The truth commission is to question business about its apartheid role, writes Charlene Smith
Was business an innocent bystander or active participant in apartheid? What was its role in South Africas defence industry, security apparatus, sanctions campaign and homeland system and how did this impact on political conflict both directly and indirectly?
These are just two of the questions the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has posed to more than 50 business representatives, ranging from the Land Bank to the Chamber of Mines, Afrikaanse Handels Instituut, Business South Africa, the SA Chamber of Commerce and the Steel and Engineering Industries Federation of SA among others. Union comment has also been sought.
They have been asked for their submissions by October 10. The commission will then request some parties to testify on certain areas over three days in November.
Dr Fazel Randera, who is co-ordinating the hearing, said this week that although the commission as a whole had received 12 500 submissions from victims and 7 000 from perpetrators of human rights abuses, the rest of the SA community has seen themselves as divorced from this process. The commission has asked several specialists for their input, including Professor Nic Wiehahn, who wrote the Wiehahn report of the late 1970s that led to the decriminalisation of black trade unions, as well as academics and labour experts Professor Sampie TerreBlanche and Professor Charles Simpkins.
The Black Business Council this week tore strips off white business giants of the past for their role in apartheid. Don Mkhwanazi said that big business had been part of atrocities blamed on politics, when capital and business were part of those atrocities in the economy. He believed it was traitorous that billions of rands had left the country in capital flight.
Dr Randera said the response of some members of the corporate world had been that the business of business is business and they were just following laws and regulations. But how does business explain some of its relationships with the state? There was no law that said black workers had to be paid abysmal wages …
Most black businessmen, however, are cautious and suspicious one executive declined to comment, because we are a comparatively small company and most white business people are not happy with the commission asking them to testify.
But other business people have thrown themselves wholeheartedly into the effort. One of the most keenly awaited submissions is from Bobby Godsell, who heads the gold and uranium division at Anglo American. With Cyril Ramaphosa, now of Nail and former head of the National Union of Mineworkers, he pioneered the labour/business co-operative negotiations that could rightly be said to have laid a solid foundation for the multi-party talks. It is believed that Godsell has approached Harry Oppenheimer personally to ask if he will head any Anglo delegation. Godsell was abroad and could not be contacted.
There is a fear that the commission hearing will be a way of putting business on the hook, and getting us to pay compensation, said one businessman.
Adrian du Plessis, a negotiator at the National Economic Development and Labour Council (Nedlac) for Business SA, notes that the common view is that business was a beneficiary of apartheid and labour was a victim. Certainly SA experienced very high growth in the 1960s and 1970s, but by the 1970s South Africa was a fortress economy that led to inward industrialisation that was not self-sustaining.
The wheel of growth, Du Plessis avers, demands democracy. Capitalism can survive under illegitimate repression, but if we had not had repression our economy would be more broad based, operating at a higher level and working more profitably. An argument can be made that capitalism was a victim of apartheid.
Dasi Moodley, a former trade unionist with the Food and Allied Workers Union, who is now an economist and consultant, says: Job reservation and job guarantees ensured South Africa could never meet its economic growth potential. The lack of skilled labour that ensued, and apartheid education policies, are still retarding South Africas attempts to climb emerging markets indices.
The gurus of separate development deliberately steered the mass of the workforce toward labour-intensive industry and failed to envision capital-intensive, high-tech futures and the need for an educated skilled workforce.
While job reservation and low wages led to temporary highs in the economy with enormous profits for companies, they also fuelled the creation of militant unions, beginning in the late 1970s and accelerating in the early 1980s when workers pushed for high wages to escape from conditions of growing poverty.
It has only been in the last two decades or so that training imperatives have become glaringly apparent but despite that little progress has been made.
Certainly the unions are angriest about the role of business in, as they termed it, the military-industrial complex that the apartheid government became. Migrant labour, which began almost a century before apartheid, reached its zenith during this time.
South Africas rate of mine deaths, among the worst in the world, also arouses anger about black blood building gold wealth primarily for the benefit of whites. And it was the mining houses that were initially most against any union activity; they banned meetings on premises, refused for a long time to allow union membership and generally did all in their power to resist what would become the most potent agent for social change in South Africa.
Fatalities are still high. According to the Chamber of Mines there were 529 deaths in mines in 1987, or a rate of 1,16 per 1 000 employees out of a total of 456 000 employees. Last year it slipped to just under one per 1 000 workers at 0,99, or 304 deaths from a workforce of 308 000.
Dr Nick Segal, president of the Chamber of Mines and vice-chair of Business SA, said the chamber would respond with due gravitas. It is a complex story, there are no good guys and bad guys, but we will not flinch from problem areas.
Pointing out that migrant labour had been in existence for almost a century by 1960 (the commission has asked for submissions dealing with the years between 1960 to 1994) he said that efforts around wages and hostel improvements began in the 1970s.
Mining is an unsafe activity; the deeper one goes the less safe it is. I dont know that as an industry we were involved in gross violations of human rights. And we will not be afraid to say that with hindsight we would have acted differently, but there are many things the industry has done which were positive.
By and large we acted within the law and chose to do so, the same way that we act within the law now and often disagree with the present government.