Some Views on South Africa's Future

Introduction:

Honoured guests, Head Table guests, members of The Empire Club, ladies and gentlemen. It is an honour to introduce the Chairman of South Africa's largest corporation as our guest speaker today. He heads a company whose employees and dependents number some one and a half million citizens of his country.

Gavin Relly's career in the Anglo American Corporation spans a period of forty years, of which three were spent here in Toronto among many of the business leaders here today. So I say first to Mr. Relly, welcome back to Toronto.

Gavin Relly's involvement with the social fabric of his country includes his term as President of the South Africa Foundation, an association formed to make South Africa's business better known around the world. He is on the governing board of three universities. He is a leader in the South African Nature and Urban Foundations. This last is a body formed to help resolve the housing crisis for black workers in urban centres.

He holds a Masters degree in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics from Oxford University. He is an outspoken analyst of South Africa's circumstances, whose words are heard and respected in his own country and abroad.

These achievements are a measure of this man's dedication to his business concerns and, of equal importance, to the welfare of his country and his people.

He is a person whose dedication to social justice has taken determination, steadfast and unrelenting resolve. He is a person to whom the words of Albert Camus may come with some comfort and encouragement: Camus said, "in the midst of winter, I finally learned there was in me an invincible summer".

Ladies and gentlemen with "Some Views on South Africa's Future", I present Gavin Relly.

Gavin Relly:

I won't attempt to assess the impact of Mr. Gorbachev's policies of glasnost and perestroika on North America or Europe, nor whether they will work as far as the USSR or Eastern Europe are concerned. They will variously be seen as bad, good, malign or beneficial depending on where we stand, but I don't think anyone can deny that they are profoundly important or that they have created significant input to change the behavioral conduct of nations and peoples.

Let me tell you rather of some of the effects on my own continent, Africa, a continent sitting uncertainly between the confident history of the old world, in which I include North America, and the strident ambition of what is now the new--the Pacific Basin. It belongs to neither. Apart from colonial associations it doesn't share the political or economic past of the former and temperamentally has little linkage with the latter.

I'm sure it is difficult for you to visualize how profound it is for the underdeveloped world to have heard from the mouth of the horse itself in Moscow that marxism doesn't work and therefore isn't for export. At a single stroke this turns the mind from the centralist demands of the State to a re-emphasis of the individual. It frees neighbours to look at each other for what they are, and not as potential surrogates for some remote ideology.

Of course, processes of change were taking place anyway in Africa as disillusionment and despair set in, and the merits of individual enterprise and free markets were starting to have their impact on relationships between states, but Mr. Gorbachev perhaps unwittingly has put a seal on the value of experimentation and has set most of Africa free to try and find more workable and pragmatic solutions within their own countries and between their countries. The United States of America clearly supports the import of this development as l, imagine the Canadian Government does too.

Sadly, those in the South African Communist Party and many academics on the left in South Africa, seem to have been impervious thus far to Mr. Gorbachev's message and the practical experience of Africa over the last 30 years. The spectacle of Moscow, in some respects more pragmatic on South Africa than the Congress of the U.S., jousting with its erstwhile allies on the left in South Africa, adds piquancy to one's observation of the South African scene, though of course it has its worrying side.

Nevertheless all of this gives an enormous fillip to my own country, which, as you know, has been undergoing a slow process of deregulation and transformation for a number of, years, both internally and in its external relations. Certainly many of the most offensive elements of apartheid's restrictions on people have been removed. This process has been slower than most people would have liked, but it has been real nevertheless and one might ask the question, "how slow is bad and how fast is good?" Only historians of the next century_ will tell us.

Why, one might ask, has it been so slow when happy chants of freedom have been ringing round the globe for a good long time, and human rights have been a cornerstone of the United Nations since its inception, and a practical policy of Canada, though sadly not of all of her colleagues in the Commonwealth?

