SOUTH AFRICA / SHAPING AN ECONOMY : Nation’s Future Hinges on Word : The white business community hopes the ANC will ease up on its belief in nationalization.

Ten months ago, a black South African businessman emerged from a prison visit with Nelson Mandela and raised the hopes of free-market advocates by announcing that the African National Congress leader was beginning to sound soft on nationalization.

Mandela promptly sent his followers a rare message: “The nationalization of the mines, banks and monopoly industries is the policy of the ANC, and a change or modification of our views in this regard is inconceivable.”

Change of Heart?

But a few days ago, the ANC revealed, for the first time since it was legalized Feb. 2, what it has in mind for the post-apartheid economy of South Africa, the most economically powerful nation in sub-Saharan Africa.

The word nationalization was mentioned only once--in a threat to re-nationalize public utilities if the government proceeds with plans to privatize them.

Is the ANC undergoing a change of heart? Or has it just learned that nationalization is one of the most dangerously loaded words in the vocabulary of whites here?

The answer appears to be a little of both, analysts say.

The 18-page “discussion paper,” which reflects current thinking among ANC economists, suggests that the ANC has backed away from its rigid belief in a centrally controlled economy.

And it has eased white fears that property and bank accounts would be summarily nationalized under an ANC government.

The ANC envisions a mixed economy with a healthy private sector.

But it also sees a strong role for the government in directing the economy, to correct severe racial inequities, redistributing wealth from the rich white minority to the impoverished black majority.

Closing the Gap

The overwhelmingly white business establishment hasn’t been overjoyed with the ANC document. But there is no panic yet, and some even see signs for hope.

The ANC policy statement “represents some closing of the gap between rhetoric and reality,” the South African Chamber of Business said. “Many businessmen see this ANC document as one small step for realism but a huge step for the ANC.”

Still, the chamber said, “the overall impression remains that of an organization which refuses to acknowledge what has manifestly failed elsewhere.”

The chamber says the ANC and business leaders agree on only two things: the need to restore business confidence and the need to create enough wealth and employment to accommodate black as well as white South Africans.

They disagree strongly about which must come first, economic growth or wealth redistribution.

The ANC thinks government- directed redistribution will spur growth.

“The engine of growth in the economy . . . should be the growing satisfaction of the basic needs of the impoverished and deprived majority,” it says.

Electricity is one example the ANC has cited. Providing electricity to more black areas will create jobs, which will have a multiplier effect and begin to redistribute wealth, ANC economists say.

But many business leaders have been trying to persuade the ANC that the economy will only grow and improve the life of blacks if free enterprise is encouraged, a South African version of Ronald Reagan’s trickle-down theory.

“We can’t escape our responsibility (to) uplift the poor,” said Peter Haasbroek, an economist for Barlow Rand, the largest industrial conglomerate in South Africa. “But we (business and the ANC) differ on the methods.”

“Business is not opposed to slow, careful, step-by-step change,” he added. “What we fear are marked, radical changes in policy.”

But the ANC is under pressure to make things happen quickly.

It doesn’t want to scare off white business and investors from the United States and Europe. Yet, expectations have been raised among black South Africans, who outnumber whites 5 to 1 but who own less than 2% of the country’s productive assets.

“Black South Africans look up to the ANC and say: ‘We definitely don’t expect our position to continue like this forever,’ ” says Tito Mboweni, an ANC economist.

What of the Mines?

Nowhere are black expectations higher than in the mining industry, currently in the hands of a few white-controlled conglomerates.

For 35 years, the ANC has been saying it wants to nationalize the mines, which account for well over 33% of all exports and employ more than 350,000 black workers.

Now, though, the ANC is treading more carefully.

It stops short of calling for nationalization of the mines, saying only that a new government would need to consider “the nature and extent of state intervention and ownership.”