ANC Today

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Volume 3, No. 23, 13 - 19 June 2003 

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THIS WEEK:

* Letter from the President: Our youth should be makers of history 
* Youth Day: Build a youth contract for a better South Africa 
* Umrabulo 18: The story of problems being overcome 

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LETTER FROM THE PRESIDENT

Our youth should be makers of history

This week our country will celebrate National Youth Day. Hopefully, we will all
use the occasion of this important national event to reflect on the tasks our
society faces with regard to youth empowerment and development. We would do this
cognisant of the fact that the youth constitutes the majority of our population.

Accordingly, we would also focus on the reality that the young people of today
are tomorrow's adults. What happens to our youth today will determine what our
country will be tomorrow.

Our movement has a particular vision about our country and its future. We want
to see all our people, regardless of race, colour, gender or location, living
together in a united South Africa as equals. We want to build a united, non-
racial and non-sexist society, with our citizens sharing a common patriotism.

We are striving to construct a system of governance that truly represents the
vision that the people shall govern. Accordingly, we have spoken both of a
people-centred society and a people-driven process of change. We therefore
continue to work to ensure that the people determine their future within a law-
governed society.

The izimbizo of the executive authorities of the three spheres of government,
the parliamentary outreach programmes, the use of modern information and
communication technologies to communicate to the people and to access their
views, letsema and vuk'uzenzele, are all part of the effort to ensure that the
people participate in our system of governance.

We want to build a South Africa that has rid itself of the scourge of poverty.
This means that we have to construct a prosperous society that shares its wealth
equitably. This must enable us to end the negatives that are a blight on our new
democracy, such as hunger, joblessness, homelessness, the prevalence of curable
diseases, and unacceptable racial, gender and geographic disparities in terms of
distribution of wealth, income and opportunity.

We are determined to give birth to a new South Africa characterised by high
levels of safety and security for all our citizens. This includes safety and
security for our children and youth. It includes the safety and security both of
persons and property. It entails the cultivation of a value-system that results
in social behaviour that opposes criminality, and discourages crime not merely
because the law prohibits crime and provides for its punishment.

We want to see a new South Africa in which all our citizens have the possibility
and opportunity to achieve spiritual fulfilment. All our people should live in
conditions free of material deprivation and free of enslavement by ignorance,
prejudice and superstition. Among other things, this means that we have to
ensure that all our people are able to read, write and count. It signifies that
we must work to realise the objective stated in the Freedom Charter that the
doors of learning and culture should be open to all.

We are working to help create the environment in which our country belongs to a
united African continent of peace, democracy, and a shared prosperity. We must
achieve the result that we end the centuries of suffering during which Africans
became an object of contempt in the eyes of other human beings, and during which
it got marginalized from the rest of human society except as a source of raw
materials and cheap labour.

We will continue to do what we can to ensure that our country and continent
develop in the context of a better global setting. In our own interest, we want
to see our common world transformed into a common home for all, one that
genuinely addresses the interests of all humanity, and ensures equality,
cooperation and solidarity among all nations.

We want the children and youth of today to grow up in and into the kind of South
Africa, Africa and the world that we have tried to sketch, briefly. At the same
time, we know very well that the construction of the national, continental and
global reality we have sought to describe will take time and will not be easy.
However, our movement and the masses of our people fought for and won their
liberation despite the similar reality that they knew that it would take time to
achieve victory and that it would not be easy to realise this goal.

At the same time as we want to ensure that our youth should inherit the better
world we have spoken of, we also want them to play a role as conscious
participants in the processes that will surely lead to the birth of this better
world. They youth should both be the beneficiaries of this process of human
evolution, and makers of history.

This requires that our youth should be brought up as such makers of history,
even as we strive to attend to the many practical tasks that confront our
society with regard to the challenge of youth empowerment and development. These
encompass the period from the unborn child to the young adults who begin to
bring up their own children.

