Zuma Asks for Debate as Youth, Unions Want Mine Nationalization

February 14, 2010, 05:10 PM EST
By Mike Cohen
Feb. 14 (Bloomberg) -- South African President Jacob Zuma called for a debate on the ruling African National Congress’s youth wing’s demands that the government take over mines, and said the party has no policy on such nationalizations.
“You can’t say because you have views today, this is now policy,” Zuma said in an interview broadcast today by the state-owned South African Broadcasting Corp. “Let the issue be discussed. I think people sensationalize the issue. There isn’t any policy that has been adopted by the ANC” on nationalization, he said.
On Feb. 2, Mines Minister Susan Shabangu told reporters nationalization would not happen in her lifetime. South Africa is the world’s biggest producer of platinum, chrome, vanadium and manganese, the third-biggest gold miner and the largest source of coal for European power plants.
Unions and the ANC youth league argue that nationalization became ANC policy when it adopted a document known as the Freedom Charter in 1955. While the ANC never officially distanced itself from the charter, it didn’t implement several of its resolutions.
“There is no shortcut to policy in the ANC,” and any changes must be considered at a policy conference and adopted at the party’s national conference, said Zuma. He won control of the ANC in December 2007 from then-President Thabo Mbeki with backing from the unions. Zuma was inaugurated on May 9 as South Africa’s fourth post-apartheid president.
--Editors: Keith Campbell, Dick Schumacher.
To contact the reporter on this story: Mike Cohen in Cape Town at +27-82-4549620 or mcohen21@bloomberg.net.