Is Nationalization the Solution to the Expropriation of African Resources?

By

Dr. Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni,

Senior Researcher,

South African Institute of International Affairs

[Public Lecture organized by the African Democratic Institute, Devonshire Hotel, Braamfontein, Johannesburg, South Africa, 4 May 2010, 6.30-8.30pm]

Introduction

The question of ownership of African resources has a long pedigree that needs to be clearly understood before one can say whether nationalization is a solution to the complex realities of material inequalities and poverty particularly in post-settler and post-apartheid societies like Zimbabwe and South Africa.

Put in simpler terms, the debate on nationalization is basically about the search for an appropriate approach to property relations in a liberated and democratic society, it is also about the search for a working relationship between the state, the markets and the citizen, and finally the debate is about thinking carefully on what is desirable and what is possible at a particular time.

My task tonight is to give a bigger picture within which the question of resource ownership features in post-colonial and post-apartheid societies, and I will particularly interrogate the trajectories of the African national project as the wider terrain within which the debate on nationalization must be understood.

My point of departure from existing contributions on the debate on nationalization is to situate it within African historical experiences and realities rather than jumping to draw lessons from what happened in China, Cuba, Venezuela, Vietnam, Korea, Brazil and other parts of the world without understanding our African realities that might be different from these other areas.

In organizational terms, my presentation will unfold this way:

• I am beginning with posing a series of proposition to situate the debate historically and politically, including capturing some of the dominant discourses on nationalization debate;
• I move on the briefly analyze what I have called the African present and the questions of today—we need to be very clear on the uniqueness of our present time and the core issues that are emerging, before we say whether nationalization is a solution or not to the African economic problems
• I then discuss the Zimbabwe case with a specific focus on the politics of indigenizing the economy and the lessons for South Africa;
• I move on to analyze the South African national project and the nationalization debate including commenting on the Freedom Charter of 1955 as that foundational text in the South African national project;
• Finally, I will talk briefly about the ANC Youth League document on nationalization of mines and ends with my position on nationalization.

African History as a Series of Expropriations and Counter Expropriations of Resources

Allow me to make an important albeit controversial statement on African economic history in general and the history of ownership of resources in particular:

African economic history in general and the history of ownership of resources, across the pre-colonial, colonial and postcolonial periods, can be read from a materialist perspective as nothing but a history of expropriations and counter expropriations.

One can think of the political economy of Africa as unfolding in a series and catalogues of dispossession and displacement of one group by another, giving birth to the fundamental question of ‘who appropriated what from whom’ across the pre-colonial, colonial and postcolonial epochs of the African experience.

In broad strokes, one can read  the South African history of expropriation and counter expropriation, as having taken the following trajectory: the Khoi Khoi expropriating resources and displacing the San, Khoi Khoi experiencing a similar fate from the Bantu,  the Bantu experiencing a similar fate from the Afrikaners, the Afrikaners experiencing a similar fate from the English, when the Act of Union was consummated in 1910, black races experienced not only political exclusion but also legislated dispossession via the Land Act of 1913 and other settler colonial interventions up to the current debate on nationalization of mines as part of resolution of previous expropriations or as another form of expropriation, this time by black elites in charge of the African state.

But there is a danger in this type of argument being used by those who benefitted from previous expropriations rooted in colonialism and apartheid to resist transformation and efforts at restitution.

Even more dangerous is to misinterpret this reading of African economic history and history of ownership of resources as confirming the old and false argument of the ‘empty lands’ in South Africa where early whites settled after Africans had decimated each other during the Mfecane revolution.

There is no doubt that African economic history is imbricated in complex episodes of expropriations and counter-expropriations up to the present day.

It is also clear from the evidence that this economic history of resource ownership cannot be understood outside the interventions of such processes as mercantilism, imperialism, colonialism together with such vectors as race, class, ethnicity, gender and generations.

