Thank you for inviting me to speak at the second Federal Congress of the Democratic Alliance Youth. It’s an honour for me to be here, especially since I’m not sure I qualify to be here as a member!  
 
It is great to see all of the delegates who have travelled from around South Africa to be here this weekend - I hope you were also allowed to land at Waterkloof air force base when you arrived in Gauteng?


The DA Youth is very special to me, because when I trace my own involvement in politics, this is where I began. I started my involvement in organised politics in the Young Progs in the early 1970s. But I never dreamt I would one day be a public representative, because our main concern was getting the only one we had - Helen Suzman - re-elected.  None of us ever imagined that we would one day have over 1600 councillors, 77 MPs, and 66 MPLs, whose numbers we intend to grow significantly next year.
 
Youth politics has always been central to the unfolding of South Africa’s freedom struggle. In the 1970s it was the youth who rose up in Soweto and Alexandra, and then across the country, to oppose Bantu Education. It was the student movements of NUSAS and SASO, led by people like Steve Biko, Barney Mthombothi, John Kane-Berman, Neville Curtis, and many others all of whom were in their twenties and early thirties at the time who opposed apartheid on South Africa’s campuses and beyond, endured violence and victimisation, and stood up for non-racialism.
 
 
In the 1980s, the youth formed the moral and intellectual backbone of anti-apartheid sentiment and protest. I was probably the oldest member of the End Conscription Campaign and I learnt a lot about activism from the exceptional young people who drove this movement across South Africa..
 
In the 1990s, the youth grappled with the rapidly changing political landscape and their place in it.

 
But after 1994, and particularly in the period after Nelson Mandela’s presidency, a rising disenchantment with the ANC began to set in across the country and the youth of South Africa began to grow disillusioned with politics. I have often tried to understand why this happened.  

 
Perhaps the attainment of the franchise and the right of every South African over the age of 18 to vote was regarded as an end in itself. It was most certainly a crucial milestone, but the struggle for democracy and freedom is never finally won. As Coretta Scott-King, the widow of the US Civil Rights leader, Martin Luther King reminded us: The struggle for freedom must be fought and won in every generation. You are the generation that must take up the torch today, and run the race, so that when you hand it over to your children’s generation, who will be able to say: we did our bit.  
 
Each generation also faces its own challenges and opportunities. Your great opportunity - indeed South Africa’s great opportunity - is that a significant majority of our people are below the age of 35.  However, your great challenge is that most of these young people do not vote, are not interested in politics, and are not active in the community. A full 80% of unregistered voters are under the age of 30.
 
Instead of earnest debate on the key issues of the day and activism towards a better society, young South Africans have been taken up by other preoccupations ranging from materialism - the bling culture - to disillusionment that expresses itself in all sorts of negative ways. Today, right here in Johannesburg, we have the phenomenon of izikothane, or “burning swag” – where young people burn their designer label clothes just to show how much money they have.
 
As nonsensical and immoral as some of these things seem, they are indicative of a disengaged generation, with no value base in their lives, and with little sense of personal responsibility for their own lives, let alone for making democracy in South Africa work.
 
Today the “anti-politics” stay-at-home vote is much larger than the corps of young people willing to stand up and use their power to shape their future.
 
To be fair, we have not always put the choice to young South Africans in the clear terms that we are now doing. For too long we have allowed our opponents to define politics as binary – as black versus white, or rich versus poor, or oppressed versus oppressor. We’ve allowed them to cement the perception that only they fought apartheid and that by definition, everyone else must have supported it. That is the big lie that underpins South Africa’s politics.
 
It is therefore little wonder that so many South Africans have felt unable to trust any alternative with their aspirations and needs, even when they also felt they could no longer trust the ANC.
 
But this is changing. We are in the middle of a massive campaign to tell South Africa the truth about who we are, what role we played in the struggle for freedom and democracy, and what we stand for. And the Young Progs played a crucial role in the organisation, not only as activists, but in shaping policies such as universal adult franchise.
 
This party believes in the same basic constitutional principles today as it did when I joined as a Young Prog in the early 1970s.
 
We opposed Group Areas, we opposed the Pass Laws, we opposed the Immorality Act, we opposed Population Registration, and we opposed racist job reservation.
 
We said 'no' in the referendum on a tri-cameral constitution because it excluded the majority of South Africans, and we opposed Bantu Education, the effects of which are still evident today.
 
We fought for the rights of prisoners, of workers, of black people, of coloured people - of all South Africans.
 
These are the DA’s values. We stood for them then, and they brought us into constant conflict with the apartheid government, and we stand for them now still, even if they continue to bring us into conflict with those who seek to undermine these values.

 
We want South Africa to know us - to know where we have come from, so that they can have faith in our vision for where we want South Africa to go.
 
This must be the singular focus and agenda of the DA Youth – to tell young South Africans the untold story of the DA, to be present in their lives and in their communities, and to grow our movement.
 
Your job, after your new leadership is elected today, must be to fan out across the country to bring together all young people who care about the future of their country.

Don’t be consumed by outward appearances, by importance and status, like another political youth organisation, which dominated the front page of every paper two years ago and which today barely exists at all. So long as the perceived future political leaders of South Africa conduct themselves like that, no young person will ever take an interest in the political process.
 
Increasingly, people across South Africa realise that the future leaders of South Africa are actually in this room - those in the DA Youth today will become the backbone of a new government in the not so distant future.  It is an enormous responsibility.  Power brings with it very great temptations. That is why the saying “Power Corrupts” has such universal resonance.
 
But there is another, less well known saying about Power, and it is my favourite:  "Power does not change who you are. It reveals who you are".

 
If you have a basis of values, of integrity, of compassion, it will shine through when you are in power. Because power is not an end in itself. It is a means to an end: it is the ability to make things happen to improve the lives of other people.  It is not about personal status.  It is about service. This is the DA alternative.  
 
We need to live the example of our alternative – we need to make our voice heard on all the issues that young people care about at every level, from school to university to the job market and in the work place.

If this happens, our party will continue to grow in leaps and bounds, our democracy will flourish, and we will build the Open Opportunity Society for All. But whether this happens depends very much on you.
 

Thank you.