PEDRO MZILENI | Julius Malema left with the soul of ANC Youth League

The ANC Youth League (ANCYL) sat its national conference this weekend, but nobody can deny that this once vibrant organ of the youth seems to be trapped in a graveyard. The overall public enthusiasm, membership participation and television/online viewership of the conference was extremely low compared to the figures it recorded at its 2011 national conference.

If we can take YouTube for instance as a premier platform to measure the viewership of all youth conversations in modern times, one notices that none of the videos concerning the ANCYL reached more than 8,000 viewers. The video with the highest viewership at the time of writing this article was seated on 6,211 views – which was an interview hosted by the SABC channel where ANCYL presidential candidate Aphiwe Mkhangelwa was talking about registration problems and an alleged irregular conference that took place in the Eastern Cape a night before.

This is far different from the video uploaded on the same platform in 2011 on the Mail and Guardian YouTube channel, where Julius Malema was delivering closing remarks at the ANCYL national conference that had re-elected him as president. That video is seated on over 180,000 views – and it continues to trend. Of course, Malema’s videos in the ANCYL are 12 years old on the platform, but nobody can deny the amount of viewership they received at the time.

The press conferences of the ANCYL under Malema were also full, including rallies and memorial lectures. In the main, what pulled this amount of viewership was the central message that his generation of leaders represented, and the manner in which it was being delivered in the ANC and to the broader public. The 2011 ANCYL was frank, brutal, and frightening about the suffering that black young people are living under since 1994.

Malema’s leadership packaged the frustrations of this youth and tabled them with the exact emotions that they were feeling at the time. By extension, this message was also received by the adult population and younger children who all felt fully represented as black people who live under white supremacy. In addition, their policy proposals were also shifting government programmes towards more concrete initiatives concerning youth development.

Today, this message and approach keeps Malema’s leadership style relevant, and his party – the EFF – is rated by all popular political polls as the fastest growing political party in SA. Furthermore, the EFF also has higher prospects to increase its votes once more in the 2024 general elections. These statistics also correspond with Malema’s viewership on YouTube, which constantly averages over a million onlookers whenever he appears on a popular issue.

His interview on the MacG podcast on YouTube is seated on 2-million viewers. Nobody in the current generation of the ANCYL comes close to these figures, despite all of them being much younger than Malema today. The youth constituency that should be their target market, whose attention is being fiercely contested on YouTube, is on the platform daily but it is choosing not to listen to them.

The ANCYL conference of this past weekend resembled the current crisis that also faces the ANC. They are failing to capture the popular imagination and they are not exciting to young people any more. In addition, one could not grasp the core message behind the politics they represent. The dominant message behind all their interviews and speeches were about registration problems, bogus delegates, and rogue provincial conferences. Nothing else.

This is different from the 2011 ANCYL moment that featured hot topics of national importance – free education, economic freedom, land expropriation without compensation, and the nationalisation of mines. These ANCYL policy proposals frightened white industries in SA and elsewhere, and older ANC ministers spent a huge amount of time trying to silence, intimidate, and illegitimise these fearless young leaders who were so popular among the youth at the time.

In other words, the 2011 ANCYL had a critical voice of its own, and it was adding value to the national discourse of post-1994 transformation and youth emancipation in real terms. Today’s ANCYL looks like a proxy network of dealers who are looking for a safe landing in parliamentary positions after being elected. They are on a determined self-serving adventure that has nothing to do with youth issues and the state of our national life. If anything, the soul of the ANCYL seems to have left with Malema’s collective in 2011 – and the organisation does not seem to have value nor a purpose any more.