In Zimbabwe, we recently saw how the ZANU-PF government engaged in land expropriations as part of what President Mugabe termed ‘conquest of conquest’ and resolution of previous settler expropriations of land.

In Zimbabwe, the nationalist elites in ZANU-PF have defined the whole history of the country as a catalogue of white subjugation of Africans countered by African resistance in the form of First, Second and Third Chimurenga.

But the history of expropriations has extended to African elites and some African leaders like Mobutu Sese Seke of Zaire using state power to engage in new forms of expropriations that have left peasants and workers disempowered.

The debate on nationalization has this complex history behind it that must be understood before exploring strategies of redress, compensation or restoration of expropriated resources.

I further argue that the ongoing debate on nationalization of the commanding heights of the African economies such as mines, land, banks and factories cannot be understood outside the broader question of postcolonial and post-apartheid societies’ truncated if not unfinished national projects that unfolded at the end of the Second World War.

The debate on nationalization is further caught up within complex scholarly prisms ranging from:

• Revived Marxist perspective that is conjuring up fears of the return of dreams of socialism and communism;
• Afro-pessimist thought with its dismissive if not criminalization of any African radical politics as gravitating towards nothing but crisis and confusion;
• Progressive nationalist thinking that is struggling to find ways of taking the African national project forward beyond the event of colonialism and apartheid;
• Neo-liberal interpretation of the African postcolonial and post-apartheid situation that is not open to the limits of liberal democracy and the human rights discourse when it comes to resolution of material inequalities and questions of social justice rooted in colonialism and apartheid;
• Emotional charged and radical nationalist resurgence that is taking the form of reverse racism, nativism and xenophobia as a solution to the intractable national question together with material inequalities in post-settler and post-apartheid societies.

The current revival and resurgence of the debate on nationalization of strategic resources is partly provoked by what has come to be known as the ‘credit crunch,’ ‘global financial crisis’ or ‘capitalist crisis’ that adversely affected the banking sector in Europe and America with ripple effects on the South.

One of the immediate responses to the financial crisis was the re-grouping of the Left and the revival of Marxist thought and its socialist vision of the world that encouraged nationalization of the commanding heights of the economy.

The second response was the return of the state as the driver of the economy after its withdrawal under the post-Cold War neo-liberal triumphalism.

Throughout the presentation, I will strive to locate the debate on nationalization within the broader African national project that unfolded at the end of the Second World War.

By the African national project, I mean that nationalist-inspired strategy of decolonizing Africa, building African nation-states out of colonies, installing popular democracy and human rights that was denied under colonialism and apartheid, forging common citizenship embracing former natives and former settlers as new political communities loyal to common national symbols and enjoying equality; promotion of economic development aimed at extricating the ex-colonized from centuries of domination and exploitation;   and building friendly and useful relations between postcolonial states and the international community.

This entry point to the debate on nationalization is to me the most suitable avenue of analysis as it takes us away from the confusion of ‘isms’ into analysis of the historical and present realities of post-settler and post-apartheid societies and the chronic problems of the postcolony.

By the postcolony, I mean a particular time and condition in the unfolding of the African national project  within which Africans are trying to make sense of their realities vis-à-vis the past and the present,

• African initiatives to understand the agential and structural realities of exploitation in the mines and farms,
• Efforts to make sense of the problem of underdevelopment and deadly diseases afflicting Africans,
• Understanding why after the end of colonialism and apartheid the socio-economic life of the majority black people remain unchanged if not become worse;
• Making sense of the politics of gluttonous consumption by white and black elites and displays of riches in a sea of poverty;
• Understanding why Africans have continued to lack freedom and rights that were promised by the liberation movements,
• Making sense of why there is continued lack of social peace marked by criminality and violence that continue to wreck havoc within poor African neighbourhoods—the list of deficits manifest in the African present is endless provoking new forms of politics.

