Reading through the resolutions put before Cosatu's 10th National Congress it becomes clear that there is an appetite for nationalisation. As NUMSA notes:

"The Freedom Charter demands that the wealth of the country including all its natural resources beneath and above the soil and water, and productive capacity, be restored to the people as a whole (i.e. nationalised). These demands have long been formulated and accepted by the working class, [sic] constitute the basis from which to start the formulation of the demands of the proposed programme."

And so the season of nationalisation was borne:

NUMSA, SACTWU and FAWU, for example, want "the whole food supply chain" to be nationalised. SACTWU and NUMSA want the "public transport system" to be nationalised. CEPPWAWU and NUM have demanded the "immediate nationalisation of SASOL" along with Arcelor, Mittal, Denel, Telkom and Eskom. NEHAWU, NUMSA and SATAWU believe we should "move towards a 100% state owned Reserve Bank". NUMSA has even gone so far as to say that the wealth of Tokyo Sexwale and Patrice Motsepe should be nationalised.

Brilliant. Radical socialism never looked so good.

And the unions are not alone. The ANC Youth League has been blowing the same trumpet. Our mines should be nationalised, the commercial banks should be nationalised, you name it, someone wants the ANC government to run it.

And who could blame them, the ANC has such a brilliant track record in government, it makes perfect sense that they should run as many things as possible.

Of course there was the small matter of South Africa running out of electricity a couple of years ago, and we do have the highest telephone call rates in the world; oh yes, and the Land Bank is mired in corruption, and the SABC has had to be bailed out four years in a row, and the Department of Home Affairs had to be put under special management along with several municipalities, and we have a R200-billion backlog on our road infrastructure, and have spent R265-billion spent on bailing out parastatals over the past four years. And there are service delivery riots every month, and only a handful of government departments have managed a clean audit opinion in the last seven years, but those are all just trivialities, I'm sure.

In the spirit of nationalisation then, the DA Youth has a proposal to make: Chancellor House - the ANC's funding front house - should be nationalised. It seems to do very well out of the people's wealth. Indeed, one could say it does very well out of the people's misery too (one of its multi-billion Rand deals is to help establish a new power plant, a necessity brought about by the ANC own failure in government). Surely the people should control all that money?

If Tokyo Sexwale should be nationalised, why not Chancellor House?

We look forward to the staunch support of COSATU and its affiliates, as well as the ANCYL, on this issue. We have full confidence that they understand that Chancellor House relies heavily on money taken from the public, and that, as such the public should own it!

Statement issued by Khume Ramulifho, MPL, Democratic Alliance national youth spokesperson, January 29 2010

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