By Chris at www.CapitalistExploits.at
About a month ago, the South African government raised the minimum threshold for black ownership of mining companies from 26% to 30%.
It's called "black empowerment" or "affirmative action" and is intended to provide black people with greater access to wealth, education, and to correct the inequality created by the white-led government who relinquished power in 1994 - 23 years ago.
With every passing day the formerly booming nation of South Africa is getting ever closer to the formerly banana republic of Zimbabwe.
On Wednesday, South Africa's ruling African National Congress proposed at its 5th annual national policy conference that in addition to potentially nationalizing the country's central bank, that land expropriation without compensation should be allowed where it is "necessary and unavoidable," President Jacob Zuma said.
South Africa’s new mining charter (that all local mines should be 30% black-owned) is scaring away investors.
The charter revision comes shortly after Africa’s most industrialised economy entered its first recession since 2009, with investor confidence already shaken by infighting within the ANC over the scandal-hit presidency of Jacob Zuma.
Not long after South Africa introduced legislation calling for the redistribution of white-owned land and business to the country's black population, in a redux of the catalyst that resulted in Zimbabwe's hyperinflation at the start of the century, on Thursday South Africa doubled down when it announced plans to revise its mining charter and introduce rules requiring all local mines be 30% black-owned, regardless of whether they have previously sold shares or assets to black investors that later divested.
Authored by Ilana Mercer via The Mises Institute,
Yes, it has happened. A mere 23 years after the 1994 transition, in South Africa, to raw ripe democracy, six years following the publication of a wide-ranging analysis of that catastrophe, Into the Cannibal's Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa, a Beltway libertarian think tank has convened to address the problem that is South Africa.