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Reports today reveal that the ANC's investment arm, Chancellor House, has over the past six years secured prospecting rights to 560 sites in the Northern Cape, North-West and Mpumalanga. Applications to carry out prospecting at a further 400 sites are still under consideration by the Department of Mineral Resources. This is wrong. It represents a conflict of interest, on the one hand, and an attempt to use public resources and state control to the benefit of the ANC on the other.

The separation between the state and private sector is becoming increasingly blurred, as evidenced by the fact that senior members of the ANC's national executive committee, including Matthews Posa, Max Sisulu and Cyril Ramaphosa, all have direct interests in various mining companies.

To see how this impacts on the lives of the communities who are supposed to be benefitting from the empowerment promised by such transactions, one has only to look at the situation at the Grootvlei mine near Springs. Workers at this mine, which is operated by Aurora Empowerment Systems, headed by Zondwa Mandela (the grandson of Nelson Mandela) and Kulubuse Zuma (the nephew of Jacob Zuma), have not been paid since March, and there is no indication that their situation will improve in the near future.

There is little doubt that the ANC is trying to advance its agenda of nationalisation by stealth. The creation of mining companies that are owned by the state, given their licences by the state, and then operate as state businesses is clearly unethical and the statement by ANC spokesperson Brian Sokutu that there is nothing wrong with NEC members having interests in mining, and that "there is no conflict at all" is disingenuous and cynical.

It is clear that the ANC is influencing every step in the process of obtaining prospecting rights: It has set up a front company, which is overseeing its grip on tenders and is now ensuring that it gains control of mining rights. In essence, the state is nothing more than a de facto embodiment of Chancellor House, which is quietly going about the business of enriching the ANC coffers at the expense of real transformation.