The Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) on Tuesday raised several concerns about the quality of candidates to be interviewed for the National Youth Development Agency (NYDA) board.

Five of the 14 shortlisted candidates were on the African National Congress Youth League's (ANCYL’s) national executive committee, and some did not have a secondary qualification, EFF Chief Whip Floyd Shivambu told Parliament’s NYDA ad hoc committee on Tuesday.

The committee met to discuss the outcome of security checks on the candidates. MPs however spent more than an hour debating minutes of past meetings and omissions.

Shivambu said the EFF was not invited to the December 7 meeting, during which the 14 candidates were shortlisted. He said he wanted to raise his concerns within the committee before the party challenged the shortlisting process in court.

The EFF said they would never have agreed to the shortlist, as it had nine men and it did not reflect the country’s demographics.

If they resorted to litigation, he said, the process would have to be redone. All he wanted was for it to be done properly.

The NYDA should not be treated as an area for deployment for those who did not have jobs, he said.

The five ANCYL NEC members include Thembinkosi Josopu.

There are seven seats on the board.

“Some of the people shortlisted are 'chair lifters' in a company somewhere,” Shivambu said.

The EFF wanted a secondary qualification to be non-negotiable. Shivambu cautioned that the committee might face the same problems it did the last time, when a small legal problem led to it falling apart.

Joint chairpersons Galerekwe Manopole and Phillemon Mapulane told Shivambu that the problem was that the EFF kept changing committee members. So when they sent out invites, they sent it to the last EFF member who appeared before the committee.

Shivambu said they were allowed to change members as many as 20 times.