African National Congress Youth League chief Julius Malema has highlighted the three issues he believes pose the biggest threat to today's young people. Photo: Bongiwe Mchunu African National Congress Youth League chief Julius Malema has highlighted the three issues he believes pose the biggest threat to today's young people. Photo: Bongiwe Mchunu
Cape Town - Unprotected sex, alcohol abuse and illiteracy are destroying the future of the country's youth, African National Congress Youth League chief Julius Malema said in Cape Town on Tuesday.
Illiteracy ensured blacks continued to be employed as gardeners, helpers, security guards and street sweepers, he told the League's provincial council at the University of the Western Cape.
He encouraged young people to go to school.
The nationalisation of mines and banks - one of the league's pet subjects - required skills, he said.
“Not woodwork skills, proper skills,” he laughed, a possible reference to the G he received for the subject, on the standard grade, when he scraped through matric at the age of 21.
He said the League had a responsibility to prove it was capable and that black youth should not have to continually prove themselves at the workplace or elsewhere. Education was the only way forward.
The “excessive amounts” of alcohol young people consumed also posed a threat to their future.
Malema had the 600 people in the audience in stitches as he acted out a scene where a female official asks for a document from an intoxicated male employee. Slurring his speech the man asks her to stand closer, and calls her “babe” and “sweetie” while gyrating his hips.
“We are drinking alcohol like there is no tomorrow. You get yourself into trouble. When you wake up in the morning, you don't want to go to work, you are embarrassed.”
He described the third problem as “this killer disease called HIV/Aids”.
He said the stigma surrounding the use of condoms needed to fall away.
“You must never be ashamed to carry a condom. You must never be ashamed to buy a condom... Keep it close to you at the scene so you can use it at the right time,” he said, demonstrating how to go about buying and then using a condom, triggering renewed peals of laughter.
He urged young people to have only one partner and to be faithful.
“This is a message which comes from President Zuma as well. You must be faithful. There is nothing wrong with what President Zuma is doing... with polygamy as the cultural practice... but you must be faithful,” he said. - Sapa