The national debate around the ANCYL's radical economic agenda can be seen as a very useful and timely proxy that allows all of us to define our shared and equitable domestic economic personality as a nation, and also our united SA Inc on the global stage. It is thus very necessary to look, in some detail, at the meaning of the ANCYL's call. After all, as Franz Fanon once remarked, "each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfil it or betray it."

In addition, as Wits University's Achille Mbembe has well demonstrated, in the "The Wretched of the Earth", Franz Fanon came out very clearly, strongly and unambiguously against nationalisation in the post-colony, viewing nationalisation is a deeply corrupt, corrupting and venal scheme for the quick self-enrichment of post-colony's tiny parasitic but unproductive ruling elites, at the expense of the suffering and wretched masses of the post-colony.

It is clear that the Julius Malema ANCYL generation believes that in nationalisation and land grabs, it has discovered, out of relative obscurity, its mission, which it does not want to betray, but instead wants to fulfil in its lifetime.

Since the ANCYL first made its now famous call, so much has been written and said about the topic, that one is reminded of Immanuel Kant's angry words: "I do not wish to hide the fact that I can only look with repugnance...upon the puffed-up pretentiousness of all these volumes filled with wisdom, such as these are fashionable nowadays."

All these weighty Kantian words flood the mind when one attempts to assess the current status of our national debate regarding the ANCYL's nationalisation call. Yet the past year (2011) also witnessed some of the most innovative thinking on our potential for progressive and forward-looking economic transformation, and the alluring possibility for a shared national economic vision and consensus, all written in response to the ANCYL's nationalisation call.

In this ongoing national debate about the nature and purpose of our current economic arrangements and relations may lie the ANCYL finest and most enduring contribution to our post-apartheid dispensation. The ANCYL decided to tread where for too long since 1994 even our angels and icons feared to go.

I shall now seek to do a hurried over-view of a representative sample of these select and high-brow writings by South African opinion-formers on the ANCYL's nationalisation and land expropriation call. In my view, the most enlightening and advanced thinking on the matter was provided, surprisingly enough, by the South African Institute of Race Relations (SAIRR).

On November 10 2011 Catherine Schulze of the SAIRR released statement entitled "Malema out but youth problem remains" which said: "...that the socio-economic circumstances and inequalities that allowed Mr Julius Malema to become such a force in South African politics were still in evidence. Youth unemployment rates, for example, remain over 50%. Only 60% of Grade One pupils are likely to make it to Matric...Approximately 30% of households get their biggest source of income from the State via welfare payments." And, "According to the Institute, a country with South Africa's inequaliities will always be a breeding ground for political radicalism." Lastly, "The Institute also said that Mr Malema had been useful in ensuring a new level of national focus on youth poverty and unemployment."

Rattled by the ANCYL June conference's adoption of nationalisation of mines and land expropriation without compensation platform, Business Leadership SA (BLSA), which represents the JSE-listed blue chip companies, sprung into action the following week. Under the heading "Mines, land grab plans 'a bad idea' - business", which appeared in the Business Day of 22 June 2011, Michael Bleby reported BLSA CEO, Michael Spicer, as saying: "Business has a responsibility - in this debate to get information into the public arena - hard competitive date internationally - to have a real debate. Some people may want to follow polemics. What we are saying is we're going to be more proactive."

BLSA Chairman, Bobby Godsell, was quoted in the same article as stating the following about the ANCYL's nationalisation call; "It's a bad idea, emphatically. There are much better ways to address the issue of growth and unemployment. The youth league needs to come and enter these national debates and listen to other people's ideas...South Africans have got to enter this debate. The debate cannot be monopolised by any one organisation."

Arguably the best critique of the ANCYL mines nationalisation proposal from big white business was penned by Jac Laubscher, SANLAM's Group Economist, entitled "Nationalisation will cost too much, ratchet up risk" (Business Report of September 6 2011.) Laubscher concluded his well-thought intervention on the nationalisation debate by saying: "In the event that the government decides to increase its role in the mining sector, a gradual approach would be advisable. Utilising the state mining company or public-private partnerships would be a more feasible approach."

There was also Nick Segal's contribution to the nationalisation debate, entitled "Nationalisation will not lower barriers to growth SA needs', which was carried on the Business Day of 12 August 2011, and which, unfortunately, ended bizarrely by stating that "...the debate is irrelevant."

