'We will defend ANC': ANCYL president takes swipe at Zuma’s MK party

ANC Youth League president Collen Malatji has urged the organisation to register its intellectual property and brands to prevent people from appropriating its identity.

Speaking at a Peter Mokaba memorial lecture in Kanyamazane, Mpumalanga, on Thursday, Malatji took a swipe at former president Jocob Zuma’s MK party, saying the youth must defend the ANC from “opportunists”. 

“We must defend the ANC; the next thing we are going to have people registering the UDF as a political party. If people do not get elected within the structures of the ANC they will wake up in the morning and form a political party and go away with the history of the ANC,” said Malatji.

“As part of the January 8 (celebrations), let us register all these organisations that belong to the ANC because if we don’t do that, we are going to wake up in the morning having everything registered as a political party, including the (ANC) Youth League. We must urgently act on such opportunism.”

Malatji rallied his peers to close ranks around the ANC and its president, Cyril Ramaphosa. 

“We are taking it upon ourselves to defend the revolution against counter-revolutionists who infiltrated us a long time ago in the ANC. When we told people not to create leaders to be above the ANC, they thought that we were joking. 

“Some of us, when we were young, were organised to go to courts to defend people against many crimes including rape and corruption and we are saying that is enough. We have created an animal in the ANC and now we cannot control it any more.”

He said the youth will rise to defend the party. 

“Don’t be threatened, president, the youth of this country is with you. Don’t be scared to take decisions against those that don’t do right because we must protect the gains of freedom. Some of those people who are leaving now to form opposition parties are running away from an ocean called renewal. 

“Every time that the ocean called renewal cleans itself, they go outside and form their own political parties. Every day criminals are forming political parties, they are using the money that they stole from the ANC government to go and form political parties.” 

His sentiments were shared by youth league convener in Mpumalanga Sipho Mahlangu, who said: “We are going to defend the ANC with whatever we have. We have seen that former leaders of the ANC have grown greedy to the extent that they believe that they are bigger than the ANC. 

“We want to compare them to a donkey that returned to the city without Jesus Christ because it believes that it was more popular than Jesus Christ. The former president of the ANC believes that he is more popular than the ANC.” 

Mahlangu said the ANC will “defeat him like the leadership of the ANC Youth League did in the 50s, with discipline.” 

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