YCLSA.png YCLSA Press Statement, Johannesburg, 13 September 2015 National Committee Meeting YCLSA Statement of the 3rd plenary session of the 4th National Congress National Committee The Young Communist League of South Africa [uFasimba] convened the 3rd plenary session of the 4th National Congress National Committee Meeting over from Friday [September 11, 2015] until Sunday [September 13, 2015]. The meeting firstly congratulated our motherbody the South African Communist Party [SACP] for a successful 3rd National Special Congress. We also noted the unity that was achieved and restored at the COSATU Special Congress. We view this as a victory for workers and a defeat of the tendency that was hell-bent on destroying our beloved federation. The meeting had the pleasure of being addressed by the acting General Secretary of the Congress of South African Trade Unions, Cde Bheki Ntshalintshali, who spoke on the current state of the trade union movement in the country and also briefed the meeting on the progress made on the establishment of the COSATU Youth Forum. The meeting also had the pleasure of receiving an update on the state of education in the country. The update was delivered by the Minister of Basic Education, Cde Angie Motshega. The meeting received and discussed the organisational update, financial and political report. These reports spoke to the state of the YCLSA as an organisation, our finances and analyses of the political situation both nationally and internationally. The organizational report indicated a significant rise in the membership of the YCLSA. A deep introspection was done on our ability to attain our strategic goal of building a socialist South Africa and dislodging the capitalist class which continues on a daily basis to exploit our people and subject them to the brunt of the triple challenges of abject poverty, rampant unemployment and inequalities. The meeting then after extensive and robust discussions resolved on the following: On the NYDA We congratulate the NYDA for receiving its first ever clean audit and the clean audit award it received by the Auditor General of South Africa. The NYDA comes from a dark past but has made significant positive strides since President Zuma appointed a new board in 2013. At the time, the YCLSA National Chairperson, Cde. Yershen Pillay was appointed as the Executive Chairperson of the NYDA and was given the mandate of cleaning up the NYDA and restoring its credibility. Today we can salute our young communist for leading the NYDA and for successfully cleaning up the agency leading to a clean audit outcome. Today the NYDA is a more credible and capable development agency than ever before. The NYDA also achieved its best ever performance since inception achieving 93% of its performance targets as approved by the Parliament of South Africa. The Auditor General's report also indicated that the NYDA has no deficiencies in leadership, no deficiencies in governance and no deficiencies in its performance and management. This provides a strong basis for the NYDA to improve in addressing the issues of youth poverty, youth inequality and youth underdevelopment. The NYDA must be provided with more funding so that it is able to assist more young people in local communities. On the State of the Economy in the Country As the YCLSA we vehemently refuse nor accept that the current slump in the South African economy is as of the results of bad policies by the African National Congress or President Jacob Zuma. The weak economy must be attributed to weak global economy; our economy is not undetached from that of the rest of the world. The global economic crisis is the major reason why China's "new normal" is also responsible for our economic downturn and a weaker rand. Overproduction of commodities and the slowing down of our imports especially steel and platinum has also contributed to the current state of the economy. As the YCLSA we call on our government to prioritise accelerated industrialization. On the Cancer of Corruption The National Committee of the YCLSA resolved that we must confront the cancer of corruption in society. Corruption is the devil of all devils and this devil is killing our country and society. It is time to confront this devil of corruption and eradicate it from all levels of society, from the state, from the private sector and from civil society. The primary threat facing the ANC is corruption and corrupt leaders who want to use their ill-gotten gains to buy members and branches and secure their own personal development. These corrupt leaders do not care about building a non-racial, non-sexist, democratic and prosperous South Africa. All they care about is building a South Africa that belongs to them and only them, a South Africa that becomes their one personal bank account. We call on the ANC to rid itself of these evil and corrupt leaders. On the Threat to our Revolution and Democratic gains The so called 2017 class project, which is being discussed on corridors not on formal structural organizational meetings, is worrisome. This is one of the most serious challenges facing our revolution as the 13th Plenary Session of the 13th Congress Central Committee Political Report, characterize this as "one of the biggest challenges facing the revolution and the movement in the immediate period is that of the absolute necessity to roll back and defeat what is emerging as a hugely divisive offensive that wants to capture the ANC in the lead up to 2017. The strategy this time seems to be that of capturing the ANC long before 2017 and turn our movement into an instrument of personal and class accumulation by a faction bent on weakening the unity of our movement and isolating the allies". This faction is using money to buy conference delegates at all levels of our movement, the Leagues and Alliance in pursuance of its agenda. This faction is using gate keeping especially at branch and regional levels, and deliberately seeks to undo our Alliance structures on the ground. Access to state power is now less about even the problematic notion of a wheelbarrow (service delivery) state, but largely about dispensing patronage to consolidate factionalist groupings both in the ANC and government. This is reinforcing rather than reducing the politics of slates". On the ANCYL 25th National Conference The National Committee congratulates the newly elected leadership of the African National Congress Youth League. We wish them well on their revolutionary tasks and they can rest assured that in the YCLSA they have a reliable ally. Ours