the ANC, young people have been the catalyst of every major turning point. The national objective of the ANC has been to usher in what the organisation calls the National Democratic Society (NDS), through fighting the three interrelated antagonistic contradictions of class, race and patriarchal relations. This objective, the ANC opines, will be achieved through a National Democratic Revolution (NDR).
While these contractions are no longer overtly and cruelly witnessed today, they remain very much alive and even more devastating because they are hidden.
The fact that today’s young people may have not confronted colonialism and apartheid in their coldest forms serves as daily fodder by the ‘old’ to dismiss young people as lacking the experience that will shape their perspectives and policies for the complete liberation of our people. Leaders like comrade Gwede Mantashe hold on to this narrative.
The reality is that young people, at any given time, are always at the coalface of insidious forms of exploitation and exclusion as they seek to enter the world and define their place in it. The idea that because young people did not experience the overt and cruelly exercised forms of oppression, they do not grasp the gravity of this exploitation is a false narrative.
What is true is that outdated dogmas and old slogans will not solve our current and future challenges. Our young people have the answers to our problems. Those who want to hold on to the past and cling to the present, who are secured in their current positions will not give us the solutions we need. It is the youth that is excited about change and willing to take greater risks to realise the change.
IMMEDIATE TASKS FOR YOUNG PEOPLE
Much of the promise of democracy has not been fulfilled for many South Africans and that we continue leading change at a snail’s pace is unacceptable. It is the task of young people to shake the country out of its slumber and complacency in moving with speed in fulfilling its democratic promise and aspirations of the freedom charter for all. It is young people who must shake the establishment in its refusal to let go of its stronghold and open up the economy for all to meaningfully participate.
It is young people who find the continued suffering of their parents and fellow human beings unbearable even as the parents themselves may have adjusted to their suffering, and young people want to put all their energies into eradicating all the suffering.
Young people are ready to make their contribution to give our world a leap forward. We are ready to rebuild our organisations, institutions, and our country.
ALL POLITICAL PROGRESS HAS DEPENDED ON YOUNG PEOPLE
When the 1944 generation of youth leaguers came busting through the gates, they were driven by their idealism and impatience of youth, against an unyielding yoke of black oppression, and old leaders who seemed stuck in Reverend Dube’s maxim of struggle ‘Excelsior!’ – onward, higher; cautiously, ploddingly’, a maxim that seems at odds with the urgency of the battle of the shifting times.
Young people wanted to radicalise their intellect and their ideas and to come up with new and more effective means of waging the struggle for the liberation of the people and were willing to die for it. They were not going to be just a voice on the periphery of the elders’ organisation, they wanted to take over the organisation and they did.
There is therefore no need to coddle the elders and try not to hurt their feelings. When the time for young leaders to take over, elders either support young people or must be pushed out.
The ANC has always benefited from the youth of its leaders, from Dube, Makgatho, Mahabane, Gumede – all were either just entering their 40s to mid-40s and had already accomplished much and led in many structures by the time they took over the ANC. It is only Nelson Mandela who took over the ANC at the old age of 70. Still, Mandela’s cabinet was one of the youngest we have ever had, because Madiba himself had appreciated the sharpness of his own youth in the 1944 generation and delegated much of his work to his young deputy and cabinet.
CONCLUSION
For the ANC to survive then, it took young leaders like Lembede, Sisulu, Tambo, Mandela, Majombozi, Mda, Nkomo, Nokwe – all in their mid-20s and many others who were not just youth leaguers but were young leaders driven by a sense of destiny and urgency to lead the entire ANC and country at the point where elders had become more conservative with age. They bent the ark of history.
This is no different to the generation of young people that followed – Thabo Mbeki, Chris Hani, Parlo Jordan, Zola Skweyiya and others and they came into the organisation to lead it into greater frontiers and new waves of battle.
If today’s ANC is to revive and thrive, young people must take over the reins.
By Yonela Diko – former spokesperson to the Minister of Human Settlements, Water and Sanitation.
The article first published in EWN!
