Phosa and Tabane Agree: ANCYL Lost Its Voice the Day the ANC Expelled Malema — Who Speaks Now?

Mathews Phosa dropped a sharp political verdict last week, telling analysts and journalists that the ANC Youth League ceased to matter the moment Julius Malema walked out of its leadership in 2012. The former ANC treasurer-general pulled no punches, insisting the organisation has drifted without direction, relevance, or a commanding voice for over a decade.

Political commentator JJ Tabane backed that assessment with equal force, arguing the Youth League has generated zero meaningful impact across fifteen consecutive years. Tabane told the panel that young South Africans hungry for radical economic transformation stopped looking toward Luthuli House for inspiration long ago — they found a louder, angrier home elsewhere.

ANC spokesperson Mahlengi Bhengu-Vundla declined to engage the criticism directly, though the party has repeatedly maintained that the Youth League remains a vital pipeline for developing future cadres. Officers within the organisation itself acknowledged internal rebuilding efforts but offered no specific programme timeline or measurable targets to the public.

Phosa went further on the record, confirming he has long believed the ANC made a catastrophic miscalculation by removing Malema through a disciplinary process in 2012. That decision fractured the Youth League’s membership base, drove thousands of energised young activists straight into the Economic Freedom Fighters, and left a structural vacuum that four subsequent ANCYL presidents failed to fill with any comparable national authority or street-level mobilisation.

Amidst the debate, messages flooded social media from EFF supporters who addressed Malema directly — writing that the ANC still mourns his departure while they, standing proudly in the metaphorical red sea, celebrate his leadership with fierce loyalty. One viral post captured the emotional split perfectly: a photograph showing a half-empty ANCYL regional meeting alongside a stadium-capacity EFF rally in Soweto, both held on the same Saturday afternoon in March.

The deeper wound remains unstitched — not simply about one expelled leader, but about whether a youth structure can rebuild genuine mass confidence once a generation transfers its trust elsewhere. Phosa’s admission invites a question that neither the ANC’s national executive nor any current Youth League president has answered publicly: when an organisation loses its youth, who exactly inherits the future?

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