Directly, this means that, among other things, our society should look after the
health and welfare of the expectant mother and the unborn child. It should work
to ensure the same for the infant and the child. In this regard, it is correct
that we should continue to be vigilant against all forms of abuse of both mother
and child.

We should also create the conditions such that the children enjoy all the rights
and protections guaranteed by our constitution, the law and international
conventions. These include the right to education, to protection from child
labour, and access to the means needed to ensure good health, including clean
water, adequate access to sufficient, nutritious food and sports facilities.

Among other things, this means that we should continue to strive to ensure that
we solve such problems as the availability of a proper school infrastructure
that is within easy reach of the children, proper education from the pre-school
level upwards, including access to computers and other material that prepare the
children to understand the world of science and technology into which they will
grow up, and the success of our special education programmes for children with
disabilities. We must support the steps announced by our government to ensure
that children from our poorest families receive free education.

It also means that we should ensure that our school-feeding scheme functions
properly and reaches all the children who may not have the possibility to have
adequate nutrition at home. We must continue to strive so that all children in
need have access to the child support grant. This must also entail education of
the parents to ensure that such grants are in fact used for the benefit of the
child.

We must also continue to improve our entire system of education, keeping in
sharp focus the understanding that it should produce young people who are
properly educated, who are prepared in a manner that would facilitate their
access to decent work and who share the kind of value system we all advocate as
we strive to achieve the objectives of "the RDP of the soul", and understand the
responsibilities of adulthood.

We have a duty to attend to the challenge of youth unemployment with all the
means at our disposal. This includes the empowerment of the youth to be able to
take its own economic initiatives, enjoying the greatest possible support of the
state and all other echelons of our society. We have to ensure that such
parastatal organisations as the Umsobomvu Fund and the National Youth Commission
maximise their impact in terms of their mandates. Such other programmes as we
have and will institute, including the Expanded Public Works Programme, the
National Youth Service and the Rural and Urban Development Strategies, should
assist in drawing the youth into productive employment and creating additional
opportunities for vocational training.

We also need to encourage both community based and non-governmental
organisations active in areas concerned with youth development and empowerment
to help our society to make even greater progress in the struggle to achieve
these goals. This includes those that are particularly focused on dealing with
the challenge of children in conflict with the law, including the implementation
of programmes intended to prevent the progression of children to the commission
of crime.

As we continue to pursue the goal of a better life for all, one of the things we
must measure as we weigh our success in this regard, is the progress we are
making towards the achievement of the goals of child and youth development and
empowerment we have mentioned, and others. Clearly we cannot claim that we are
making progress towards the realisation of the goal of a better life for all,
when our youth is exposed to avoidable ill health, hunger and poverty,
ignorance, joblessness and crime.

The empowerment we speak of includes encouraging the youth to see themselves and
act as agents of change in their own interest. Our Youth League is therefore
correct when it calls on our youth to use the possibilities created by the
victory of the democratic revolution to advance both their goals and those of
society as a whole. Our entire movement has a responsibility to support the
Youth League in its important work, helping it to reach as many of our youth as
possible, both black and white.

Our collective resolve to ensure that we activate the youth is informed by our
confidence in the will and capacity of the youth to act as agents of change.
After all, our National Youth Day was chosen to commemorate the youth uprising
of June 16, 1976 and to pay tribute to the youth who have played such a central
role in the struggle for liberation, for many decades.

June 16 confirmed that the youth our country is perfectly capable of
understanding what is in its own best interest. It demonstrated the willingness
of the youth to become part of the mass army for progressive change, integrating
their interests and efforts within those of society as a whole. It conveyed the
message in no uncertain terms that the youth is capable of sustained acts of
bravery, based on the understanding that sometimes we must be ready to sacrifice
everything, including life, to achieve the common good.

