Du Toit The ANC Billionaires

Big Capital's Gambit and the Rise of the Few
1. Auflage 2022
ISBN: 978-1-77619-135-2
Verlag: Jonathan Ball
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 256 Seiten

'We were talking about the rise of Japan, about Ronald Reagan's Star Wars ... globalisation, technology. And they were still banging on about the Freedom Charter.' - Anglo American's Michael Spicer on the ANC in the mid-1980s. In 1985, a group of white South African business leaders, led by Gavin Relly, the executive chairperson of Anglo American, travelled to a game lodge in Zambia to meet with the exiled ANC leadership under Oliver Tambo and Thabo Mbeki. This visit set in motion a coordinated and well-resourced plan by big business to influence and direct political change in South Africa. In The ANC Billionaires, top-selling author Pieter du Toit draws on first-hand accounts by major roleplayers about the contentious relationship between capital and the ANC before, during and after the country's transition to democracy, and shows how the liberation organisation was completely unprepared to navigate the intersection between business and politics. He also ties the rise of the new elite - including Cyril Ramaphosa, Patrice Motsepe and Saki Macozoma - to the ANC, a party of government and patronage.

PIETER DU TOIT is an award-winning journalist and assistant editor at News24. He is the author of the best-selling The Stellenbosch Mafia (2019) and the co-author of Enemy of the People (2017), with Adriaan Basson. Pieter is a former editor of HuffPost South Africa and news editor of Beeld and Netwerk24.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Du Toit, Pieter

Leseproben

Introduction

The winter of 2022 was a difficult one. Eskom, the parastatal that has the monopoly on the provision of electricity, was in an advanced state of failure as loadshedding crippled the economy and further depressed South Africans’ standard of living. Unemployment was at crisis levels, with the expanded definition closing in on 50 per cent, and continued tepid economic growth, high inflation and the rising cost of living meant that the country wasn’t about to exit the stagnation and regression of the previous decade and more. And South Africans were increasingly starting to question the country’s underlying social compact, querying what undergirds our society and challenging the agreements and covenants we entered into during the political transition from apartheid to democracy.

There are very few achievements in this country’s tumultuous history that rank alongside the political transition between 1990, when the African National Congress (ANC) was unbanned, and 1996, when the final Constitution was adopted. In the space of six short years, South Africa went from exclusionary white minority rule to a democracy under a black majority government. This wasn’t achieved easily, nor without bloodshed, but the country avoided a civil war and protracted strife because the main actors on all sides of the divide were able to look beyond the horizon. And it was these main actors – principally the National Party (NP) government and the ANC – who were able to agree on the main tenets of what was achievable and what wasn’t.

Of course, there were many factors that contributed to decisions about the interim constitution, the final election date and the government of national unity. But it was the elite pacts – the agreements between those groups in society that possess political and economic power – that ensured stability and breakthroughs.

While the political compromises have been investigated, documented and analysed, the economic compromises and agreements that took place among the elite have had similar, if not more consequential, repercussions for South Africa. Almost 30 years after political freedom was achieved, the country is still searching for agreement on how to change the structure of the economy, how to ensure that more people are included, and what needs to be done to achieve faster, efficient growth. And while the ANC government, in power for 28 years in June 2022, remains engaged in its internecine wars of power and succession, and while big capital retreats from investment just enough to remain profitable while hedging its bets on South Africa’s future, ordinary South Africans stagger on, trying to remain afloat in an increasingly hostile economic environment in which living costs are shooting up and wages remain behind.

The rise of a few well-connected and very wealthy billionaires and millionaires after 1994, all of them connected to the ANC, is testament to the opportunism of some individuals who very early on identified the rich seam of economic opportunity that freedom brought, and who believed that their alignment with the post-apartheid political elite could be a very profitable bargaining chip. It is also testament to big capital’s solutions to the existential crisis it went through in the 1980s and 1990s. By the early 1990s these conglomerates – Anglo, Rembrandt, Sanlam, Old Mutual, Liberty Life, AngloVaal – controlled 86 per cent of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) and had been producing rich profits for decades.1 They had to find a way to survive.

But the ANC did not really believe in the free market, and it most certainly did not believe in apartheid capitalism. So the conundrums during the transition years were, for big capital, how to protect its interests while embracing the new regime, which historically had been antagonistic towards it; and, for the ANC and liberation movement, how to implement its stated policies in a rapidly changing global environment antagonistic towards its ideological foundation.

