The reorganisation of oppositional movements did not occur out of the blue. Indeed, as early as 1971, members of SASO's senior leadership had been seriously considering two ways of restructuring the organisation: first, altering its internal structure and, second, establishing a new movement that could provide a home for SASO's members after the completion of their studies.

Their immediate concern was that the institutional structure of SASO might be too unwieldy and, perhaps, too amateurish in conception to respond to the pace of the organisation's development. They recognised that SASO was now a ‘going concern’ and would ‘reach a membership mark of 3,000 by the end of the year’ – which meant that it would have to consider increasing the scale of its activities in light of its growing membership. These early proposals focused on developing a core of ‘committed leaders’ within the university system. SASO did not have the luxury of NUSAS's structures dedicated to identifying potential leaders. In its operations to date, the pattern had been that any activist who demonstrated the potential to lead would have responsibility thrust upon them as soon as he or she began to participate in student politics. This was in part because ‘the leadership potential in the black universities is very minimal … due, mainly, to the conditions prevailing there which effectively stifle the full development of the intellectual being’. The overall effect had been to weaken the organisation. The different ages of the organisation's leaders, the general insecurities of youth, and the uneven distribution of leaders across the country had eroded the effectiveness of SASO: there was ‘no intimacy among student leaders and this manifests itself in an obvious lack of cohesion in leadership ranks’. Without reorganisation, the organisation was in danger of coming apart at the seams.

Alongside these discussions about the internal structures of SASO, another group within the national executive was beginning to discuss the possibility of launching an adult wing of the movement – an affiliated organisation that would neither be led by students nor be based on university campuses. In April 1971, this group met with represen tatives of six other organisations, and then again, in August, attended a meeting of twenty-seven aboveground organisations representing different parts of the black community.