Next year we will be holding our third General Elections. During our last
elections, including those that elected our municipal governments, we worked to
defeat the tendency among some of our youth to stay away from the political
process. We sought to impress it on our youth that it had a right and duty to
help decide both who should govern our country and what our future should be. We
must continue our work in this regard, to reduce the numbers of those who stay
away from next year's elections, bearing in mind that this is part of the
continuum that must result in the engagement of the youth in the struggle for
the reconstruction and development of our society, in their own interest.

We should carry out this work of youth education and mobilisation conscious of
the fact that the youth is exposed to other tendencies in our society that
encourage selfishness and the pursuit of personal material wealth as the most
important objective in life.

Our youth is also exposed persistent negative images of both our country and our
continent. All of us know that there are some in our country who seem intent on
painting as negative an image of our society as possible. These lose no
opportunity to make false assertions such as that our country is the rape
capital, the crime capital, and other negative capitals of the world.

They are determined to highlight and exaggerate the problems we experience, and
downplay and disparage the progress our country is making to eradicate the
legacy of colonialism and apartheid, seeking to convince one and all that
failure is the dominant feature of the efforts in which our people are engaged
to build a better life for themselves.

These cannot but have a de-motivating and debilitating impact on those of our
youth exposed to this negative campaign. However, this emphasises the importance
of the work we have to do, to educate the youth about the gains of the
democratic victory and convince them about the possibilities open to them to use
the democratic space to advance the goals of youth development and empowerment.

Our youth is growing up in an exciting period of the rebirth of both our society
and continent. It is growing up in a situation in which the battle is joined to
build a world that is truly focussed on changing the lives of ordinary people
throughout the world, for the better. This world has the material and
intellectual resources to achieve this goal.

However, it also needs young people as visionary, courageous and full of
initiative as the youth of 1976, both makers of history and beneficiaries of the
gains they will score through struggle. As we celebrate Youth Day, we wish all
our youth success in their endeavours to build the people-centred society for
which their peers in the past sacrificed their lives.

Thabo Mbeki 

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YOUTH DAY [Viewpoint - Malusi Gigaba]

Build a youth contract for a better South Africa

On Monday, 16 June, our people will salute the youth for daring to rise up
against the tyrant's might and to give a lie to the notion that the apartheid
regime was invincible.

What started as a class boycott by the Form 2 students of Orlando West High
School, culminated into a bloody confrontation between the fascist regime and
the young representatives of our future. It ignited solidarity action in other
parts of the country and quickly developed into a national strike movement by
the youth, demanding that apartheid be replaced by a popular government.

The verdict of June 16 was loud and clear - apartheid had failed! Our people
wanted it dismantled by all means, including those that demanded of them the
highest sacrifices.

These exceptional events in Soweto and other parts of South Africa became
significant milestones in the development of the liberation struggle, coinciding
as they did with monumental events in southern Africa - in Mozambique, Angola
and Zimbabwe. This gave hope to our people that our own victory was imminent.

June 16th was decisive in re-awakening our people and mobilising national and
international action against apartheid. It served as a prelude into the next
phase of the struggle during the roaring eighties.

The progress we have made since that fateful day is immeasurable; the vision of
1976 is no longer merely a pipedream, it has become a fact of life in our
country. Sadly, many young people have begun today to take our freedom,
democracy and rights for granted. Parents and older generations of youth have
stopped narrating the story of 1976, to teach the youth and raise their courage
and patriotism.

In observing the 1976 uprising every year, we ensure that it traverses with us
into the future, allowing us each year to measure the progress we have made
since that fateful day and to discern clearly the challenges that still lie
ahead for the youth and people of South Africa. It reminds us of the tragedy
into which our country was once plunged and the role the youth played to move us
to where we are today.

Today, the challenges faced by the youth differ sharply from those that faced
the generations of youth before and after 1976. However, democracy has created
immense opportunities for the youth to seize in line with the strategic goal of
the reconstruction and development of our country, for the eradication of the
legacy of colonialism and apartheid, as well as poverty. Integral to this task
is the question of an integrated and sustainable youth development programme.

