ANC Youth League blasts Mantashe: Youth unemployment not due to laziness

ANC Youth League president Collen Malatji has hit back and criticised remarks by ANC national chairperson Gwede Mantashe linking youth unemployment to a lack of effort in applying for jobs, saying such views reflected a troubling disconnect from the daily realities faced by South Africans.

“With the high level of unemployment in South Africa, you find leaders of the ANC saying that people are unemployed because they are too lazy to apply for jobs.

''Those are people who are detached from the reality of the people of South Africa,'' said Malatji. 

This comes after Mantashe sparked controversy during an interview with the SABC, where he criticised what he described as a passive relationship between government and society.

He suggested that many South Africans expected the state to deliver everything for them.

“We have created a situation where people sit back, you sit in the sun, and expect the state to deliver,” Mantashe said, arguing that this was a mistake in governance.

Using a fishing metaphor, Mantashe said: “The ANC has given you a fishing rod, must it now catch fish for you?”

He argued that the country needed to move from a passive society to an active one where citizens took responsibility for their own success.

Referring to a conversation with a young woman who complained about joblessness despite being educated, Mantashe repeated that the ANC had already provided the “fishing rod”.

He also compared current expectations with his own experience, saying that despite being over 70 years old, the government had never looked for a job for him.

“Today, because there is a progressive government, people expect the government to give them jobs; they do not look for jobs, and that must change,” he said.

Speaking at the ANC Women’s League prayer service at Covenant Fellowship Church in Rustenburg, North West, on Thursday, Malatji criticised senior leaders who, he said, spoke as if they were “in their dining rooms with their families” while millions of South Africans struggled to survive.

He said it was irresponsible for ANC leaders to suggest that unemployment was the result of laziness, particularly in a country with persistently high joblessness.

“How do you say the youth of this country and mothers here every day, who are giving their kids money every day to go and apply for jobs, one man, who has not retired, stands up and says, who has never written a CV his whole life, says that the youth is unemployed because they are lazy to apply for jobs,” Malatji said.

''They are going to retire and leave us with problems.” 

He added that such remarks amounted to saying that the majority of South Africans were lazy, which he described as “irresponsible”.

Malatji urged ANC women, particularly mothers, to take a firm stand against leaders who, in his view, spoke outside the mandate of the movement.

“Now mothers of the ANC, whenever the ANC is doing wrong things, you must be the first one to stand up because you carry the kids for nine months in their stomach,” he said.

He warned against a future in which children were born into a country characterised by “lawlessness, that is legalness, that lacks decisive leadership, that has unemployment and where there is poverty”.

He further stressed that ANC deployees were expected to communicate and implement party resolutions, not personal opinions.

“When you are deployed by the ANC we don't want your views, we don’t want your slogans. We want you to speak resolutions of the ANC and not what you think is right. We don’t care what you think; we care about the resolutions of the ANC,” Malatji said. 

hope.ntanzi@iol.co.za 

IOL Politics