The repercussions of the decisions made by big capital and the ANC to account for those challenges are still being felt today. Big capital is operating in a market-friendly global environment, with capital flowing freely from hospitable to inhospitable climes to ensure the best returns for investors, while the ANC remains in government and in charge of policy and other governance levers able to influence the shape of wealth accumulation and redistribution.

Michael Spicer, an executive at Anglo American during the transition years and someone who played a central role in big capital’s attempts to move closer to the ANC – and in attempts to help move the ANC closer towards business – remained adamant that early empowerment was ‘absolutely necessary’. After establishing contact with the ANC during a period in which the apartheid government seemed to be resolutely unwilling to do so, big business moved to create structures and relationships to help it understand the ANC – but also to ensure that the ANC understood that they were now in a different environment than 1980s exile. ‘It was very, very difficult to navigate that space during that time,’ Spicer, who died suddenly in March 2022, said in an interview for this book. ‘The movement spanned Stalinism to free marketeers, and it tried to provide some coherence, but in general it wasn’t market friendly. And then throw into the pot race, apartheid and the history of the country …’2

But big business had no option other than to navigate that space if it wanted to continue operating in South Africa, and what followed were thousands of hours and hundreds of days of influencing, cajoling, meeting and convincing the liberation movement of the value of South African big capital – with some of its leaders even providing logistical and organisational support for the political negotiations process. Spicer said that after individuals like Gavin Relly, Anglo American’s boss who succeeded Harry Oppenheimer, and Mike Rosholt, at the top of the Barlow Rand empire, agreed what had to be done, there was a largely coherent view that big business, too, ‘needed to make changes’.3 He recalled ‘a flurry of activity’ in big business, trying to massage and persuade the presumptive new political leaders of their bona fides and what was needed to ensure future success. ‘Business was taking a hands-on, coordinated and coherent approach.’4

One of the ‘many streams’ that came together to ensure a peaceful transition was the country’s strong civil society. ‘Churches, universities, the judiciary, a strong business community and a vibrant NGO sector – all of these managed to pull together,’ Spicer said. ‘And business played quite an important role in that it had relationships – personal relationships – with all the leadership. The relationships built up in the discussions, both in exile and when [the ANC] came back, were one of the reasons we had a successful transition.’

Business was quite clear about its intent; the ANC less so. The movement arrived back in South Africa uncertain of its exact economic policy positions, save to proclaim allegiance to its 1955 Freedom Charter, a document which by then had become moribund as a guideline for modern economic theory, opaquely advocating for the nationalisation of banks, mines and monopoly industry. Saki Macozoma, one of post-1994 South Africa’s most successful black businessmen, says he was involved in long discussions at the highest levels in the ANC about keeping the party in line with the main policy positions of the Freedom Charter, but that implementing them as was envisaged in 1955 wasn’t possible. ‘When those of us in the ANC’s economic transformation committee were putting together the Ready to Govern document in 1992, we tried to keep it aligned with the Freedom Charter. But applying it to the economy largely did not make sense; it was not going to work, irrespective of the conditions we found,’ he said.5

Trevor Manuel, who was finance minister between 1996, when he was appointed by Nelson Mandela, and 2009, when he was shifted to another portfolio by Jacob Zuma, says there was a singular determination to run the country efficiently and to gain the trust of the global community. ‘We wanted to demonstrate that we weren’t two-bit players just out of nappies; we were serious about running the country,’ Manuel said.6

And what did this in effect mean? South Africa had to become a credible investment destination, and it had to play by the rules. So it meant the adoption of pro-market, conservative economic policies that had as their goal the consolidation of state expenditure, the reduction of debt and, crucially, the redistribution of wealth and social development through economic growth.

It also meant bringing formerly excluded black businessmen into the rosewood-panelled salons of big capitalism. And some of them became fabulously wealthy.

Almost thirty years later, amid high levels of poverty and deprivation, and the deterioration of social services, the question is being asked ever more urgently: did the ANC sell out the ideals of the liberation struggle? Could the political transition have been concluded in such a way as to ensure a just and sustainable economic transition?

Bobby Godsell, who once headed Anglo American’s gold division and who distinguished himself as...