The answer lies in many places, and it has to do with the', whole history of South Africa, from the founding of Cape Town in 1652, soon after the first French settlers arrived in Canada. The story thereafter became one of the struggle between white settlers and indigenous peoples for scarce resources, particularly of arable land. This process did not include the decimation of indigenous peoples, though many frontier battles were fought.

The act of Union and the Independence of South Africa were confirmed by the British Parliament in 1910 on a basis which allowed the white man to govern the country, which he has done for the last 80 years.

Since then we have grown into a country (I cannot say we are yet a nation) of 35 million people. But with six major languages there is a communication difficulty between the groups and cultures, though English increases its role as a common media. More than 45 percent of our 26 million black people are under 18 years old, testifying to a far too high birth rate. There is great unemployment, not helped by sanctions and disinvestment and enormous backlogs in housing as masses follow the universal path of developing lands, of leaving the rural areas in search of viable urban lives. Of course, apartheid is responsible for some of our imbalances, but many are tout court the product of being a middle order developing country.

I do not wish to minimise the disastrous impact of apartheid but, leaving aside for a moment this dominant aberration, one can say that a relatively modern State has evolved with a sound infrastructure and a high per capita GNP by African standards, although a low one by the standards of the developed world.

The World Bank's World Development Report 1989 illustrates that, compared with the major OECD nations and contrary to conventional wisdom, South Africa is a poor country. In fact, it has recently been downgraded by the World Bank from the upper-middle income to lower-middle income category for the first time. In terms of GNP per capita it is just ahead of Cost Rica, Malaysia, and Mexico and just behind Poland, Lebanon and Brazil. Comparisons with Canada and Australia are equally illuminating. With a population of 26 million the Canadian GNP is six times that produced by South Africa's 34 million and Australia's half-as-great population produces a GNP three times the size of South Africa. Our relative ability to provide infrastructure and social services is therefore limited, compared with yours.

Nevertheless, the country is reasonably well-placed by the undemanding standards of our continent, to face the positively daunting task of creating an amalgam of the First and Third Worlds which the times, population growth and rapid urbanization are thrusting towards each other at a great pace.

The world perceives South Africa to have been governed by a group of obsessive racists whose only cause is at all costs to '; preserve their own power. Racist one should try not to be, but ' in fact I don't think the majority of white men in South Africa are racist, in the sense of hating people of different ethnic backgrounds. Most are tribalists and the preservation of the tribe was paramount. Apartheid is not an engaging policy. It never had a chance of working from an economic viewpoint and its moral turpitude stemmed from the attempt by a minority for its own benefit to impose it on the majority. If apartheid had been an experiment between consenting adults so to speak, it would no doubt have been seen as stupid but not immoral. Consenting adults are allowed to do anything these days.

Apartheid encapsulated the white, and particularly the Afrikaners', determination not to be driven by formless world opinion into the morass of Africa's equally formless nonbeing. The Afrikaner in Africa wanted to preserve his language, culture and institutions and in 1948 when apartheid was introduced he did not know how to do it other than on a tribal basis of separation, distinction and exclusion.

This all seems monstrously silly now to most white South Africans. The recent election said 70 percent of them voted for reform. One suspects that most of the balance who voted so to speak, against reform, were protesting both their own--relative economic decline (which has flowed from greater resources being applied to the needs of the black community as well as from counterproductive sanctions) and their fears as to what sort of future a reform process would produce for them. These are quite understandable human reactions. I would judge that those who voted against reform on purely racial grounds, i.e. I hate black people anyway--were relatively few.

I believe we stand on the threshold of a genuinely new era in South Africa. I have discussed the extraordinary impact of Mr. Gorbachev in his deus ex machina role, which as far as South Africa is concerned has allowed us to escape our longstanding fixation with Moscow's supposed nefarious designs and see our future as being in our own hands rather than in others. It has by precept given new life to individualism and the market, not just for South Africa but for most of Africa too, and has given impulse to the old adage that together we stand or divided we fall.