Seen from this perspective the nationalization debate is not only taking place in South Africa but also in other postcolonial societies such as Zimbabwe for instance, under such names as Africanisation and indigenization policies.

What has so far constrained the depth of the debate is its circulation within the media with its tendency to sensationalize rather makes sense of issues.

Media debates are often focused on the murky present with a view to prescribing the mysterious future without taking into account the historical realities.

The debate is further complicated by the African political elite divisions into those who have succumbed to the neo-liberal dispensation and are travelling the Right lane making them take ideologically informed decisions on nationalization and those who are Left-leaning who are still confident in possibilities of the African National Democratic Revolution culminating in nationalization of resources and socialism or welfare state.

We need to move beyond the shallow approaches of blaming messengers that articulate particular societal problems as the authors or originators of the problems they articulate.

I am here referring to those analyses of issues that border on blaming individuals like President Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe or the ANC Youth League Julius Malema in South Africa as dangerous populists dragging Africa into crisis.

This was typical in the debates in media where there was competition to coin epithets such as idiotocracy and clash of stupidities with specific reference to Julius Malema and Terre Blanche.

While individuals have agency to raise particular issues, they do so within a particular context that shape particular thinking---it is this context that we must first seek to understand before rushing to apportion blame to particular individuals as harbingers of crisis.

I hope a few examples will help us see the broader picture of how the political, the social and the economic have continued to be re-constituted at particular times in history as well as how particular political actors emerge on the political stage including what we call revolutions:

• The rule of the monarchy and nobility provoked a challenge by the rising middle classes who installed capitalism as an alternative to feudalism;
• Capitalist exploitation provoked the rise of Marxism and dreams of socialism and communism as alternatives;
• The crisis of capitalism in the inter-war years provoked the rise  fascism and Nazism;
• The Atlantic Slave Trade produced radical Diaspora leaders like Marcus Garvey who coined the slogan ‘African for Africans’  and various version of pan-Africanist thought,
• Tsarism provoked nihilism, anarchism, Menshevism, Bolshevism and Leninism as imaginations of the future,
• The realities of Imperialism and colonialism in the 20^th century Africa provoked the rise of African nationalism and such leaders as Kwame Nkrumah, Robert Mugabe and Nelson Mandela together with such ideologies as Ethiopianism, Negritude, and some other ‘ isms’ as Africans imagined a postcolonial and post-apartheid future;
• Apartheid racism provoked Black Consciousness Movement and Steven Bantu Biko;
• Our present challenge is to understand what the dominant neo-liberal thought with its limited engagement with the realities of African material depravation, lack of social justice  and general poverty is provoking within post-colonial and post-apartheid societies, where there are glaring and deep signs of economic disparities across races, genders, ethnic groups, classes and generations.

Once we understand what neo-liberal dispensation is capable of provoking then we can understand what produces Mugabeism and Malemaism and the new politics of nationalization and indigenization, without seeking to decapitate or knock off the heads those who articulate them.

David Harvey defines neo-liberalism as ‘a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets and free trade. The role of the state is to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practices.’

There are a number of issues the neo-liberal dispensation has provoked since the end of the Cold War; the most important being popularization of discourses of rights and entitlements to jobs, houses and resources as well as new expectation crisis among the poor and marginalized, while at the same time using the same discourse of rights to property to maintain the status quo of inequalities.

Once we are clear on this,  we can also avoid adopting dismissive approaches whereby a scholarly theoretical or ideological whip is always at hand to condemn certain forms of politics as stirrings of a dark brew, Nongqwawuse syndrome, masculinist mystifications of African dissent, reverse racism or catalogues of epistemological errors or even mere African thuggery or reversion to darkness.

Instead we will put our heads together and seek to understand what I will call the African present as a particular moment within the long trajectory of the African national project and why some political actors think we must go back to the foundational principles of the African National Democratic Project while others think we must forget about the past and strive to embrace globalization, neo-liberalism and cosmopolitanism.

