Special Hearings — Business Hearings — 1997-11-13

MR GODSELL: Mr Chairperson, this organisation, Anglo American, has expressed its views on the political and social and economic context in which it wish to do business on many occasions and indeed we included as an annexure to our submission, a set of quotations.
 But of course at a moment like this, it's - we must be judged not simply by our words, but much more importantly by our deeds.  The first thing that I want to do is to point to three areas, three very important areas where the deeds have failed to match the words.
 The first of those is the area of migrant labour and housing.  This tells the sad story of the development of the Free State Gold Fields.  As Anglo prepared to develop these gold fields, seven new mining companies, it was its intention to provide for married housing for 10 percent of its Black employment force.
 That 10 percent level was set in a way to provide married accommodation for all South African Blacks who were married.  This would have enabled every Black employee who wished to live on the mines, to do so with his family.
 The Minister of Native Affairs, Dr Verwoerd, wanted  no married housing at all.  Indeed, he instructed Anglo to destroy the housing already constructed.  The compromise reached at that time, was to retain houses already built, but built no more and this is the origin of the three percent quota that has - that was only scraped - with the scrapping of influx control in 1986 and which was applied to the whole Mining Industry. 
 The particular failure here is that Anglo itself, failed to meet this three percent quota, and in fact that the married housing built never exceeded more than one percent.
 If indeed we had been able to house 10 percent of Black workers and indeed had done so, this would have provided a model for non-racial urbanisation in South Africa in the 1950's that I think certainly would have changed the pattern, of both urbanisation and industrialisation.  
 It would have created a Welkom that was almost equally White and Black in terms of its permanent married population.
 The tragedy is that the opportunity to provide infra-structure on this scale occurs really only at the time of planning and designing new mines.  
 A second area where deeds had failed to meet words is that of employment equity.  Of course Apartheid laws did (indistinct) Blacks from many key jobs in the Mining Industry and elsewhere in the economy.  Yet, in many other areas it was social convention rather than law that prevented the development of Black encumbrance.
 This applied equally to gender.  Until recently women were barred from all underground occupations.  It was social convention which prevented the employment of women in important surface occupations such as finance, company administration, human resource management and information technology.
 The management of our organisations could certainly have done much more to break down the social prejudices that confined recruitment and promotion to only one small part of South Africa's total population.
 The third area is that of work place desegregation.  Efforts were made from the mid-1970's onwards to desegregate work places.  These efforts, however, should have commenced much earlier, proceeded much more quickly and been achieved much more consistently.
 This segregation not only gave the lie to the values expressed by Anglo's leaders.  It was also a direct affront to the human dignity of every worker thus excluded from facilities and opportunities.
 So, this is as bluntly as I can express an admission of failure to match words with deeds.  Does this then mean that no serious attempt were made to differentiate the Anglo work place from other areas of Apartheid where our words utterly without consequence.
 We would argue that was not the case.  Here again I want to focus ons just a few areas for illustrative purposes.
 Wages.  When in the early 1970's gold was liberated from its fixed 35 dollar an ounce price, Black wages in Anglo gold mines were increased three fold over three years and this at a time when inflation was still low.
 The ratio of unskilled to semi-skilled - that ratio of unskilled and semi-skilled wages on the one hand to skilled wages on the other was reduced during the early '70's from seven to one, to five to one and today this ratio is three to one.
 Let me come to the important issue from trade unions.  In 1974 the then Chairman of Anglo American, Harry Oppenheimer made a public call on employers to recognise Black unions, noting explicitly that there was no law that prevented employers from doing that.
 He also called on the Government to appoint a multi-racial commission of enquiry to comprehensively review South Africa's labour laws.
 Anglo gold mining companies and in the mining sectors and other sectors of the economy, were amongst the first to grant independent Black trade unions access for recruiting purposes and then to recognise them as collective bargaining agents and our companies remain the most significantly unionised of mining companies.
 A further area is in the area of urbanisation.  This is an area which Ann Bernstein spoke to at some length and I will just remind people of the role that the Urban Foundation played in changing Government policy to afford Black South Africans, first lease hold, then full property rights and then finally the abolition of influx control during the 1980's and I would just note that Harry Oppenheimer played an important role in the creation of the Urban Foundation.
 If we turn to the area of education and training.  In 1979 Anglo introduced bridging education programmes in the core disciplines of business.  Mining engineering and commerce.  Our concern was to see Black university students in these core disciplines.  Since that time more than a thousand Black matriculants have participated in pre-university and university schemes at Wits, Cape Town and Natal in the disciplines of engineering and commerce and a significant number have gone on to take up management positions in our group.
 Under the broad theme of working for change, there had been a number of initiatives.  Perhaps the most publicly prominent and far reaching in terms of the audience that it has achieved, was Clem Suttner's scenario work, popularising a high road for South Africa and really making the term political negotiation one that was both acceptable and increasing deemed to be inevitable amongst White South Africans.
 If we turn to corporate social responsibility the Anglo American and De Beer's chairman's funds have pioneered, particularly in the area of education, important departures from past policy and practice.
 Part of that practice was to exclude Black South Africans from technical and vocational institutions and so Anglo was significantly involved in creating the first technikon open to Black South Africans and also in building technical colleges in both Daveytown and Attridgeville.
 At the school level there was an effort and here we're talking about the early 1980's, to support important non-racial schooling initiatives, such as the St Barnabus College, the Nest Schools, Grace College and St. Anne's and the Bishop Baven School, St Gregory College, Sacred Heart and Tiger Kloof.
 Then more broadly there was a commitment to trying to enhance, particularly - particular areas of teaching and Black schools, starting with the Morris Isaacson High School in Soweto in 1975 and a programme supporting particularly science and maths teaching in over 800 schools across the country.
 Then there was assistance to universities, particularly to help them broaden access and make universities more accessible to disadvantaged groups of students.  
 The final area of an example of putting deed to word, has been the small business initiative.  This was to give practical effect to the positive relationship we sought between large and small businesses and to date some 850 million rands worth of business has resulted from the small business initiative in the hands of some 500 emerging businessmen and women, employing some 7 000 people.
 Now, the last point that I would seek to make is a theme that has been much discussed over these past three days and this is whether business benefitted or did not benefit from Apartheid.
 The one distinction I would seek to introduce here, is just to draw a distinction between the fact that without a shadow of doubt, all White South African fared very much better than their Black compatriots throughout the Apartheid decades.  So all  White South African were beneficiaries of Apartheid.
 Every piece of Apartheid legislation amounted to a massive affirmative action programme, a quite targeted affirmative action programme, because when it came to the allocation of state contracts and state businesses;  then it was not only all Whites, but particular groups of Whites who benefitted.
 But I just want to pause a note that to jump from that to argue that business as a category did better under Apartheid than it would have done without Apartheid, is a big leap in logic.
 If you imagine a South African without Apartheid from the decades of 1960 to 1990, it seems quite plausible to suggest that South African would have grown at Brazilian growth rates rather than the ones that we did and our economy would be twice the size that it is.
 Now, that is important looking forward, because as we look to the RDP and to year, it's clear, to me, that there's a coincidence between a national political agenda to address the legacy of Apartheid and the need of the business community to grow companies effectively.
 Thanks very much.