Comment: Ronald Suresh Roberts
Mere days after big business found itself on the sidelines as Parliament finalised employment-standards legislation, the performance of leading apartheid-era business players before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission raised fresh questions about business’s ability to make relevant contributions to the new South Africa.
If business is to believed, its performance ranged from neutral professionalism to heroic anti-apartheid resistance.
This view was strongly challenged. Noting that Switzerland, ostensibly neutral in World War II, lent its banking system to the Nazi regime, the commission’s independent expert witness, Terry Crawford Browne, suggested that ”money is not neutral. It can be used for good or evil.”
But business was unmoved. The worst offender was the South African Chamber of Business (Sacob). The organisation insisted that ”the business sector … has oiled our transition to democracy”.
In support of this view, Sacob cited a 1994 article from the Financial Mail, then under the editorship of Nigel Bruce, who has said that he can see no difference between the truth commission and a programme called Circus on TV.
Far from enriching the commission’s deliberations, Sacob got basic facts wrong: under the heading ”Important Dates”, the hearing was informed that Nelson Mandela was imprisoned in 1966 (not, as we had previously thought, 1962).
In its oral presentation, Sacob treated the hearing to a blizzard of formal resolutions from its archives, purportedly proving the organisation’s anti-apartheid vigour. In fact, however, these resolutions reveal the organisation’s lukewarm attitude, very late in the day, to majority rule.
As late as 1993, under a heading entitled ”The Constitution”, Sacob called on ”participants in the multi-party negotiating process to ensure that the deadlock-breaking mechanism does not ultimately depend on a simple majoritarian process”.
This mirrored the National Party’s position, expressed by Gerrit Viljoen the previous year, that a mere ”arithmetic majority” should not be given power. To the bitter end, Sacob supported power-sharing, not ordinary democracy.
Also in 1993, Sacob urged ”the introduction of a juristic or corporate vote available to business as the major contributor to local coffers and the sector most directly affected by revenue collection and expenditure decisions”.
Throughout, Sacob faithfully reflected the views of leading business personalities. ”I used to think, rather simplistically, when I was much younger,” Anglo American chair Gavin Relly told New York Times journalist Joseph Lelyveld in 1985, ”that, really, why do we go on with this bloody thing? Why don’t we have one man, one vote and be done with it? I now no longer think like that at all.”
Business has entirely failed to take collective responsibility for such views. In a postmodern twist – more natural to the Johannesburg Biennale than the boardroom – the hearing was uniformly told that business was not ”homogeneous”; not ”monolithic”; that there is ”no single business story” (Sacob).
Such truisms do not mean that business can evade collective moral responsibility. The Council of South African Banks came close to acknowledging this: ”Just as the cardio- vascular system supplies blood and sustenance to the healthy and unhealthy parts of the body, so does the banking industry.”
But the weight of business opinion is best captured by big business think-tank savant Ann Bernstein, who asserted bluntly that ”corporations are not institutions established for moral purposes … Life is not a morality play.” If in fact morality is not business’s business, it should be enough to say: ”So what if we colluded in crimes against humanity?”
Business will, in Bernstein’s words, ”find ways and means to make money under almost any political regime”. But Bernstein and business alike ultimately shy away from their own logic. They want both to exempt business from moral claims and also to deny that apartheid business was immoral.
Thus Bernstein told the truth commission that ”the marketplace … is a stalking horse for democracy”. Even at its most thoughtful, as in this submission, business wants both to have its cake and eat it.
In fact, business exulted in apartheid. The South Africa Foundation, supported by Harry Oppenheimer, Anton Rupert and others, took a paid advertisement in the Sunday Times in 1967, urging that South Africa stop apologising for apartheid and instead ”substitute a tone of confident self- assertion” which publicised ”the opportunities” that apartheid created for international investors.
The South African Foundation was actively committed to pro-apartheid culture. ”My latest idea is to have all my pro-white papers published together,” wrote pro- apartheid novelist Sarah Gertrude Millin in the Sixties. ”The South Africa Foundation is anxious to do it, but I want it done by an ordinary publisher of repute. We have obviously to live with Africans, but we need not be eaten up by them.”
Despite its continuing influence in macro- economic and other policy debates, the South Africa Foundation did not testify at the hearings.
Apartheid bosses apparently think that keeping shop under apartheid was an innocent pursuit, like running the grocery store that Margaret Thatcher’s daddy owned. In fact, apartheid profits could not be any more benign than was apartheid itself.
The most astonishing remark made during the hearings came from the former head of Barlow Rand, Mike Rosholt. Asked whether his company, the leading supplier of hi- tech military technology to the regime, had colluded in human rights abuse, he replied: ”I don’t believe that you can repress people with avionic equipment.”
As Professor Sampie Terblanche lucidly testified, politics, business and culture were ”symbiotically linked”. Apartheid was an ugly case study in public-private partnership.
Ronald Suresh Roberts is co-author of Reconciliation Through Truth: A Reckoning of Apartheid’s Criminal Governance