The African Present and the Questions of Today

The African present is a unique moment in the African quest for emancipation, economic empowerment, taking control of their collective destiny and general transcendence of the constraints rooted in colonialism and apartheid.

The questions of today are directly focused on modes of wealth accumulation and ethics of property ownership; popular anger ranged against the realities of opulence on the one side and hunger and poverty on the other; and methods of how to realize fundamental rights and entitlements to certain resources.

It’s a moment of reflection on the achievements and failures of the decolonization project; and making sense of some of the mutations and metamorphoses of the African national project that made it fail to deliver a new and better life for Africans, particularly the workers and peasants.

At the state level, the questions of the day are about how to achieve higher rates of economic growth; how the fruits of economic growth can be used to reduce poverty and inequalities; and within this view of the present, state ownership of resources is therefore a means to an end.

But the African present is also grappling with other new questions emerge:

• Can the African present be read as the return of ideology as a guide to the African national project, in effect falsifying Francis Fukuyama’s prediction of the ‘End of History and the Last Man’?
• Can the return of ideology be taking the form of what can be termed Mugabeism and Malemaism?
• Is the African national project struggling to renew and re-launch itself through a return to the foundational liberation texts like the Freedom Charter in South Africa as well as liberation songs and liberation style mobilization in Zimbabwe?
• Is this backward-looking gaze symptomatic of the present crisis and a mere ‘repetition without difference’ that was predicted by Frantz Fanon on the morrow of independence?
• Is what is appearing as stirrings of new emancipation nothing other than a manifestation of what Fanon termed the ‘pitfalls of national consciousnesses’?

Taken together all these questions make the debate on nationalization of resources even more complex.

As noted by Joel Netshitenzhe, the central consideration in the debate on nationalization must relate whether state ownership strengthens the ability of the nation to deal with poverty and inequalities and whether it strengthens growth and global competitiveness.

Here the case study of Zimbabwe might help in responding to some of the questions and indirectly responding to the question of whether nationalization is part of the solution to the pertinent problems of material inequalities rooted in colonialism and apartheid.

For the past ten years Zimbabwe has been a test case with lessons for other African post-colonial states.

Lessons from Zimbabwe for South Africa

Allow me to state a few unique features of Zimbabwe that help in making sense of its present state.

Zimbabwe is a unique ‘middle decoloniser’ and by this I mean it does not rank with the ‘early decolonisers’ of the 1960s such as Nigeria and Senegal or the ‘late decolonisers’ of the 1990s that is Namibia and South Africa.

Zimbabwe gained independence in 1980—in between the early and late decolonisers.

This had an impact on the ideological orientation of Zimbabwe as it was born in the middle of fading socialist world and an emerging neo-liberal world.

This was noticeable in the fact that Zimbabwe tried to locate itself in the middle of both worlds—with its political rhetoric and professed ideology projecting what was termed scientific socialism while at the same time practicing capitalism in the economic sphere including compromising with those who owned the means of production.

Thus those who had led the liberation struggle took cover under the socialist rhetoric to continue pretending to be with the peasants and the workers while in reality they were undergoing fast embourgeoisement.

Even the policy of reconciliation while perched at a high moral ground was in fact a form of surrender to capital, a manifestation of postponement of the national question, and it perpetuated the economic inequalities rooted in settler colonialism.