What do these thoughts mean in practice for South Africa? The international community, wringing its hands now for a generation, has sought to "do something" by backing that well proven back-runner, sanctions, the fundamental effect of which, to the extent they work, is to diminish the ability of any government in South Africa, present or future, to achieve desirable practical equity amongst its people and it has encouraged extremists on both the right and the left.

The White House under President Reagan and his astute agent Chester Crocker pursued a policy of "constructive engagement:' I have never understood the hostility shown in the USA and elsewhere to this policy, which to my mind displayed a realism about Southern African affairs which went to the heart of the matter. When sanctions engaged the emotions rather than the intellect of Congress, the academia, the States and cities of the United States and the Commonwealth, the U.S. adminstration was quietly burrowing away at the issues which made sense on the ground: independence for Nambia, the proper location of Cuban troops and the legitimate security fears of South Africa and the Southern continent as a whole.

I think this clear-minded and painstaking process has justified itself in what still looks to be a successful fulfilment of UN Resolution 435--in bringing about independence in Nambia and the removal of Cuba troops from surrogate adventurism in Angola. It should be remembered that Dr. Crocker did the groundwork for these achievements before Mr. Gorbachev came to power, and against the background that the adminstration did not favour sanctions. The processes of history take time.

In addition, I think the Reagan administration set in hand the notion that in Southern Africa resources were too limited for them to be wasted on bush wars, and that sights should be set on regional co-operation. I have no doubt that South Africa reacted better to the encouragement from the White , House and from Downing Street to move forward, than to\ advocacy and imposition of sanctions and boycotts. Likewise in Mozambique and Angola, regional assistance and co-operation have become the accepted wisdom. Meetings on regional matters by Mr. De Klerk, with President Mobutu of Zaire, President Kaunda of Zambia and the forthcoming meeting with President Houphouet Boigny of Ivory Coast, are indicative of African reality but helped also by the broad implications of glasnost and President Bush's recognition of global interdependence.

Our new State President has bound himself and his government to create, over the coming five years, a new South Africa. Why over five years? Surely the world has waited long enough for radical change? Surely the promises of earlier governments, Rubicon crossings and statements at the United Nations have been conspicuous only by their lack of follow up?

Wise women and men have long since recognised that if the goal is a reasonably democratic South Africa, which, whatever , its constitutional system may be, is not racially discriminatory, then the odds are that this goal cannot be achieved dramatically by fiat. We will certainly strive for this goal but in any reality it can only be achieved over time it, perfectly, it can be achieved at all. The international community must not reject in South Africa the workable just because it is not the ideal.

Why then five years? I think it is a common cause in South Africa that we will not have another election again, no not ever, based on the present Constitution which accords the vote only to white, Indian, and mixed race people. I repeat, this is common cause for the majority of South Africans.

Mr. De Klerk's formal power base terminates in five years and, in my view, no doubt in the view of the international community and certainly in the view of my fellow citizens, that period must bring absolutely credible progress towards a form of democracy acceptable to the majority of South Africans.

Mr. De Klerk has invited all South Africans to join in a process of discussion and negotiation towards this end, provided they will participate in achieving a new South Africa on a peaceful basis. But all South Africans do not want to do that. For many, suspicion about the past and honest doubt about motives, play a great role in their thinking. For others the prospect of the radical change which must be wrought is too heartrending to be contemplated and the comfort of the known is preferable.

For others still there is the view that gradual change, of the nature inherent in the concept of negotiation, will leave the institutions and privileges of the past intact and therefore revolution can be the only solution. One might summarise by saying that revolution is a supposedly quick fix for the underlying socio-economic issues just as maintaining the status quo reflects a desire to avoid the issues altogether.

Mr. De Klerk's formidable task is nevertheless to weld these -attitudes together by starting, as he says, to lay emphasis on those values which bind all South Africans together and not on those which separate them. They are, as he also says, a common South African citizenship, the rule of law and a bill of human rights and constitutional methods to eliminate domination of one group over another.