This prompted my own rebuttal to Nick Segal's arguments in a Letter to the Editor, (Business Day, 17 August 2011), which was entitled "Sucker-punch stuff".

There was an excellent input to the debate by Jabulani Sikhakhane, currently the Independent Newspapers's Political Editor, entitled "Emotions hold sway in debate on nationalisation", carried by Pretoria News on 13 August 2011, and which opened brilliantly thus: "The ANC Youth League has succeeded in dictating the terms of the nationalisation debate, putting all its opponents, especially the captains of the mining industry, on the back foot."

Not to be left far behind, the big guns and captains of industry entered the nationalisation debate fray. Under the heading, "Nationalisation would divert investors'", Michael Bleby and Mariam Isa reported in the Business Day of 11 August 2011 about the statements of organised big business on the debate, i.e. the South African Chamber of Commerce and Industry (SACCI),Business Unity South Africa (BUSA), and the ever powerful Chamber of Mines.

SACCI CE, Neren Rau, was quoted in the article as having stated the following: "Nationalisation is a policy path that would seriously undermine the domestic outlook...it could lead to a double-dip recession in SA." BUSA's president, Ms Mtoba, was reported as saying: "A debate like this should take as short a time as possible because of the long-term implications on investors debating whether to put their money (in the country)." AngloGold Ashanti's CE, Mark Cutifani, was quoted in the same article as saying that "people are somewhat astounded that we're talking about nationalisation."

This flurry of reactions on the nationalisation debate was occasioned by perhaps the ANCYL's biggest coup a week earlier - Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) throwing its political weight and organisational might behind the ANCYL's call for nationalisation of commanding heights of the national economy.

COSATU's support for the ANCYL's radical economic agenda was a massive game-changer in the debate. Suddenly nationalisation no longer seemed far-fetched, but a realistic possibility. Saying that COSATU viewed nationalisation as 'inevitable', the same article quoted Chris Malekane, the COSATU Economist, as indicating that "if you say business needs certainty to make investments...that is the certainty you need to have, that what is being discussed now is models."

As if pouring paraffin onto a raging Dante-sque inferno, the City Press of 20 November 2011 published a very well-researched and definitive article by Thandeka Gqubule, entitled "BBBEE model is on the rocks", a self-explanatory heading that told a harrowing and sad story about how formal black business has failed dismally to reconfigure our national economic landscape to reflect the huge political and constitutional gains SA blacks have registered since 1994. Gqubule's concluding paragraph was, tellingly: "The anxiety in black capital and intellectual circles about the direction of economic policy is a rare moment of confluence in class interests with the poor. The tenuous consensus appears to be 'we have to talk'"

Nothing best illustrated the difficulties ahead for the ANCYL as it pushes for the adoption by the ANC of its nationalisation proposal than the vile and vicious reaction from some within the SA white community to Archbishop Desmond Tutu's "wealth tax" proposal, a far more diluted and toned down proposal than the ANCYL's nationalisation and land grab proposal.

If so vehement was the opposition and resistance to the "wealth tax" proposal by the Arch, one can just imagine the kind and ferocity of the response and resistance that will ensue and follow in the event the ANCYL convinces its mother body this coming December to adopt nationalisation and land expropriation as its main economic plank.

A good analysis of reactions to Archbishop Tutu's "wealth tax" proposal was provided by Rams Mabote's piece on the same subject, entitled "Tutu's proposed tax puts spotlight on race debate", which appeared in The Times of January 10 2012. In a piece entitled "South African mines still face a rocky new year", which appeared in the Business Report of January 9 2012, Dineo Matomela indicated that the ANC Youth League's belief in nationalisation "is fuelled by the belief that only with state intervention will South Africa be able to cure rising inequality, unemployment and poverty."

In a piece as powerful as the SAIRR's November 10 2011, Leon Hartwell opened this New Year with a magisterial input to the nationalisation debate in SA entitled "Plague behind SA's nagging ills", which appeared in the Pretoria News of 18 January 2012. Hartwell wrote:

"Businesses are quick to point out that indiscriminate nationalisation will have large-scale negative consequences, while farmers often retort on the land issue by saying 'look what happened across the border'

"The problem is not that these interest groups reject these populist solutions. Rather, it is worrying that they fail to come up with noteworthy alternatives.

"South Africa desperately needs more policy makers (and implementers) rather than policy rejectionists

"...The Malemas of this world become popular not because they are fashionable, but for the reason that the issues they speak to are real rather than imagined."

