When South Africa’s belligerent head of state, PW Botha, spoke at the opening of the Natal National Party congress in Durban on August 15 1985, he took many by surprise. Prior to that infamous Rubicon speech, expectations were high that Botha would announce fundamental reforms of the apartheid state.
Instead, far from taking on board proposals from his cabinet colleagues regarding black representation in the executive, the future of the homelands and the release of the ANC’s Nelson Mandela, he did quite the opposite, vowing that he wouldn’t be browbeaten by his colleagues, the liberation movement or the international community.
For the grandees at Anglo American’s headquarters at 44 Main Street, the speech was a disappointment but not unexpected. Deeply involved for some decades in changing the business and labour environment in a changing world, Anglo American chair Harry Oppenheimer and his successor, Gavin Relly, had found that the apartheid government was falling further and further behind domestic societal and global shifts.
Anglo had, in fact, been in conflict with the National Party government since it had come to power in 1948 and threatened to nationalise various parts of the economy, followed by Hendrik Verwoerd’s refusal to engage with Afrikaner businessman Anton Rupert, and the clear admonishment by prime minister John Vorster and his successor Botha that business should not meddle in affairs of state and politics.
Doug Band, CEO of Anglo subsidiaries including the Argus newspaper group and Gallo Records, said it was an accepted fact that Botha wasn’t antagonistic only towards capital, but downright hostile to “English” capital.
Politicians have the job of running the country ... From business’s point of view, it is entitled to say when it thinks those politics are jeopardising its ability to create wealth
— Gavin Relly
Relly said that in 1985 he was convinced business should step up its engagement with the government and play a stronger role in national affairs. This represented a departure from organised capital’s historical role, with big business extremely reluctant to involve itself in matters of the day.
Those days were over, Relly said. “I think it is a much better thing for the country in the long term if we listen to what each other is saying. I don’t think it is necessary for the linkage (between business and government) to be too close. The politicians have the job of running the country, providing sensible infrastructure, a credible legal system, security and managing our external affairs. From business’s point of view, it is entitled to say when it thinks those politics are jeopardising its ability to create wealth.”
And that was now the case, Relly and other senior business leaders believed: they’d been duped by Botha and had been co-opted into his strategy. Relly “bluntly” put his views forward: “Piecemeal reform in the current style is now identified clearly in the black mind as tinkering with apartheid and only a visible process of political negotiations that symbolises real intent to share power will end the stonewalling tactics pursued by many black political leaders.”
The government, Relly explained, should accept that business would become more strenuously involved in planning and preparing for the country’s future. It was entitled to do so because it was responsible for a vital economy. “Our attitude should be based on the practical realisation that there is no future for any of us, aside from an African quagmire, unless we can express our views and seek to have the government realise the deep concern we feel about the conditions as we find them today.”
Which is why, on September 13 1985, less than four weeks after Botha’s Durban speech, Relly led a delegation to meet ANC leaders in Zambia.
Relly and his colleagues returned to howls of criticism. Botha publicly denounced them as traitors, while Oppenheimer remained unhappy with his protégé’s decision, and the conservative members of Anglo’s management distanced themselves from their boss’s initiatives.
Anglo executive director Michael Spicer said there was “deep concern” at 44 Main Street about the ANC’s ideas about a future South African economy. Anglo was “transcendent” across almost all walks of life in South Africa, its interests were varied and vast, and it formed the backbone of the economy. So Anglo, with Relly leading the charge, was convinced the ANC needed to be brought into the world of modern economic theory.
The party, making allowance for its historical proximity to socialism, and given the support it had received from the Soviet Union and East Germany, had to understand that the South Africa it could one day inherit was built on a free-market economy, albeit with unique apartheid characteristics.
And even though the ANC’s leadership might not agree with Anglo’s analysis of the domestic and global environment, they had to see that the quaint world of 30 years before no longer existed. The ANC had “simply not thought” about economics, Spicer said. “They had thought consistently about politics, and of course the difficult life of exile — who’s blaming them — breeds paranoia; you get into this whole secretive way of living and thinking,” he noted, referring to the ANC’s centralised decision-making processes and “need-to-know” culture.
“It wasn’t conducive to thinking about the future South African economy. And who knew then, in the mid-1980s, that in a couple of years’ time they’d have to really start thinking about it. Well, we were encouraging them to get on with it.”
Thabo Mbeki — one of the six ANC leaders present — was reportedly deeply disappointed with the lack of dividends the Zambia meeting delivered; he’d hoped to get immediate reward from it. But he understood why it was businessmen who had initiated the first formal contact between the ANC and South Africa’s white elite. “Because businesspeople tend to be more realistic. They don’t like to deal with poems and dreams but facts. Relly came because he was sensitive to the depth of the crisis and [understood that he] needed the ANC to get out of it,” he said later.
Both sides — business and the ANC — had their own reasons for having talked to each other. Apartheid had become ruinously expensive to maintain, and business increasingly found that the system was seriously undercutting their ability to expand and deliver returns for their shareholders.
They [Anglo] ran massive intelligence operations
— Trevor Manuel
For the ANC, it was important to find a way into a constituency with actual power and influence. And what both business and the ANC knew was that they needed each other. Business wanted to break out of the stranglehold of the apartheid capitalist system and craved global acceptance. The ANC needed as many partners inside South Africa as possible, and hoped that capital could start playing a meaningful role in forcing political change.
So, on Relly’s return, Anglo stepped up its efforts to help history along. The chief executive of South Africa’s most powerful conglomerate decided that nothing should be left to chance — and Anglo should help to direct events from that point as far as possible.
“What business needs to do most of all is to make the world realise that you can’t have sensible reform without economic growth ... they need to understand that we are not capable in the long run of creating an even moderately stable society, unless we can develop economically as a nation giving jobs to people and creating new services,” Relly said.
Relly’s enterprise, as the dominant player in the tightly controlled apartheid economy, was prepared to expend “vast resources over an extended period” to influence the process of political and economic change, said Spicer. First Relly and then his successor, Julian Ogilvie Thompson, invested much to ensure the company had eyes and ears everywhere. “They [Anglo] ran massive intelligence operations,” said struggle stalwart Trevor Manuel.
Years after the tumult and uncertainty of the unravelling of apartheid, Spicer admitted that business’s approaches to the ANC were not all about human rights and individual freedoms — but that, by the same token, it was much more complicated than simply accusing business of harbouring only concern for itself.
“Yes, we had to look after our own self-interest, but one would hope it was enlightened self-interest. Of course, it was self-interest in the sense that in order to continue to operate in South Africa, one had got to have at least a degree of market economics, particularly post the fall of the Berlin Wall and the breakup of the Soviet Union, and the delegitimising of out-and-out socialism.
“So, an untried, untested group of people who had been nurtured in Soviet thinking and practised it — many of them had lived in the Soviet Union — was to come back to this country and had the Freedom Charter as its guiding document. The Freedom Charter was, at best, a Fabian socialism type of document, and, at worst, could be interpreted as Stalinist. This was not going to cut it.”
* This is an edited extract from Pieter du Toit’s The ANC Billionaires: Big Capital’s Gambit and the Rise of the Few (Jonathan Ball Publishers)
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