ANC Youth League president Julius Malema's call for South Africa's mines to be nationalised has received lukewarm support from the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), Business Report said on Tuesday.

The newspaper cited the NUM's general secretary Frans Baleni as its source.

Baleni told the newspaper mineral rights had already been nationalised under the African National Congress government.

"Clearly if you annex private assets you will have a problem unless there is a willingness to sell.

No imposition

"We are saying 'do these things in a dynamic way rather than through imposition'," Baleni told Business Report.

He added that an audit of state mining activities, as well as a study of state entities that had mining rights, should be conducted to determine areas where greater state involvement could occur, and where they could be "operationalised" in the mining company.

Baleni noted that De Beers had hived off its interests some time ago in Namaqualand diamonds to the state diamond company, Alexkor, which he said was "a good model".

Furthermore, the state mining company had already been established before the Polokwane resolution was passed by the governing party in 2007.

"It is a question of operationalising it," Baleni explained.

Spokesman for the Chamber of Mines, Jabu Maphalala, told Business Report the mining industry could not comment on what the ANC Youth League had to say about nationalising local mines.

"The ANC Youth League is having a debate on its own that we are not involved in," Maphalala said.

Not a policy issue

"This is not a policy issue. We can't comment."

Last week Malema told the Sowetan newspaper the country's mines should be nationalised.

"At the moment, when the imperialist forces are accepting the failures of capitalism, 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," Malema said.