It is time for Nicholas and Jonathan Oppenheimer, respectively the chairperson of the De Beers group and MD of De Beers Consolidated Mines (DBCM), to establish their places in the pantheon of philanthropists. They should leave the management of De Beers to professionals who owe their positions to their skills, rather than to historic family connections.
This is the view of a great many people inside and outside the diamond company — people who are concerned at the manner in which necessary transformation is being handled at De Beers and at the effect this might have on the company’s future in South Africa and that of its controlling shareholder, Anglo American.
De Beers has been lagging behind other mining companies when it comes to transformation. It is not an industry leader in the big black economic empowerment (BEE) debates and has few senior black executives.
In addition, it will struggle to attract a BEE partner because five of its seven mines are unprofitable.
This was underscored, some De Beers insiders say, when the company’s top transformation executive Khumo Seopela resigned unexpectedly at the end of February, officially because of an attractive job offer elsewhere, but unofficially because of the slowness of transformation.
As one De Beers insider told me: ”The transformation ducks were supposed to have been in a row by this June. But now the process is only likely to start in June.”
The concerns inside Anglo American (where Nicholas Oppenheimer is a non-executive director) is that De Beers’s slowness in transforming can affect Anglo’s own plans, particularly over the changes in progress at iron miner Kumba Resources, of which Anglo owns two-thirds.
In addition, there is a view that an exit by the two men would ensure better corporate governance by seperating management from shareholders.
A group, closely allied with and in part dependent for their positions on the younger Oppenheimer, sees things differently.
This grouping forms of the flanks of the opposition to transformation in De Beers and they still enjoy great influence. Their departure would also, it is argued free group MD Gary Ralfe, hamstrung by the Oppenheimers since De Beers was removed from the stock exchange, to carry on with his sound management policies.
The first group is concerned that if Nicholas and Jonathan hang on to corporate power and do not attend to building the family’s legacy in South Africa, history will not be kind to them or to their family. There is the real danger that the family will be remembered as grasping and reluctant to return anything but the minimum to the society that aided it in accumulating its fortune.
Perhaps the perception is justified by the deliciously cynical advice that patriarch Ernest gave his son Harry, as quoted in Anthony Hocking’s biography Oppenheimer and Son: ”You must always be ready to concede all that you can. When you want something from a person, think first of what you can give him in return. Let him think that it’s he who is coming off best. But all the time make sure it is you in the end.”
It is time, some argue, that the family give and be seen to give a great deal back to society. This, it is suggested, could be the basis for the two men’s graceful exit from De Beers.
Of course, they would lose the $15-million annual fee they earn for their operational positions. But that is small change when set against the $180-million the family took in dividends from its 40% shareholding last year. If they donate, say, a quarter of the family’s fortune to an independent philanthropic trust, the Oppenheimers would still be richer than Rockefeller.
By way of comparison, last year Bill Gates pulled in a salary of $0,9-million from Microsoft. If, as expected, Microsoft pays a maiden annual dividend of $0,32 this year, Gates’s dividend income will be less than twice the amount the Oppenheimers receive from De Beers.
By choosing a philanthropic path, the family could alter its image as one whose history (and fortune) is bound up with the migrant labour and job reservation systems.
When I came to South Africa as a mining engineer 40 years ago, underground ”lashing boys” were paid between 30 cents and 34 cents for a ten-hour shift in the country’s gold mines.
Their pay scales were fixed by the entire mining industry through the Chamber of Mines and, for years, black mineworkers were prevented and discouraged by the mining companies from organising into trade unions.
They were the years when the Oppenheimer family, led first by Ernest and subsequently by Harry, was building its private fortune in a mining industry where labour was kept in its powerless place by South Africa’s race laws.
That fortune has now grown to the $6-billion recently calculated by Forbes magazine, ranking the family as the world’s 72nd richest and the richest among the planet’s mining moguls.
The younger Oppenheimer might well have ambitions to see the family rise in the wealth rankings back to its membership of the top 10 wealthiest families it enjoyed some thirty years ago.
But that is unlikely to happen.
Harry’s raison d’être was to consolidate and to build on the foundations laid by his father Ernest. And Harry gave the group a sheen of respectability in some quarters.
Nicholas and his son, Jonathan, have no such avocation. They have had to surrender the sort of absolute control that Harry had over Anglo American and are left with their family’s 40% holding in De Beers.
It would be best, some argue, for the two Oppenheimers to stop trying to prove their usefulness to De Beers and to concentrate on building a legacy that will embellish the family’s name.
When contributions to society come up, one never hears the name Oppenheimer uttered in the same breath as Rockefeller, Carnegie, Gates, Astor or Getty. Yes, Harry set up the charitable chairman’s funds at Anglo and De Beers, but they were funded not by the family directly, but by the corporations, and hence all of their shareholders, themselves.
Rockefeller, Gates and others became sensitive to the needs and feelings of the societies to which they owed so much. And they endowed philanthropic foundations with significantly large parts of their personal or family fortunes.
The Oppenheimers have doled out some unspecified amounts to local NGOs and educational institutions in South Africa. And they have set up a think-tank, the Brenthurst Foundation, now headed by family friend Greg Mills.
The annual total of Oppenheimer personal donations is reckoned to be in the region of R5-million or something less than 1% of their annual dividend income from De Beers.
John D Rockefeller, founder of the egregious Standard Oil trust, started donating 5% of his income to charity when he was still in his teens and continued to do so for the rest of his life. That was on top of the vast amounts he distributed from his personal fortune to various foundations.
And it went on down the generations. Rockefeller’s daughter-in-law Abby donated the family home in New York and her private art collection to form the basis of what is now the world-famous Museum of Modern Art.
The Oppenheimers have donated a couple of African headrests and walking sticks to the Johannesburg Art Gallery. Their Goya portraits and Impressionist oils hang on the walls of the family’s sitting room.
Sure, people inside De Beers are quick to point out, Nicholas Oppenheimer graciously allows some outside cricket teams to play on his private pitch north of Johannesburg, and he contributes to the finances of local cricket.
Generous, but where is the Oppenheimer trust, similar to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation which
has set itself the ambitious and global task of finding cures for Aids, TB and malaria. Some of the Oppenheimer family’s charity giving is done quietly through the Ernest Oppenheimer Trust.
Modesty is not to be gainsaid but public disclosure of the level of private philanthropy might encourage some of South Africa’s other tight-fisted mega-rich to disburse their fortunes for the benefit of their compatriots. — Â