[miningmx.com] — THE African National Congress has returned a long-awaited report with policy recommendations on the issue of mine nationalisation for redrafting to improve its presentation, a senior party official said on Monday.
Investors are keen to know what the report will say as it could form the framework of future government mining policy in the world’s largest platinum producer.
However, ANC Secretary General Gwede Mantashe said party leaders wanted a document that was more accessible to rank and file members. “The first draft has been tabled. We’ve sent it back on the basis of style. The work is finished but the report is being re-drafted and re-filed,” he said.
“Please write us a report that will be read by a member of the ANC, not a professor,” Mantashe told a news conference after a three-day meeting of the ANC’s National Executive Committee.
The report will be completed early in the New Year and raised at a major ANC policy conference in June of next year.
It looks at how nationalisation or similar policies have been carried out in several other countries.
Senior ANC politicians, notably the mines minister Susan Shabangu, have frequently stressed that nationalisation is not government policy in South Africa.
But talk of nationalising mines and banks by radical elements in the ANC have unnerved investors and made them anxious about the internal party debate on the issue.
The policy drive for mine nationalisation lost political momentum after an ANC disciplinary committee found its biggest advocate, ANC youth league leader Julius Malema, guilty of sowing discord in the party. The committee handed down a five-year suspension which Malema has appealed.
