Thursday was the last day of voting in student council elections back at home (congratulations, George!), which I have followed, perhaps too closely, from afar. But as much fun as I find student politics at Columbia, and as nutty as things can get in the final stages, CCSC has nothing on UCT’s Student Representative Council.

The SRC has a proud history, having led much of the pre-1994 resistance to apartheid at UCT. Now, they have a significant role in policymaking, and a degree of respect from the student body. This is also signified by the fact that each officer has his or her own personal office. The first time one of them had their secretary call me, I hung up, thinking she had the wrong number.

The other thing you need to know about student governance at UCT is that Instead of fabricated parties with names like “Connect Columbia” and “Experience Columbia,” SRC candidates actually run under the banner of national political parties—that would be like having someone run as the Democratic or Republican candidate for student body president. Needless to say, the African National Congress candidate wins every time (although the Democratic Alliance is gaining steam). And they don’t hesitate to use their position to pontificate on affairs of state, from national economy policy to the missteps and malfeasance of George W. Bush.

Perhaps because of their political allegiances, student politics here are serious business. During one hour of a student assembly session–which went on for four–I watched the president get accused of reverse racism and of stealing a laptop, in between agenda items such as replacing an SRC member canned for embezzling funds and time for long winded speeches from the audience. For much of it, I just wanted to step outside and giggle.

For the last edition of the Varsity, I interviewed the SRC president for a story about the ANC Youth League. He told me he knew his party has an image problem: people perceive ANCYL as being a group of hotheads who go around making statements about the latest thing to annoy them, talking a lot about being “revolutionary” and “militant,” with very few actual proposals. In the very same edition, Varsity reported that ANCYL had put out an attack on SHAWCO for funding “reactionaries” and failing to achieve results (if the organization had been effective, ANCYL reasoned, more kids from the program would be going on to UCT).

These are the kids who are going to go on and run the country.

Full story reprinted after the jump

Pictured: a member of the Democratic Alliance Students Organization speechifying at a Zimbabwe protest.

ANCYL: Striving for relevance

By Lydia DePillis

Falling membership. A national chair who may have plagiarized from an NGO. A conference that broke down and had to be postponed indefinitely to resolve doubts over the integrity of election results.

That’s what the African National Congress Youth League looks like on the national level. The University of Cape Town’s branch is having a few difficulties of its own—it couldn’t even send delegates to last weekend’s conference in Bloemfontein, after a meeting to elect them failed to reach quorum. More generally, though, ANCYL’s leadership on campus knows it has an image problem.

“The assumption is that it’s about militance, and almost thoughtless jumping, and that’s not it,” says ANCYL chair Thulani Madinginye. “We’re a group of people that think about and discuss things thoroughly before we do anything.”

The ANCYL is governed by a committee composed of 13 members, currently all Black males except for four women and two Indian men. To address the perception issue, the leadership convened a group of professors to help them strategize about how best to improve their image, and has launched a “marketing campaign” to trumpet its priorities and successes.

According to Nqaba Malghas, a third year charged with the organization’s political education portfolio, ANCYL’s central mission is making UCT responsible to the black African population of Cape Town through empowerment and education programs—which he says the university has so far failed to do.

“They hide behind the banner of some student-led organizations, such as SHAWCO,” Malghas said. “They have a fantastic spirit, but their work is amounting to nothing.” If they were working, he contends, more students from those communities would be enrolled at UCT.

On campus, the group has focused on fighting academic and financial exclusions, as well as advocating for finance degrees to be more applicable to South Africa rather than the international market. Youth League members have been deployed to the faculty committees in order to gather input and recruit members—not easy to come by these days, given a depressed political climate on campus. Nqaba attributes the lack of enthusiasm for the ANCYL to an overrepresentation of wealthy white students and a small population of poor Black students who can’t afford to spend time on activities outside academics.

“So you get a student that, although black, thinks white,” he explained.

Madinginye, who is after all also president of the Student Representative Council, suggested that it may have to do more with leadership. He remembers the SRC president his first year at Varsity as being very inspirational, and there being “a lot more vibrancy” around campus.

“I’m not the most charismatic person in the world,” Madinginye said while sitting in his small barren office, an empty Red Bull can placed on the desk.

This year, he’s in the middle of an SRC term that has been marked by scandals, from an embezzling day houses coordinator to an inquest over a missing laptop. He says his biggest failing so far was working very closely with the top four officers, rather than building a full 15-member team from the beginning. Difficulties left over from the campaign, involving an “unholy alliance” between the ANCYL and DASO against SASCO, have been smoothed out.

“There was nothing I could have done by myself, it was purely a God thing,” he remarked.

When asked what three things he’d like to get done this year, Madinginye responded in generalities: first, getting students to “care a little more” about social issues. Second, having an honest dialogue about race. And third, increasing communication between the SRC and the student body.

ANCYL elections should take place in the next two weeks.