Tim Cohen
6 July 2009
opinion
Johannesburg — SOMETIME when you hear the absurd rubbish sprouted by the African National Congress Youth League (ANCYL), you wonder whether SA has any kind of future.
This is not only because what they say is such illiterate junk but because it is just so reminiscent of the kind of thug- speak that extremist politics mixed with ignorance seems to elicit.
It would be wonderful to just ignore them but every now and then they manage to force more significant organisations into a political corner and play a card they might not have. The "nationalise the mines" call by the ANCYL is a good example. Normally we would just ignore them, but somehow they contrived to get trade federation Cosatu to agree to this call. So now, alas, we have to pretend to take the league's stupid idea seriously.
So let us, wearily and sadly, state once again the blindingly obvious reasons why this is an absurd idea. First, it seems to have escaped the youth league that minerals have been nationalised. The result has been that SA's magnificent geological gift has been squandered, because the mines are now the playthings of the government. Inevitably, the process has been badly managed, because bureaucrats are not managers, and SA has largely missed out on the largest commodities boom in a generation.
Second, if the mines are going to be nationalised, we need to know with what. If it's going to happen with money, then basically the education budget is blown for a decade. If it's going to happen by executive fiat, then you need to subtract the disinvestment that will follow from the value of what is gained, and you again don't have an education budget for a decade.
Why is this so hard to understand? Why are we having this debate when it dropped off the political agenda of the rest of the world, outside a few bonkers dictators, decades ago?
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