When nationalisation of mines was being peddled as a panacea to our transformation travails about a decade ago, there were quite a few prescient mine owners that were more than happy to be receiving an unsolicited bid from government for their stake in a sector that they knew was set for a very long winter. When this talk was at its height and led by the oratorically gifted Julius Malema, Impala Platinum was trading at more than R210 a share. Today, the world's second-biggest platinum miner trades in the region of R20, valuing the firm at R14bn, and is in the throes of a massive restructuring drive. Now just consider if the flawed argument for nationalisation had won the day and had tasked the administration of former president Jacob Zuma to nationalise Impala's Rustenburg operations. Beyond how clumsily it would have been done and just how dubious a process it would have been, Impala's woes would have been for the taxpayer to bear. Today, we'd have a National Treasury struggling to...
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