Youth of ActionSA’s #DissolveTheNYDA Campaign have called on Minister for Women, Youth and Persons with Disabilities Maite Nkoana-Mashabane, as the Cabinet Member responsible for the National Youth Development Agency (NYDA), to immediately dissolve the agency.

ActionSA would call for her removal from Cabinet should the agency fail to dissolve.

Young ActionSA members staged a picket at Nkoana-Mashabane’s office on Friday to present its memorandum of demands, which calls for the Minister to hold an urgent conference on young people by the end of May to determine the modality of the new mechanism which will replace the NYDA.

The party said the agency is not functioning as intended and the overwhelming majority of people who derive some benefit out of it are those aligned to the governing African National Congress (ANC), its youth league and affiliates.

It also demand that the NYDA publish the names of all business and company owners that have funded the Agency since 2009.

“If the Minister fails to deliver on these demands, we will consider our options for her breach of the Executive Ethics Act and Code, and call for her summary removal from Cabinet. If she is removed and the next Minister also does not deliver, we will demand their removal as well,” warned the party.

ActionSA youth said it will agitate for the removal of any and every Minister, Cabinet and administration which does not put the interests of young people first.

“We find that 27 years into freedom and democracy, young people of South Africa are excluded from the economy. Young people are pressed from all sides, trapped in over 60% unemployment; the successive Workers’ Days that have come and gone over the years have been painful reminders of the heart-breaking conditions young people face in South Africa. The same will be true tomorrow,” they said.