The aspirations of the youth for development are integral to those of our people
as a whole. Accordingly, they must be central and play a special role in the
pursuit of both these goals of reconstruction and development, on the one hand,
and youth development on the other.

Of course, many among the youth and society in general often make the erroneous
statement that the youth of today have no vision.

But this statement ignores the important fact that when we fought to defeat
apartheid tyranny, we sought to replace it with a democratic state and to
construct a democratic society. But, the end of the apartheid system would not
mean the resolution of all the problems bred by that system. The vision of the
youth to defeat apartheid would then have to graduate into a vision to build a
democratic and prosperous society.

Yesterday, the youth earned their respect in society because of the role they
played to bring apartheid to an end. They were responsible in the execution of
the struggle and were always the first to volunteer. Hence, they occupied a
special place in the hearts of our people and were regarded as a reliable and
responsible force for freedom.

Today, our struggle has entered a new epoch. The critical question of the day
today is the mobilisation of the youth to take responsibility, both for their
own development as well as for the reconstruction and development of our
country. Seizing the opportunities of democracy is about taking responsibility
to raise our struggle to a new level. It is about the vitally important spirit
and practice of Vuk' uzenzele.

This year, more than ever, we must succeed effectively to pursue youth
development through youth mobilisation and, inversely, to pursue youth
mobilisation through youth development. The challenge for the youth is to
improve their competencies in all fields in which they are involved; to raise
their level of political understanding and their discipline, to become better
cadres for the victory of our struggle.

To seize the opportunities of democracy is central to pushing back the frontiers
of poverty. It means that we must make progress on all fronts and, in everything
we do, strive for excellence. It means that we must: 

* Take advantage of the open doors of learning and culture - to deepen our
knowledge, enhance our skills and capacity and improve our people 's culture; *
intensify the campaign for youth economic participation by developing their
skills, job and self-employment opportunities, taking advantage of the Growth
and Development Summit (GDS) agreements, especially in relation to youth; *
engage the challenges of science and technology, especially through increasing
the volumes of youth studying natural and mathematical sciences, indeed to leap
our country into the information age, and to improve our country's capacity to
develop and enhance our people's lives; * participate in sports and continue to
fight for transformation; increase support for women's sports and mobilise the
active participation of young women; and strengthen our local, school, varsity,
technikon or college sports clubs and associations; * confront the challenges of
health by leading the offensive against poverty, volunteering for health
education and awareness, fighting HIV/AIDS comprehensively and supporting
community service for medical students; * build a youth contract for a better
South Africa by forging partnerships with other partners against poverty; *
empower young women, fight sexism and create gender equality through conscious
and concerted political and socio-economic programmes; * continue to strengthen
and support the youth development institutions; * forge a broad youth front for
reconstruction and development and for youth development. 

There are great opportunities emanating from the GDS for the youth of our
country to seize. All the constituencies in the National Economic Development
and Labour Council (NEDLAC) have recognised the urgent economic plight and
genuine economic aspirations of the youth and have asserted that youth
empowerment, among others, in an important national priority.

The GDS agreement includes the national youth service programme, the targeting
of the youth in the black economic empowerment strategy, the dramatic increase
in the recruitment of young people for the learnership programmes and the
expansion of the social security system to include, among others, the unemployed
youth. Further, the agreement includes the proposal for a Youth Solidarity Fund
to be established through the contributions of the gross salaries and wages of
the employed youth in solidarity with their unskilled and unemployed
counterparts.

At the same time, we reached important agreements with ABSA Bank this week on
the matter of the SMME Incubator Fund, cooperation with the Umsobomvu Youth Fund
(UYF) on youth economic empowerment programmes and cooperation with the UYF and
the National Youth Commission on learnerships for youth in finance and
information and communications technology.

A great decade lies ahead of us to continue to champion the all-round political
and socio-economic aspirations of the youth. Critical also to what we do is to
intensify the global war against poverty, for peace and Africa's development. We
must 'NEPADise' the South African youth and lobby for the establishment of an
African Union youth organ.