So, the ANCYL's finest and most enduring post-apartheid contribution has not been its successes in the ANC leadership succession, but in forcing the debate about the nature and direction of our country's economic future upon our collective "moral consciousness". In this way, the ANCYL has changed not just the nature of the ANC, but of SA society and politics since the end of the Mbeki Presidency in 2008. An indication of how difficult it is to undertake a radical and deep-going overhaul of economic property relations in South Africa was provided by the Mbeki Presidency.

The Mbeki Presidency implemented one of the most conservative economic policies in the history of post-1994 South Africa, namely GEAR. Yet in Africa and abroad, the Mbeki Presidency promoted some of the most progressive and forward-thinking policies SA has seen since the time of former Prime Minister Jan Smuts, or even Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah.

It proved much easier for the Mbeki Presidency to pursue high-sounding but elusive and illusory concepts like NEPAD and African Renaissance, than to confront, and do the debilitating domestic hard slog on, Apartheid-era vested and highly entrenched interests and imbalances in our national economy.

The Mbeki Presidency could not resolve the riddle of two nations - one black and overwhelmingly poor, and another white and predominantly rich, living within the same national sovereign space, owing allegiance to one Constituttion and democratic order, and sharing the same revulsion at our recent apartheid past, and yet so unable to weld together as one united, winning and resilient national economic team, especially when playing abroad. For the solution to that riddle lies in a radical and fundamental re-ordering of inherited and exclusionary apartheid-era economic developmental patterns of our new democratic "two-nations" SA nation.

Yet difficult and divisive as this debate may be, it is necessary for the future survival and sustainability of our shared and common SA future.

It has to be had.

And as the SAIRR statement referred to earlier correctly pointed out, the nationalisation call by the ANCYL has refocused our national attention on the vital economic issues that impact directly on the future of our youth, who constitute the majority of our SA population.

Almost eighteen years after our democracy it's a major national economic debate we can no longer postpone any further. But we should also concede that we have reached a national stalemate on this important debate, or what the philosopher, Karl Popper, described as "...political equilibrium" (The Open Society and Its Enemies, Volume One: The Spell of Plato, page 45).

To break the national logjam on this issue, it is not enough to advocate the convening of Economic CODESA, as many have suggested, laudable as that call is.

What is also required is a radical shift in the mindset of all the parties involved in the nationalisation debate.  Without such a mindset shift by all, Economic CODESA will be convened only for it to be immediately and indefinitely adjourned, because of huge and unbridgeable differences about our economic vision for the future.

In a watermark New York Review of Books article, entitled "How to Save the Euro", which appeared on 20 January 2012, George Soros approves and embraces the British psychologist David Tuckett's term of "a fantastic object - an unreal but attractive object of desire."

It is perhaps right that all of us, including bitter opponents of nationalisation, begin to also understand the ANCYL's nationalisation and land grab call as SA youths' "fantastic object - an unreal but attractive object of desire", which nevertheless should animate our collective national imagination, going forward, in search of our long-term and consensual, shared and common economic vision for our future.

> Instead of adopting what George Soros describes as "reflexive" posture, which is "driven by mistakes and misconceptions", we could choose to relate to the ANCYL nationalisation call strategically and creatively, in a way that gets us all working together to fashion and "coin" (Hartwell) an economic outlook and future for the poor and unemployed SA youth, which will make them loudly proclaim: "We are very proud to be South African youth".

As Aubrey Matshiqi brilliantly summed it up in his article, entitled "Economic Codesa - Humility and compromise must imbue economic talks", which appeared in the Business Day of 11 August 2011:

"... we must approach the idea of an economic Codesa with a spirit of humility and compromise, because none of the economic knowledge that is available to human kind today has prepared us for the economic problems that are still to come.

"In the light of this, we must be brave enough to reach for the heights of the impossible instead of wallowing in the depths of politics and ideology."

Let us use the ANCYL nationalisation and land grab call to help us collectively re-imagine ourselves as a great and prosperous united African nation with a common and shared purpose and vision for our country's economic future, in which all of us are winners, and none falls outside or behind the economic realm of national prosperity and progress.

The first step on that long economic journey of a thousand miles is to convene an all-inclusive Economic CODESA in 2012/2013.

Isaac Mpho Mogotsi is Executive Director of the Centre of Economic Diplomacy In Africa (CEDIA). He is also a businessman and a former diplomat.

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