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This morning's edition of Tim Modise's After Eight Debate on SAfm was originally intended to be a debate on the nationalisation of South Africa's mines, following the ANC Youth League's release of a "discussion document" on that topic. However, when the ANC Youth League found out that it would actually have to debate that document with other youth organisations, rather than merely engage in soliloquy, they said it would pull out of the debate, and eventually the topic was changed to something milder ("general youth issues in South Africa today") and the ANC Youth League agreed again to appear on the programme.

That all speaks volumes about the real nature of the ANC Youth League. So much for championing open and free debate. They know that if their proposal to nationalise the mines was actually opened up to a proper debate, the breathtaking ignorance of this idea would be visible for all to see.

There are so many problems with the ANCYL's position paper that it's difficult to know where to begin. The state's track record of managing entities operating in monopolised sectors has been dismal. Eskom, which has received R188-billion financial support over the past four years, is a classic case in point. This R188-billion could have been spent on improving service delivery, just as the billions that would need to be spent supporting mining houses will be diverted away from service delivery, infrastructure, policing and the other essential state services. More to the point, you can't nationalise mines without trebling South Africa's debt over night, or sending the markets into a spiral if you opted for outright expropriation. Either way, the effect on South Africa's economy would be devastating. If the ANC Youth League thought the last recession was bad, wait for the sort of economic chaos that would follow when they nationalise the mines.
Presumably this is what Susan Shabangu and other people in the ANC who at least have some semblance of common sense told the ANC Youth League, which one imagines is why they're now too scared to be berated on national radio for their enormous ignorance.

Of course, the only reason the ANC Youth League wants to nationalise anything is because it wants more jobs for cronies. They dress it up in Marxist discourse or whatever happens to be in vogue that week, but the fact is that a patronage-based society is what the ANC Youth League wants in South Africa. Theirs is a vision diametrically opposed to our own, where all young South Africans are afforded the opportunities to make of their lives what they want, and where the state is focused on opening up opportunities using the vehicles of skills development and education. The ANC government itself fails to understand the seminal importance of these issues - they refuse to tackle Sadtu and still persist with the doomed SETAs model. The ANC Youth League takes it to an entirely new level, though. The proposal to nationalise the mines is thinly veiled cronyism, and anyone who thinks otherwise needs to explain why the Youth League won't even debate the topic with other parties.