• One lesson that emerges from the Zimbabwe case study is that of the dangers of postponing the resolution of the national question particularly the land issue. This issue had to erupt violently in the late 1990s and early 2000 taking Zimbabwe back to 1980 to sort out the land question.  It came out as a delayed fuse and the political actors quickly hijacked this legitimate issue and imbricated it into politics of regime survival with far reaching consequences for the nation and the economy.
• The second lesson is that policies of national reconciliation have proven not to be durable solutions to the questions of belonging, citizenship and distribution of national resources. The crisis of reconciliation of races as a lever of nation-building and a means of crossing-over from colonialism  and apartheid is predicated on a simplistic notion of a possibility of former black natives and former white settlers automatically undergoing painless re-birth into new stable political communities and common citizenship without resolution of material inequalities.
• Zimbabwe had to abandon the policy of reconciliation as it contended with revived black nationalism where race became its major trope at the beginning of 2000 as the question of citizenship came to the centre of politics in such slogans as ‘Zimbabwe for Zimbabweans’ and ideologies of ‘conquest of conquest’ as the best methodology of resolving native-settler problems rooted in settler colonialism and Rhodesian apartheid.
• The third lesson from Zimbabwe is that the recent attempts to resolve the national question and indigenize economy or nationalize it are open to hijacking by black bourgeois and political elites thirsty for fast embourgeoisement.
• There is the danger of black affirmative action groups, indigenization of economy lobby groups and those calling for nationalization of commanding heights of the economy turning into colonial style loot committees and engaging in colonial style primitive accumulation ahead of peasants and workers.
• The land reform programme in Zimbabwe suffered heavily from this problem and the Chiadzwa diamonds have quickly been monopolized by a nationalist-military elite operating outside the contested state structures. In search of a solution to the looting of diamonds, ZCTU has called for its nationalization in the hope that the state will make the proceeds from the diamonds to benefit all the people.
• The other problem is that the calls for nationalization of strategic resources do not take into account the character of the state that is being entrusted with managing these resources on behalf of the people. Some African states have not yet been liberated from serving sectoral interests, particular ethnic groups and particular political groups instead of serving the whole nation. In the last ten years, we can talk of the Zimbabwe state for instance as a privatized one by those who claimed to have liberation credentials and the current power duality between ZANU-PF and MDC formations is over the control of the state. For South Africa, we can talk of a bourgeois state presided over by a tripartite alliance that is fast undergoing embourgeoisement. It was partly due to clear signs of fast embourgeoisement of the political elite that provoked the call for lifestyle audits as a desperate measure to put a break to the process.

The South African National Project and the Nationalization Debate

The uniqueness of South Africa is that it is a ‘late decoloniser’ as it re-joined the community of African states in 1994 when neo-liberal dispensation was the order of the day with its popularization of democracy and human rights as global norms.

No wonder that South Africa did not gain independence but democracy in 1994 as though apartheid was not a particular form of colonization ranking alongside indirect rule, assimilation, company rule, direct rule, protectorate system as related but different forms of colonial administration.

The South African national project has evolved over centuries mediated by imperialism, colonialism, apartheid and versions of English, Afrikanner and African nationalisms.

These nationalisms have not only resulted in clashes, wars and collaborations but also produced English colonies, Afrikaner Republics, Apartheid state and the post-apartheid state that is struggling to define itself as an African state.

The control of the state became the clearest sign of triumphalism among these groups—for instance the Afrikaners who complained for years about being dominated by the English assumed power in 1948 over a unified state, they immediately began to empower themselves economically and socially through affirmative action policies  and other means.

In short, the debate over who controls strategic resources has a long pedigree mediated by race and nationalism and is located within the equally complex politics of belonging and citizenship.

What is clear in the trajectory of the South African national project since the 1960s has been the scaling down in terms of radicalism and this is evident in the changing paradigm regarding the issue of nationalization and as noted by Joel Netshitenzhe we need understand the shifts if we want to have a clear sense of the current debate within the ANC in particular:

• In 1955 when the Freedom Charter was adopted there was clear demand for nationalization of banks, the gold mines and the land.
• In 1969 at the Morogoro Consultative Conference there was emphasis on breaking monopolies  that dominated mining, sugar and wine industries so as to make them work towards changing the well-being of the people.
• Since the 1980s, ANC had started re-interpreting the wealth clause of the Freedom Charter in more liberal terms.
• In 1992, President Nelson Mandela attended the World Economic Forum in Davos, he changed his mind on nationalization after interacting with captains of industry and delegates from other countries.
• From the 1992 ‘ANC Ready to Govern Document’ right to ‘2007 Strategy and Tactics  Document’ there was increasing shift into the idea of ‘mixed economy’ based on a dynamic and flexible working relationship between the state and private sector.
• Private sector including monopoly capital was being treated as partner rather than enemy.
• The ANC began to talk about ‘the balance of evidence’ as a determining factor in considerations of private ownership and state ownership.
• Up to today ANC policies have remained attentive to a delicate balance between global and domestic balance of forces.

