JOHANNESBURG (AFP) — South Africa's largest trade union movement on Friday backed calls by the ANC's junior wing to consider nationalising mines, a key driver of the country's economy.
The Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) said it supported comments earlier this week by outspoken ANC Youth League boss Julius Malema that the time may have come to ensure "the state owns the mines."
"Nationalisation of the mines is particularly relevant in the light of the global financial crisis and the massive job losses in the mining sector," COSATU said in a statement.
The move was in line with the country's Freedom Charter which underpins its constitution and a COSATU resolution of 2006 calling for "more equitable ownership... including through nationalisation of mining", it said.
African National Congress spokesman Jessie Duarte on Thursday rejected the call.
"It is not ANC policy to nationalise mines," she told the SAPA news agency.
Mining, which accounts for about 50 percent of the country's exports, has been hard hit by the global crisis as commodity prices plunged.
Malema was quoted as saying: "We should ask whether the time has not arrived for the government to make sure that the state owns the mines and other means of production as called for in the Freedom Charter."
The charter signed in 1955 during apartheid says that mineral wealth, monopoly industries and banks "should be transferred to the ownership of the people as a whole."
Nearly 25,000 miners have lost their jobs so far this year, about five percent of the industry's workforce, but the losses have been smaller than feared.
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