By Thabisa Ndzindzwa
President Cyril Ramaphosa begins his second term as leader of the ANC with a much younger looking national executive committee.
This comes after dozens of pensioners and old NEC members were voted out at the party’s 55th national conference in December.
The youngest of the new kids on the powerful 87-member body is an Eastern Cape boy, 30-year-old Zuko Godlimpi.
The ANC Youth League spokesperson in the EC says he wants to draw the attention of policymakers to the challenges faced by the two most rural and underdeveloped regions in the country: OR Tambo and Alfred Nzo.
“We will try by all means to induce policymakers to the challenges of poverty, unemployment, and under development of the province,” he told Scrolla.Africa.
Godlimpi and 11 other NEC members from the EC want government projects including Sanral’s R1.7 billion Mtentu Bridge, in OR Tambo region, to further fund emerging farmers as legacy projects.
Subsistence farmers transitioning into commercial farming battle to get their produce to the formal market.
Godlimpi is the youngest of a slew of ANCYL demanding senior positions in the party.
A collapse of structures of the ANCYL has seen many youth leaders demanding entry into the NEC which has lucrative opportunities.
The NEC is seen as a shortcut to the ANC patronage network with NEC members most likely to be provincial ministers, Members of Parliament and ministers and deputy ministers in Ramaphosa’s cabinet.
For 10 years now the ruling party has bled hundreds of thousands of its members to the EFF, a party founded by Julius Malema, one time a very popular leader of the ANCYL.
Malema is now on a massive recruitment drive designed to get EFF membership beyond one million with over 80% of them being young people.
Pictured above: Zuko Godlimpi
Image source: Supplied