is an alliance forged through struggle and not a paper Alliance, an Alliance of sharing the same pain, of leading almost the same membership and an Alliance to champion the needs and aspirations of the youth in our country. Leaders of the YCLSA and the ANCYL will come and go but the organization remains. A 'New Deal' for the Youth of South Africa Today millions of young people are unemployed, unskilled, casualised, exploited and subjected to alcohol and drug abuse and locked-in poverty. While much progress has been made since 1996, a new deal for youth is required in the second, more radical phase of the NDR. The focus of youth development in the second, more radical phase of the NDR should be on education and skills development, youth service, cooperatives development as well as social mobilization - all of which are key drivers of accelerated job creation for young South Africans. The National Committee committed to a new deal for the working class youth in our country. This will translate into the following: . Intensifying campaigns to make education fashionable, to skill youth, and co-operatives to fundamentally change the economy. . Initiating much more urgent interventions to redress poverty, inequality and unemployment, this all disproportionately affected South African youths. . Focus on the need not only for greater participation in popular governance structures, but also key concerns of stubbornly high levels of unemployment of young people, and an education system which does not seem to produce the right skills to ensure young people can secure jobs. . Arguing for a democratic culture of service and social solidarity to counter "crass materialism and individualism", where we argues that without extensive youth mobilization ,democracy would remain "shallow" in the prevailing mass poverty, unemployment and inequality. . As part of our action plan we have proposals also on how to look at health, particularly keeping an eye on primary health programmers and the extension of school health services in partnership with the National Education, Health and Allied Workers' Union (NEHAWU) and SADTU, in particular in schools. . Emphasis on prevention, health promotion and rehabilitation, and the need for a comprehensive sexual and reproductive health rights programme, including family planning, access to safe abortions and the distribution of male and female condoms, and grassroots campaigns against substance abuse. . Connecting young people to employment opportunities including short term employment such as Expanded Public Works Programme. . Opening training and second chance opportunities for young people that have not completed secondary education. . Improving working condition and pay for youth across the economy including in the service sector. . The zero rating, scrapping of VAT on all locally published textbooks. On National Youth Service We call for government to speedily implement a structured, mass-based national youth service programme to substitute the current employment tax incentive scheme. The employment tax incentive scheme or ETI has proved to be a dismal failure and spending R5 billion to create 178 000 jobs is nothing in the context of youth unemployment currently at a staggering 3, 2 million. The ETI only caters for 12.5% of those youth who are unemployed and a better more effective programme would be a compulsory national youth service for all unemployed youth. Government should be spending R5 billion on national youth service and not on a youth wage subsidy. We will lobby the ANCYL, SASCO, COSAS and the entire Progressive Youth Alliance to support us in this call for the implementation of compulsory National Youth Service. Intensification of our 'Read to Lead' campaign In March of this year the YCLSA launched the "Read to Lead" campaign with the objective of promoting a culture of reading in the country. As a country, we have a poor reading culture which is negatively affecting learning outcomes. Young people are simply not reading and the majority of poor, rural youth have no access to reading materials. This places poor, rural youth in a disadvantageous position to poor, rural youth in other parts of the world as it relates to learner performance. It is shocking and unacceptable that 85% of South Africans are non-readers. We welcome the "Drop All and Read" campaign launched by the Department of Basic Education and as the YCLSA we will support this campaign by intensifying and provincializing our Read to Lead Campaign. Every YCLSA branch will adopt a school and promote reading by ensuring access to books through the YCLSA "Read to Lead" campaign. Police killings The YCLSA is deeply worried about the increasing trends of Police killings. We want to assure the public that this predilection will come to an abrupt end, and encourage improved community-police relations in the reduction and combat of these ills that seek to undermine our democratic gains. We are of the view that through working together with communities would yield positive results and reduce criminal activity in our society We call on the government to prioritise this matter as one police killing is one too many, and look into the long-term solutions by way of addressing the socio-economic conditions most South Africans find themselves as they are part of the root causes for the current conditions. We can no longer give lip-service to this atrocity. Annual National Assessment [ANA] In our view, education remains an apex priority and must be treated as such by all the stakeholders and the country at large. It is against this background that we welcome the recent announcement that the Annual National Assessment has been postponed. We firmly believe that standardized tests are blind to complex and contextual factors that influence educational outcomes; they disregard the fact that learners are individuals and develop at different levels at their own pace. They defeat the very same logic of education being dynamic. We want to support the call by organized labour in the education space for the Annual National Assessments to be done in three year cycles to provide time and space for fit of purpose interventions where there are gaps in the system. END Issued by the National Committee of the YCLSA For more information contact and for interviews: Khaya Xaba, YCLSA National Spokesperson, 074 520 4204 www.ycl.org.za -- -- You are subscribed. This footer can help you. Please POST your comments to [email protected] or reply to this message. 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