Young lions roar their defiance
Former ANC Youth League (ANCYL) Treasurer-General, Pule Mabe, will have to apply King Solomon's wisdom in order to get as many votes as possible from his home province of Limpopo in order to become ANCYL president.
Alex Matlala
LIMPOPO – Former ANC Youth League (ANCYL) Treasurer-General, Pule Mabe, will have to apply King Solomon’s wisdom in order to get as many votes as possible from his home province of Limpopo in order to become ANCYL president.
This was clear after the league’s structures in Limpopo recently could not decide on whether to forward Mabe’s name or North West’s Local Government and Human Settlement MEC, Collen Maine’s name as a candidate for ANCYL President.
The furore came weeks before the young lions from across the country jostled for leadership positions in an elective conference. The league will host its highly contested elective conference at Gallagher Estate in Midrand next month.
In what left many baffled, two parallel youth league meetings were convened at separate venues in the Mopani region over the past weekend.One meeting was graced by the presence of ANC bigwigs speaking the same political language as Mabe, where several youth league members declared their support of him. Mabe currently enjoys support from the majority of a group made up of people from most of the provinces, including Gauteng, Limpopo, Western Cape, Free State and Eastern Cape. In the other meeting, some league members wanted Maine to lead the ANCYL. According to a source from Mopani, Mabe’s home region, the region had washed its hands of him. However, ANCYL Mopani chairperson, Peter Ngobeni, said the general feeling was that the region would support Maine for president. “We will engage members of the youth league this week in an endeavour to consolidate the general feeling. But we have already agreed that we will not have an old man as a leader of the youth league. Otherwise we will be going to a congress of elderly people and not young people,” he said. Ngobeni further said Mabe was already 35 years old and the youth league’s maximum age for membership was 35 years. “We need to be led by a young person who still has vavavoom to lead the roaring young lions,” he added. ANCYL provincial task team secretary, Che Selane, echoed Ngobeni’s words, and said the province was quite clear of the person it needs to support.
