JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – South Africa’s centre should begin to assert itself to ensure that the country ceases to be polarised by the extremes, says political analyst Aubrey Matshiqi.

“It’s time for the middle to take over and to abandon and reject the extremes,” Helen Suzman Foundation research fellow Matshiqi tells Mining Weekly Online in a video interview on the country's raging mine nationalisation debate.

He does not, however, envisage the country being able to posit 100% privatisation nor 100% nationalisation as its economic answer.

“Between the two extremes lies a plethora of models and the conversation we must have is on the kind of model that will be an effective response to the unique position in which South Africa finds itself,” Matshiqi adds.

He would like South Africa’s civil society to display greater strength.

Matshiqi was speaking to Mining Weekly Online shortly after South African Communist Party (SACP) general secretary Blade Nzimande told the central committee meeting of labour union federation Cosatu that nationalisation would not help the poor.

He said that both Hitler and South Africa’s nationalist apartheid government had undertaken nationalisation.

Ironically, capitalist elements are currently backing the African National Congress Youth League (ANCYL), whose president Julius Malema is calling stridently for mine nationalisation.

Elaborating on this irony, Matshiqi says that some of the protagonists appear to be turning their personal differences into national issues.

He says that the SACP’s opposition to the ANCYL’s mine nationalisation call is based on political considerations rather than ideological ones.

“It is their view that the ANCYL is positing a proxy argument on behalf of certain business interests…but ideologically, the SACP remains committed to some idea of a socialist future, which along the way would involve the socialisation of productive resources,” he says.

He does not believe that South Africa should take everything that is being said about mine nationalisation seriously.

He believes that the politicians making the nationalisation statements tend to have both noble and ignoble dimensions in their attempts to achieve a multiplicity of aims, some genuine and others opportunistic.

“There’s no single policy intervention that can be a panacea for the problems facing South Africa,” he says, pointing out that many of the 60% of the country’s population under the age of 30 are unemployed and are not receiving or have not received proper education.

Life expectancy is also at a low level.

“Access to education and health must be the key challenges we address as a country,” Matshiqi adds.