Twenty-seven years ago when that heroic standoff between the forces of democracy
and the forces of tyranny took place, South Africa was everywhere an oppressed
country with no possibility to make progress on any front. Today, that picture
has radically and irreversibly changed.

Despite the immense challenges that we face, the future is brightening daily,
giving us new possibilities. The call of duty today for all youth is to seize
the opportunities of democracy. They must do so with courage, foresight and
determination.

Malusi Gigaba is ANC Youth League President. 

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UMRABULO 18

The story of problems being overcome

The latest edition of the ANC's political discussion journal Umrabulo, due out
next week, contains a range of articles examining some of the challenges facing
the movement and South Africa at the moment.

Dedicated to Walter Sisulu and Oliver Tambo, two giants of our struggle, this
edition of Umrabulo aims to approach current challenges by drawing on the
example they set.

Sisulu wrote during his time on Robben Island: "In a certain sense, the story of
our struggle is a story of problems arising and problems being overcome." We are
in the final year of our first decade of freedom and we continue to grapple with
the central transformation task: overcoming the legacy of apartheid and
colonialism and building a truly united, democracy, non-racial, non-sexist and
prosperous South Africa.

Sisulu and Tambo were founding members of the ANC Youth League. They were
profoundly aware of the challenges facing the youth of their generation. As we
remember their legacy, the present generations of youth are showing that they
too are conscious of the challenges of their time. The youth sector, led by the
ANC Youth League, made its mark at the Growth and Development Summit through its
submission, ensuring that the different social partners (government, business,
labour) were acutely aware that the problem of unemployment is essentially a
youth problem. Like their forbearers, the youth of today takes seriously the
words of Moses Kotane - that the future will be what you make of it.

Sisulu and Tambo both came from a generation who were profoundly aware of the
interconnectedness between the liberation and development of South Africa and
that of the rest of the African continent. On 25 May this year we celebrated 40
years of the Organisation of African Union. The African Union will have its next
Summit in July in neighbouring Mozambique, and will be seized with putting in
place the structures necessary to ensure that it fulfils its mandate. Many
challenges remain. The speech of President Thabo Mbeki to the Africa Conference
on Elections, Governance and Democracy and the account by Igbal Jhazbhay of the
elections in Somaliland, both of which are contained in Umrabulo, highlight some
of these.

The Umrabulo Readers Forum continues to grow from strength to strength, with
readers interested in contributing to transformation debates across a wide
spectrum of issues and topics. One such article, that is bound to stir debate,
is an assessment of the events surrounding the formation of the Soweto
Electricity Crisis Committee (SECC) called 'Beyond Dreadlocks and Demagogy'.
There is also an article on 'Internal democracy in the ANC'. It is an insightful
analysis of the evolution of the SECC, but it is more importantly a warning to
ANC branch structures, that unless it is out there actively taking up the issues
of communities, others will.

Kgaogelo Lekgoro raised this in the November 2000 edition of Umrabulo, when he
wrote: "It is true that - outside of provincial and national elections campaigns
- we may not reach the same level of political and social mobilisation. However,
to only have mass work and mass campaigns during elections leaves an undesired
lull and impact on the depth and participatory nature of the democracy we are
striving for."

Sisulu and Tambo knew the importance of organisation of the people, no matter
what the stage of our struggle we are in. Sisulu wrote: "Every organisation
engaged in national liberation constantly has to isolate, analyse and search for
solutions crucial both to its continued existence and growth, and to the success
of the struggle as a whole."

The editorial of this edition of Umrabulo concludes: "We hope that Umrabulo will
continue to be a forum for debate on the problems facing our country and our
movement, as we pick up the spears of these giants of our struggle."

MORE INFORMATION:
Subscribe to Umrabulo 
http://www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/pubs/umrabulo/subscription_form.htm

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