African Congress Youth League president Julius Malema has presumably been fortified by having sat at the feet of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, metaphorically speaking, and heard about the virtues of nationalisation of the commanding heights of the economy.

But there are powerful arguments against the nationalisation of the economy in South Africa, and elsewhere for that matter, though Malema will no doubt ignore them and press on with his crusade to nationalise the mines;.

One salient fact about state-owned and state controlled corporations in South Africa is that nearly all are badly managed and heavily in debt and, consequently, a burden on the relatively small number of taxpaying citizens.

Think of Eskom, the state-owned electricity utility, which failed to plan ahead in the 1990s and the consequences that followed: the need to borrow billions of rands from the World Bank to build new power plants to boost the supply of electricity and the recurring power failures and load shedding that will plague South Africa for the immediate future.

Think, too, of the South African Broadcasting Corporation which is so cash strapped and heavily in debt that it hobbles along like a cripple, one, moreover, who gobbles up millions of rands that could be spent on the building of houses or the repairs to roads pock-marked by potholes.

Think as well of SA Airways and the huge sums of sums of money doled out from the treasury to keep it in the sky and to reward its former big spending CEO with a large exit bonus.

The tale of woe for state-owned corporations and top-down command and economies extends far beyond the borders of South Africa to Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China.

The collapse of the Soviet Union's communist satellites in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s and of the Soviet Union itself in 1991 marked more than the eclipse of communism. It simultaneous signalled the terminal failure of centrally controlled economies and Soviet-style, apparatchik-directed five year plans.

The People's Republic of China falls into a different category. It escaped the worst convulsions of the Soviet Union and its satellites by timely dismantling many of the state controls over the economy introduce by Chairman Mao Zedong and introducing free economic zones.

China stopped short, however, of relaxing the control of the Chinese Communist Party and showed a willingness to use brutal force to suppress pro-democracy dissidents as shown by the Tiananmen Square massacre of June 1989.

While it cannot be denied that capitalist economies are vulnerable to crises as manifest by the financial crisis that overtook the United States, the world capital of capitalism in 2008, before spreading across the globe. It did not lead, however, to the collapse of states.

The assumption that black people in South Africa are enamoured with the idea of nationalising of a large proportion of the economy is also dubious. Their main aim seems to be to earn enough money to live comfortably and, in case of the more ambitious to become "filthy rich."

The township protests against the poor or non-delivered of social services serves as evidence of their anger at government inefficiency or negligence and should not be interpreted as a desire for nationalisation of large chunks of the economy.

In a reaction to a statement by President Jacob Zuma that nationalisation of the mines was not official ANC policy, Molema riposted that the ANC Youth League did not need Zuma's support as nationalisation was prescribed in the ‘Freedom Chart adopted by the Congress of the People at Kliptown in June 1955.

In a new book entitled The Rise and Fall of Apartheid, emeritus professor David Welsh provides interesting information on the drafting and adoption of the Freedom Charter.

He records that the National Action Committee responsible for collecting and collating the wishes of "the people" complained that not enough demands had flown in and, for that reason, the Congress of the People was not as representative as it should have been.

Welsh further draws attention to an astonishing admission by Ben Turok, one of the moving spirits behind the Freedom Charter initiative: it was that he was felt the economic clause did not adequately reflect his understanding of what the Congress of the People thought and, consequently, amended it to read that the commanding heights of the economy should be under the control of the general citizenry

The amended clause reads: "The mineral wealth beneath the soil, the banks and monopoly industry shall be transferred to the ownership of the people as a whole."

As Welsh notes, even more revealing of the "pre-packaging of demands" was an instruction given to volunteers. It reads: "It is essential for each and every volunteer ... to attend lectures where they will be trained to understand, analyse and correctly assess d the local and national situation (so) that they will be able to give the correct lead to the people,"

Subbed down that seems to mean they were required to obtain the answers that were required by the National Action Committee.

A further point needs to be emphasised. The National Action Committee consisted of eight representatives from each of the four participating congresses representing the black, white, coloured and Indian components of the Congress Alliance, which, in turn, means that the non-black representatives outnumbers their black comrades by 24 to 8.

It is thus paradoxical that Malema should be so quick to quote the Freedom Charter to justify the Youth League's campaign for the nationalisation of the mines when he has been so vociferous in complaining that the three people in control of the financial and economic affairs in the Zuma are all non-blacks.

For the record they are Trevor Manuel (minister in the presidency in charge of planning), Pravin Gordhan (minister of finance) and Ebrahim Patel (minister of Economic Development).

It is strange too that Malema should ignore that three black presidents of the ANC - Nelson Mandela, Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma - have implicitly but unmistakably rejected the nationalisation clause in the Freedom Charter in favour of a more investor and market friendly macro-economic policies.

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