Special Hearings — Business Hearings — 1997-11-13

<UNKNOWN>: In our group, with one possible exception I will come to, there's none of the companies that we run that isn't subject to intense competition from others.
 The one exception may be the Darwin business, but as you know we think that's rather a special case and anyway our world wide arrangements depend on voluntary co-operation.
 But the chairman of De Beer's may have something to say.  
 The second point I'd like and I entirely support what Bobby has said, is that almost all the companies in our group listed in these calculations in the stock exchange, which actually we have some dispute with, but I don't think we exaggerate the situation, but we accept that we have in our group a large percentage of the stock exchange, but I think it's something like 80 or 90 percent of that is companies that we have built from the beginning.
 (indistinct) to include one's predecessors who built up these companies;  that the Anglo American and De Beer's group have built up pretty well from scratch and therefore, as Bobby said, if there wasn't exchange control, there would be a lower percentage, others, foreigners would be in, but this has also been a measure of the success of our predecessors and I'm sure nobody wants to go around ...(indistinct) success.
 Can I put it another way.  I have often said to people when they criticise us, do they think South African would have been better off if Oppenheimer has gone to Australia rather than come to South Africa.  I know how I would answer that one.

RUSSELL ALLY: And how an Australian would answer that one, but to focus a bit more on some of the charges which were made by COSATU, because I think it's very important.
 Firstly, the question which I think was really from the heart and this is, I think, what is important about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission;  that it's not just a sterile exercise in looking back at the past.
 Fundamentally it's about people and about their human rights and the way that these human rights have been trampled upon.
 They spoke about treatment of mine workers, particularly around questions of language, Funigalore and the terms in the language.  Are these issues being addressed?  What is being done on some of those issues which lead to the humiliation of people?

MR GODSELL: Certainly, if I can talk about mining and I will fully concede that this dictionary that Sam quoted is absurd.  It's a document I haven't seen.  I'm going to go off and look for it.  It's outrageous that it should exist.
 Thank you.  Thank you, I thought you would say that.  Let's just go to a deeper level.  I mean look, if you look back in history, you have an industry that drew workers from the entire subequatorial Africa and so somebody constructed a linga franca, a way of people coming with very many different vernaculars to communicate with each other.
 But let's be quite clear.  This was a bastard language.  It was not a language at all.  It had only verbs in the imperative tense.  It was a language for giving commands, not for communication.
 Certainly what I can say about the gold mines in Anglo is that we've made an emphatic commitment and this takes us a little bit to the future;  that by no later than very early in the next millennium, 2000, 2001, 2002, we want to have eliminated illiteracy in our work force entirely.
 By illiteracy what we mean is that we want people to be able to converse, to problem solve, to discuss and to negotiate in a language which is either English or Afrikaans, because those are the two languages that had the most common industrial vocabulary.
 We do have programmes set up to do that.  This is going to involve taking our entire work force and it is a 100 000 people through probably six to eight weeks of full time language tuition.
 So, you know, did Funigalore exist?  Yes.  Did it exists for far too long?  Absolutely.  Should it exist into the future?  Absolutely not.

RUSSELL ALLY: Another very serious charge was on the treatment of families of workers, migrant workers where there had been fatalities.  In fact even the treatment of the workers themselves after fatalities.  The description which Paul Benjamin actually read which was in a Gencor mine, the Kinross disaster, but more generally there is this strong feeling that the mining companies and Anglo as one of them, has not done enough to compensate for what has happened to workers as a result of the health hazards from silicoses to the asbestos dust to actual fatalities.
 Is this - would this be fair comment and is there an attempt by the Mining Industry, but Anglo in particular, to address this issue?

MR GODSELL: You know, I think in short, yes, over 30 years you will certainly find examples of - probably many examples of inhumane treatment of families and of the inappropriate dealing with death and serious injury like paraplegics and quadraplegics.
 I couldn't sit here and say those things hadn't happen on Anglo mines.  I know that they have and I fully concede that.  Now, if you say okay, well, how are we trying to go forward?
 Paul Benjamin, I think, talked about the new mine, health and safety act.  This is a way of empowering workers to make decisions about their own safety.  We now have a much better compensation regime, so that at least there's a meaningful amount of financial security where a family looses a bread winner.
 The monstrous accident in our group's history in the Vaal Reefs two shaft accident two years.  (indistinct) we set up a joint disaster fund and in the end what is interesting about that fund, is not the money that we collected which was in the order of 14 million rand, with significant contributions coming both from NUM and from Anglo and Vaal Reefs, but it was a step that we took as a board of trustees, jointly chaired by Walter Sisulu and Helen Suzman, to visit each family, each of the 104 families in the terrains of Southern Africa and that gave a human face to the suffering.
 I'm responding in this way, because I'm saying we've got to rediscover the full humanity of the total - of the totality of South Africa.  That's what Apartheid did.  It made Whites unable to related to Blacks as fully human beings and this is what we're trying to do.
 I certainly would like to see us being able to deal with individual mine accident deaths in the same way that we dealt with the Vaal Reeve tragedy, because at least what we did is we visited the family, not once, but now regularly, two to three times a year and that trust is seeing to the education of the children.
 In the words of one of the (indistinct) trustees, its standing in the place of the father visiting the education of the children.  I think that's a human response to a human tragedy.

RUSSELL ALLY: The last - the final question is a very direct question and you can give a direct answer.
 Now as Anglo a supporter of the total strategy which was developed by P W Botha, which is often an accusation made?

<UNKNOWN>: We thought it was a total nonsense.

CHAIRPERSON: That's very direct.  Bongani?

BONGANI FINCA: I wish to begin by making a comment that the difference for me between yesterday and today compared to Monday - sorry, compared to Tuesday, is that there seems to be a growing acknowledgement that Apartheid advantaged those who are White and disadvantaged those who are Black.
 On Monday I sensed that that was absent.  But this morning someone made a comment which capture my attention, but I did not have time to ask a question on it.
 The comment that he made, to phrase, derationalising ownership, given the fact that Apartheid has advantaged those who are White and for that reason they are now owners and disadvantaged those who are Black and for that reason they are now workers, users of food and drawers of water.
 How do we derationalise ownership so that it seizes to be defined in terms of how Apartheid has defined our lives hitherto?