ANCYL's mining comments 'puerile' The ANC Youth League's response to the Chamber of Mines' views on mine nationalisation was "puerile and insulting", the chamber's CEO Zoli Diliza said.

The ANC Youth League's response to the Chamber of Mines' views on mine nationalisation was "puerile and insulting", the chamber's CEO Zoli Diliza said.

"The contribution that the league makes to sensible and enlightened debate on issues of national importance is lamentable and is consistently characterised by a crude proclivity to descend into abusive and intimidatory rhetoric," he said in a statement.

Diliza said the chamber had "noted the puerile and insulting responses of the ANC Youth League to observations made on nationalisation of the mining industry by the chamber's outgoing President Sipho Nkosi".

"At the right time, in the correct forum and with individuals and institutions appropriately qualified to participate in a logical discourse that is not contaminated by vacuous utterances, the chamber will constructively and vigorously present its well considered perspectives on the issue of nationalisation," he said.

Speaking at the chamber's AGM on Tuesday, Nkosi said nationalisation had never been successful anywhere in the world.

"Simple, indisputable facts which show conclusively that nationalisation has never been an enduring, successful system anywhere in the world where it has been implemented, are readily available," he said.

"An antiquated and discredited practice, nationalisation has impoverished many countries -- several of them in Africa."

In response, ANCYL spokesman Floyd Shivambu said in a statement on Wednesday: "The [ANCYL] is disgusted by misleading and pathetic lies spread by the Chamber of Mines that nationalisation has never succeeded anywhere in the world."

He alleged the chamber had supported apartheid legislation and measures treating blacks as sub-human.

"They therefore hold no moral standing to say anything constructive in the rebuilding of South Africa in the post-democratic dispensation."

The ANC's recent national general council (NGC) resolved that its leadership would investigate the viability of nationalising the country's mines, after repeated calls to do so from its youth league.

Ahead of the NGC President Jacob Zuma and Mineral Resources Minister Susan Shabangu said nationalisation was not the ANC-led government's policy.

The matter would again be discussed by the ruling party at its next policy conference. A decision on whether it should be made policy would be taken at its 2012 elective conference.