This last point may sound strange in your society where no identifiable group dominates another, but in South Africa we have to be realistic both about First and Third Worlds, the lack of a national language or culture, many real tribal differences and the urban problems caused by massive movements of people into the towns whose interests and needs differ from those who perforce continue to dwell in tribal societies.

What are the practical requirements for a process of peaceful reform in South Africa?

Number one is obviously a belief in and demonstration of the bona fides of the people who now govern the country. A process of radical change without revolution must rely to a considerable extent on goodwill, and no goodwill can exist without trust. I do believe in Mr. De Merk's bona fides because we only have five years in which we can get over hurdles. He has certainly done his best to demonstrate it in his first 60 days by releasing important political detainees and in allowing protest marches and meetings. These may seem easy and simple actions but in the context of the history of my country they are courageous and dramatic decisions on which there can be no going back.

Number two, we must have a sparky economy to give resilience to reform. Many countries have had radical changes in the nature of their governments in the name of freedom or independence and I do not have to argue the subsequent deterioration of the living standards of the liberated. Reform and the process of change from one system to another in todays' complex world not only means engaging and maintaining the support of those who will lose privilege, but encouraging the support of those who hope for benefit. This is an expensive business, as Mr. Gorbachev is finding out.

In this regard, an astute U.S. observer on South Africa recently remarked: "When AIDS, the need to compete on the global stage, the fragile nature of the environment, and the sophistication of information age technology demand the full attention of all societies, the sounds of freedom songs and hymns of national liberation--even though haunting and emotive--no longer have the clear and penetrating tone they once did. No group of people--no matter how they symbolise themselves--can thrive in modern society without spending more time in policy think tanks than in revolutionary meetings of 'the people':'

Those who continue to cry for sanctions for multitudinal (and not always admirable) reasons, should consider carefully whether their supposed moral purpose is achieved by trying to create economic conditions in South Africa which may make a process of transition infinitely difficult and the inheritance of an economic wasteland infinitely unattractive for the people who must dwell under whatever successor government there may be.

Third, the world must not see South Africa as an isolated .problem of human relations on its own. It is part of the southern subcontinent of Africa and its people, of whatever hue, are Africans. South Africa is the most economically advanced of African countries and it is perhaps the enigma of the continent in the sense that coming to grips with the looming 21st century imposes on it in concentrated form many of the pressures which are manifest on the globe as a whole. Success in its own experiments in achieving an African dynamic will certainly be of the greatest possible value to its neighbours and the world should enhance and support this process rather than frustrating it.

Indeed interdependence and co-operation within regionalised economic structures is now better understood to be a global trend. Whether it is the move towards integrated markets in North America (Canada, the U.S. and Mexico), the Far East, or Europe, the economic imperatives are the same. Trying to achieve EC economic integration without one of the major economies of Europe, such as Germany, would be unthinkable. Trying to develop Southern Africa without South Africa is equally unthinkable. And, at a time that the divisions between Eastern and Western Europe are dissolving, "like an aspirin" as Giscard d'Estaing puts it, it ill-behoves the EC, the U.S., the Commonwealth or the Far East to promote a policy in Southern Africa having the effect of putting up barriers between South Africa and the rest of the region.

There are many who feel, though I don't think many of you here today feel, that South Africans, in terms of its white people, owe some recompense to history for the role they have played both as surrogates of Dutch and British imperialism, and in their own right as the dominant tribe in Southern Africa. I do not intend to make apologies for a history which has not always been admirable in human terms, and which in this generation has called down legitimate calumny on our heads. It is a story of great stupidity and vulgar self-interest and also a story of great heroism and bravery and people of all colours have been involved in all respects.

But the future is more important than the past and I sincerely hope the Canadian people can help us create a future which will indeed be a restitution and also a beacon to many other countries in the world which struggle with seemingly implacable problems.

The appreciation of the meeting was expressed by Douglas Derry, Partner, Price Waterhouse and a Past President of The Empire Club of Canada.