Most South Africans have tended over many years to treat policy debate as a spectator sport, muttering on the sidelines, perhaps, but seldom daring to stand up to defend a line call.

For some it probably is a habit learned under white rule, when it was convenient to the minority to keep any reservations about government policy to themselves. The majority, eking out a living as and where they could, would risk their jobs and possibly life or a limb as well if they spoke too loudly.

Now, despite some legislative threats to our access to information, we enjoy real freedom to speak our minds and there are many public platforms from which to do so.

There are many big questions pending. The answers to some will shape this country for generations to come.

With the number of people we have elected to rule us, it should not be unreasonable to expect them to show us the right way forward.

After all, most people are in the business of producing the goods and services that actually fuel the economy -- or are trying desperately to get a toehold in the production process - and really don't have time for the nuances of what Julius Malema or Gwede Mantashe said.

But ours is not such an environment right now. Political and policy debates are dangerously entangled, personal interests predominate and too many people are trying only to identify the leading bandwagon in order to jump aboard.

If we continue to let the politicians of the ruling tripartite alliance duck their leadership obligations by deliberately talking past each other while they sort out the locker room power struggle, outsiders will lose confidence in our game and buy tickets to another elsewhere.

We cannot continue to let ANC Youth League leader Malema outline a path towards the adoption of nationalisation as official ANC policy in Bloemfontein next year while the ANC, through President Jacob Zuma and his ministers as well as Mantashe, the ANC secretary general, blithely assure that nationalisation is not government policy.

Malema has never said that nationalisation is the current policy of the ANC and the ANC has never said that it never will be.

The ANC leadership said on Monday: "We want to state unequivocally that the league resolutions remain those of the youth league and do not alter ANC policies being implemented at government level."

It was a statement that did not in any way address investor concerns about an imminent change of policy, which is the political risk that is beginning to bite into the country's growth prospects.

"Political risk" is a weighty term to use in economic research and not one that analysts lightly toss about, but that is what Kristin Lindow, a senior vice-president of Moody's Investor Services, put on the table in her address to a Moody's conference in Johannesburg recently.

"We know the government is encouraging people to speak their minds," she said. "But there is some disruption to investment intentions by both foreigners and the private sector in South Africa."

Maybe that conference caused the generally invertebrate voice of the investing class, Business Unity SA, to dredge up the courage of its last convictions and issue a mild protest against the threat of state ownership of the mines.

"If South Africa is to attract the foreign direct investment as well as the local investment we need to help create jobs sustainably, then all stakeholders have to sensibly manage public discourse, if the predictability and certainty needed for investment decisions are to be maintained," Busa said.

Business Leadership SA, which has preferred in the past to voice its concerns to government over a glass of whisky rather than over the airwaves, also found its voice this week with a protest against the Protection of Information Bill, which threatens to criminalise whistle-blowing and punish it with mandatory prison sentences.

Trevor Manuel, the national planning minister, has put many of the questions in his diagnostic report, which is to be found at www.npconline.co.za.

Now he is launching what he hopes will be a genuine national conversation about the choices on the table.

If the report has a familiar ring to it, it is because the questions he asks about the kind of society and economy we want have been left unanswered throughout these first 17 years of our freedom to be, to think and to speak.

Whether we are for or against nationalisation, expropriation without compensation, media controls or forced integration, it is time for each of us to make a line call of his own and voice it.