The Freedom Charter of 1955

But the Freedom Charter cannot be ignored in any debate on nationalization as it spoke directly to two crucial issues of criteria of belonging and citizenship on the one hand and the question of ownership of resources. These questions are inextricably intertwined.

What is dangerous is to adopt an ahistorical reading of the Freedom Charter that ignores the issue of time and change not only within then ANC ideological thinking but also globally regarding issues of the economy and its management.

In my view the Freedom Charter while celebrated as a foundational document for the African national project in South Africa did not succeed in providing a clear guide to the question of who was the subject of the National Democratic Revolution, who needed to be liberated, empowered, and guaranteed belonging.

To say ‘South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white’ was a dignified and popular surrender in the face of complex racial and ethnic diversity rather than a clear definition of criteria of belonging.

This has seen scholars such as Ivor Chipkin writing such books as Do South African Exist? --that was published in 2007.

It was mainly questions to do with criteria of belonging and citizenship to a future post-apartheid state that provoked a major split of the ANC in 1959 leading to the emergence of the radical Africanists led by Robert Sobukwe to form the PAC.

Sobukwe had this to say: ‘We claim Africa for Africans; the ANC claims South Africa for All.’

The question of ‘who are the people’ has remained vaguely defined.

The ANC Youth League document on nationalization consistently refers to ‘the people’ as the intended beneficiaries without defining what they mean by the ‘people.’

In Zimbabwe, the ZANU-PF government responded to the question of the people by invoking nativity and race, declaring that ‘Zimbabwe is for Zimbabweans’ and Zimbabweans were defined as the black people only.

Whites were excluded from the definition of the people; hence the land reform took a racial character articulated as ‘conquest of conquest.’

The debate is whether this is the right methodology of resolving the question of resource ownership and citizenship in former settler and former apartheid societies.

Some see this as reverse racism in which the Africans are repeating what the colonialists did to them, where they denied them humanity and belonging to justify dispossessing them of land and other resources.

But the question of ‘who are the people’ is inextricably intertwined with the question of who owns the means of production, who has a moral basis to form government, who belongs and who has citizenship rights.

South Africa is haunted by the question of belonging and citizenship and this question has pre-occupied such leaders as Desmond Tutu and Mandela who came up with the rainbow nation therapy and former President Mbeki who delivered the famous —‘I am an African’—speech in 1996.

The question of ‘who are the people’ must not be confined to race issues only as it is further complicated by vectors of class, gender, ethnicity, region and generation.

This analysis puts the question of nationalization of resources within the broader debate on the African national project in general and the process of making of the South African nation in particular.

Under president Thabo Mbeki there was a growing voice that put the making of a black middle class at the centre of the national democratic revolution.

The black middle class assumed the place of ‘the people’ as preferred immediate beneficiaries of BEE and affirmative action and who had to be assisted into venturing into mining and other sectors of the economy.

This definition of the people was in tandem with the logic of neo-liberalism that was encapsulated within GEAR that replaced RDP as national policy.

Poor peasants and the vulnerable workers lost the centre to elites.

Since the black elites are already accommodated in the neo-liberal framework without nationalization, it means that nationalization must take the form of enabling the post-apartheid state to directly solve the problems of poverty that is manifest among peasants and workers.

