By Ed Cropley
JOHANNESBURG, July 5 (Reuters) – A major conference of South
Africa’s ruling African National Congress (ANC) last week was
billed as the final nail in the coffin for a drive to
nationalise the country’s mines. Instead, the policy corpse
appears to be alive and kicking.
While “blanket nationalisation” – a sweeping buyout that
would cost the state, by its own reckoning, $132 billion, or
nearly an entire annual budget – and a windfall tax appear to be
off the table, the week-long ANC talk-fest has left almost
everything else up in the air.
Amid confusion about reports of more state mining firms,
partial nationalisation and “strategic” minerals, Enoch
Godongwana, the head of the ANC’s ‘Economic Transformation’
Committee, took to the airwaves on Thursday to offer some
clarity.
It didn’t help.
“I do not know what kind of clarity people want,”
Godongwana, a big-hitter in ANC policy circles, told Talk Radio
702, adding that nationalisation “remains as a weapon for the
ANC, as a tool, an instrument, as an option.”
It was a far cry from mines minister Susan Shabangu telling
an audience at a Johannesburg business school last month the
issue would be “laid to rest” at the former liberation
movement’s five-yearly policy review.
Since the meeting concluded on Friday, various ANC factions
have come out to claim victory in their fight to screw more rent
out the mines, the economic backbone of the white-minority
apartheid state that ended in 1994, and no friend of South
Africa’s overwhelming black majority.
Business Day reported on Thursday that delegates from six of
South Africa’s nine provinces pushed for mines and firms in the
steel and energy sectors to be taken over – to the delight of
the ANC Youth League, the most vocal proponent of the idea.
Continued…
