Gert Sibande YCL, ANCYL lock horns again

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IMAGE SOURCE: SABC

The two youth wing alliance partners have now declared the battle field where they will meet and fight.

Over the weekend, the Young Communist League in the Gert Sibande region of Mpumalanga released a media statement, detailing a resolution taken by its regional executive committee on Friday last week and in it the YCL resolved to march to the Gert Sibande district municipality in response to “the continuous degeneration of the district’s municipalities”

“Given the economic conditions around our district, we strongly believe and have learned that few effort if not nothing is put in place to assist and address the unemployment, poverty and inequality of our people in the district but that of few hyena elites,” young regional communist leader Ayanda Mashaba said in the statement released on 28 January 2017.

“We have learned that we cannot attain socialism by begging,” Mashaba said.

“There is centralisation of decisions and monopoly of “wisdom” that we have witnessed [and] our people’s decisions are taken in restaurants and hotels with dirty money used to control our municipalities to advance individuals’ needs and ambitions,” he said.

Mashaba said the communist mother-body in the region, SANCO and Cosatu have agreed that they will march to district mayor Muzi Chirwa’s office to address the ‘outcry’ of the poor on 28 February 2017.

SEE ALSO: YCL blasts ANCYL over strike to not advertise jobs

But the ANCYL in the Gert Sibande region didn’t like the YCL statement and responded by firing a salvo of its own.

“The ANC Youth League in the region is disturbed but not surprised by the factional statement recently made and published by the YCLSA, ”youth league regional spokesman Thulasizwe Thomo said on Monday afternoon.

“It’s really worrisome that an organisation that should serve as a source of ideology for young people has degenerated to stoop this low,” Thomo said.

“We note this increasing number of infantile disorderly utterances that are made by this self-proclaimed “top notch- revolutionaries” who serve as agents of few disgruntled charlatans within the SACP,” Thomo said in a statement released on 30 January 2017.

Thomo said they were ready to defend Chirwa who is ANC chairman in the region and any attack on him “will be confronted with all that we have at our disposal,” said Thomo.

“It is extremely and utterly wrong that our movement ought to experience a turmoil every time it enters into a period of regional elective congresses and sadly the tradition endorsed by the YCLSA has been always that of allowing themselves to be used as tools to attack ANC leaders in public domain, fortunately or unfortunately some of their leaders in the SACP are senior managers in the very same district municipality which they want to march to, and we have sufficient and rigid evidence confirming how these leaders of theirs have manipulated Supply Chain Management processes and tempered with recruitment processes and hired their

sisters and girlfriends, and we have now reached a point of divulging all these corrupt activities to the poor and the working class [which] they claim to represent,” he said.

When asked whether he knew who was using the YCL to attack the ANC, Thomo told 013NEWS on Monday night that they ‘felt’ somebody was using the YCL to undermine Chirwa.

He said: “We feel that somebody at regional level is using them for his own interests and we will tell this to the masses”.

The public spat comes barely 24 hours after the ANC celebrated its 105th birthday celebration under the backdrop of ‘forging greater unity’ within itself and its alliance partners.

(edited by MLM)

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