The ANC Youth League Document

According to the ANC Youth League document nationalization of mines was seen as a strategy aimed at increasing the state’s fiscal capacity and better working conditions; as a basis of industrialization, as a means to safeguard sovereignty, as a basis to transform accumulation path in the economy, and as a way of transforming South Africa’s unequal spatial development patterns.

I really enjoyed reading the ANC Youth League document and to me they did good research and made a strong motivation for nationalization of mines.  They offered three practical ways of implementing nationalization of mines:

• Establishment of a State Mining Company as a government entity under the direct supervision of the Department of Mineral Resources that will own and control mineral resources and channel proceeds directly to social and economic development including creating jobs and empowering communities surrounding mining areas.
• Expropriation model that is democratic, open and clearly defined that includes compensation. The expropriation model must begin with the ANC introducing Expropriation Bill in Parliament informed by public interest. The Expropriation Act must not lead to disruption of current operations and negatively affect socio-economic development.
• Amendment of the Minerals and Petroleum Resources Development Act to introduce the issue that all corporations applying for mining rights in SA do so in partnership with the State Owned Mining Company, wherein the state owns no less than 60% of the shares.

To me these are noble propositions from the ANC Youth League, but I think more research is needed into what I will call the ‘bigger picture’ questions relating to global politics and the nature of African states.

1. In the first place it clear from the ANC Youth League document that there is renewed confidence in the return of the state as the trusted engine of socio-economic development including owning strategic resources in trust for the people.
2. The key challenge in my view is that postcolonial Africa is dotted with different types of states some predatory, some privatized and very corrupt, some have assumed the character of capitalist bourgeois states that are safeguarding sectoral interests, some are gate-keeper states as defined by Frederick Cooper, and almost all of them are relatively powerless making them to occupy a tenuous space of serving and responding consistently to two masters—that is the powerful exogenous imperatives of global capital on the one hand, and endogenous imperatives of the African citizens on the other.
3. The point is that we must have responsible and trusted states freed from serving sectoral interests and freed from capture by some rapacious cliques, before trusting the state with ownership of strategic resources on behalf of the people.
4. There are many examples of reckless states that do not care about the people but that have been turned into a vehicle for elite primitive accumulation which is why competition for state power in Africa is accompanied by violence and why some leaders refuse the leave power even if defeated in elections.
5. Giving such states total control of strategic resources can be a recipe for more looting and corruption. We have examples of Sonangol in Angola that is steeped in corruption and opacity and is serving the interests of the ruling elite rather than the people in general.

Conclusion

What is clear is that the debate on nationalization is taking place at a time when the euphoria and patience among the poor people has been lost, making it hard for one to suggest that post-settler and post-apartheid states must lie in wait for them to be strong enough to nationalize all mineral wealth, all land, the banks and other monopoly industries.

The second difficult challenge is for one to offer other methodologies of resolving issues of poverty and inequality that are less risky and less costly to attain the objective of problems of poverty reduction and unemployment.

Turning to the issue of nationalization as a solution, the available evidence indicates that it has both pros and cons depending on how it is done.

For instance the drive for nationalization of commanding heights of the economy cannot be done in isolation from the broader challenges of freeing the state from capture by some nationalist elites who are dinning and winning together with global and local capitalists defined by particular race, ethnicity, gender, and class.

Before entrusting the African state with ownership of strategic resources on behalf of the people, we must make sure such states are well configured to serve the people.

We must make sure the state bureaucracy is re-oriented ideologically and ethically to serve the people;  that strong institutions are in place to minimize elite looting;  and reinforce the social contract between citizens and the governors.

At another level we need to consider carefully the climate we are operating in and weigh the costs of adopting radical policies.

We need to have a clear view of global politics and measure the strengths of the opponents of the African national project and their offensive capacity.

Zimbabwe’s economic and political meltdown was partly due to failure to consider the costs of some policies and bad timing.

I hope Julius Malema’s trips are indeed meant to learn what not to do and what is possible in this world we are living in.

 

Thank you.