Big business has both a moral and legal duty to pay reparations for apartheid, advocate Dumisa Ntsebeza said on Friday. Ntsebeza was speaking at the Black Management Forum’s annual conference in Cape Town, while in the United States a Washington court prepares to hear argument next month against calls to dismiss
a South African apartheid litigation case.
”There is more than just a moral obligation on the part of business to contribute to the reparations process. There is also a legal duty. What the apartheid lawsuits seek to do is exactly that,” Ntsebeza told delegates at the BMF conference.
Ntsebeza is one of the lawyers representing plaintiffs in a class action — against defendants including American and Swiss banks, multinational companies, armaments industries and mining companies such as Anglo American — which seeks to compel these businesses to pay reparations for having profited by apartheid, and for aiding and abetting the apartheid regime.
Ntsebeza said business had never approached the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to make full disclosure and apply for amnesty when they had the chance, because they were in denial.
”They still are. They are stronger in denial because, for whatever reason, they are now defended and supported by the democratic government in the lawsuits,” he said.
He said that the business, which benefited from the apartheid system, were still benefiting in the post-apartheid period without having to account for their past misdemeanours.
”They fit the classical bill of those who proverbially hunt with the hounds and flee with the hares. During the apartheid era, they hunted with the apartheid state in its internationally recognised violations such as extra-judicial killings, torture, genocide, arbitrary detention … During democracy, they have suddenly become
hares who run and seek refuge under the welcoming petticoats of our democratic government in the face of lawsuits.”
Ntsebeza said these lawsuits could have been avoided had business not only acknowledged that they had brought South Africans a legacy of poverty, but had also begun to act on that acknowledgement by committing meaningfully to reparations.
Among the socio-economic reparations for which business was morally and legally responsible were education, land reform, housing and water provision, and poverty alleviation.
”To hide the horrors of the past in a collective amnesia would leave posterity with a legacy of festering guilt and unrelieved pain, Ntsebeza said, quoting former transport minister Mac Maharaj.
”The clouds are gathering and the chickens seem to be coming home to roost,” Ntsebeza concluded to loud applause. – Sapa