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This is an open letter to ANC Youth League leader Collen Maine, who last week said that he was introduced to the Guptas by North West Premier Supra Mahumapelo.
Maine was speaking at a memorial service of late struggle stalwart Winnie Madikizela-Mandela in Potchefstroom.
Dear Collen Maine,
Your desperate attempt to portray yourself as a man who has reached a Damascus moment and to lobby for sympathy cannot be done next to the cold remains of a woman who protected comrades she hardly knew.
Mama Winnie’s memory cannot be used to relieve what is contained in your oversized belly.
What you indulged on to even get you to have an over-inflated view of yourself cannot be other comrades’ problem. People who know their place, know which fights to pick and which ones to sidestep.
This equally applies to both the novice and the blind.
The ANC Youth League is a platform where young people express the universality of political ideas and thoughts and not a place where people express a public display or localisation of stupidity, political factional battles, chameleonic mastery and hunger for power.
When we were brought up in the politics of the youth movement, we never thought to behave like domesticated animals.
When a domesticated animal is lost in its idle wandering, it is called a stray animal.
This applies to some people whose ideas can best be regarded as “stray”, given their misplaced location.
That’s why you will hear such people speaking garbage with authority.
If I recall, there is no university that has ever awarded a degree or diploma in howling. Your utterances at Mama Winnie’s memorial service in Potchefstroom are of a man many thought to be a fool until he opened his mouth and removed all doubt.
Even the Oxford English Dictionary has no better words to define this kind of behaviour than extreme opportunism.
Your rehearsed confession amounts to nothing but a mistaken imaginary howling qualification.
You should know that a grasshopper must learn to crawl on its belly before it can fly.
You must know that there is a difference between a political speech and a confessional in a Catholic church.
The platform where we celebrate and remember a life that never sold us out should receive high level respect and the dignity it deserves.
Your personal ambition and your incurable desire to destroy another comrade to make yourself feel better cannot be associated with the youth league. It is nothing but lumpen proletariat behaviour as defined by Karl Marx.
Let me remind you who is Comrade Supra. He is the chairperson of the North West province, the premier who championed the radical economic transformation agenda that has made black businesses benefit in the economy of the province.
The establishment of the Villages, Townships and Small Dorpies (VTSD) programme has been an effective vehicle to fighting poverty.
These are the examples of the achievements that you refuse to acknowledge.
What you should be telling us is your benefits from these relations. Today, as you walk into your R5 million house, remember that you are and have been the most empty president the youth league of the ANC has ever had.
You remain an insult to the memory of Anton Lembede and those who came after him.
Mama, finally the signal we have been waiting for has finally been availed to us.
When the youth league president was supposed to take the podium, he was instead sent to go fetch ice for the VIP.
Young people must unite and save the confidence in the ANC Youth League, and defeat the divisive posture of this amoeba.
• Robert Mugabe Ngwenya is chairperson of the VTSD chamber of commerce in Bokone Bophirima and a member of the ANC in good standing at Madibeng sub-region Ward 5. He writes in his personal capacity.
