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Zuma tells youth to use 'proper structures' PLUS AUDIO

MISSED OPPORTUNITY: President Jacob Zuma did not spell out the ANC's vision for the future.
MISSED OPPORTUNITY: President Jacob Zuma did not spell out the ANC's vision for the future.

The energy and innovation of the youth are vital to the ANC, but their ideas should be argued through the proper structures, ANC president Jacob Zuma said today.

“If you think you are right, pursue the argument correctly within the proper structures,” he said, without mentioning the possible expulsion of ANC Youth League president Julius Malema.

He told delegates at the National Union of Metalworkers of SA’s national political commission that it was normal for the youth to be militant.

However, the ANCYL was a part of the ANC, and not a separate entity.

It should present ideas to the ANC itself and within ANC structures, realising that unless the proposal was accepted it was not ANC policy.

“You can make the noise 24 hours, the whole year, it doesn’t change the path of history,” he said.

Zuma said he was once a militant youth league member and had been part of a plan to descend on Durban’s old Smith and West Street to kill white people.

At the last minute, the youths behind the plan informed an ANC leader of their intentions.

“We are going to butcher them... And the leaders will come and lead the revolution,” Zuma recalled.

However, the youths got such a tongue-lashing they slunk away and abandoned their plan.

People made mistakes.

“If they don’t make mistakes, they are not the youth,” he said.

Youths were vocal because of the problems the country faced. “But they must be disciplined,” Zuma said.

ZUMA THE WORKER

President Jacob Zuma said he was a worker above anything else, in his address at the opening of the Numsa National Political Commission.

“No matter what you do with me, I remain a worker,” said Zuma.

He said he owed everything that he was to unions.

“Until the end of time, at the centre of me will be the working class feelings,” he told delegates.

The relationship between the African National Congress, of which he is also president, and workers was significant, he said.

“The working class must influence the ANC from within. It is very crucial.” 

There were working class movements that called themselves unionism, but were not, Zuma said.

The relationship between the ANC and workers had been discussed for a long time.

“We as workers in South Africa succeeded to make the ANC a progressive organisation, a revolutionary organisation.” 

The ANC had also worked closely with unions in the struggle against apartheid.

Some of the movement’s best leaders were leaders of both the ANC and the SA Communist Party.

Delegates listened closely, with an occasional smattering of applause as Zuma traced the history of the relationship between workers and the ANC.

HOOKED UP TO TECHNOLOGY

National Union of Mineworkers of SA general secretary Irvin Jim stated the union’s positions on the working class. President Zuma browsed on his iPad while listening to Jim, reading his speech off an iPad.

Jim said the government and the ANC had correctly identified poverty inequality and unemployment as the “triple crisis” facing South Africa.

Numsa’s stance that the SA Reserve Bank should be nationalised and that a programme be instituted of agrarian reform and the return of assets from white capitalists was urgent. “These are not negotiable,” he said.

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