New wealth changing face of S. Africa

Press, 16 April 1980, Page 20

New wealth changing face of S. Africa

By

STANLEY UYS

in the ‘Guardian,’ London

South Africa is a country awash with money these days. It comes from the gold bonanza. Ten years ago, gold fetched $35 an ounce. Last year it rose crazily to past the $BOO mark and is still hovering above $5OO. South Africa produces more than 22-1 million ounces a year, more than half the world’s supply. Whites in South Africa are being only human when they expect the gold bonanza to solve not only some of their economic problems, but perhaps some, of their race problems, too; ■ The feeling of financial well-being and the general air of opulence in the white suburbs -is merging into a mood of political euphoria. A reformist prime minister and a gold boom — it’s too good to be true. The Budget introduced in the South African Parliament late last month began the task of redistributing some of the bonanza to blacks. Expenditure on black education is going up by a record 34 per cent. Money will also be spent on housing and other amenities. But the real function of Ithe bonanza will be to pick

the economy up from the floor where it has been lying since the Soweto uprising in 1976, and sustain it at a minimum 5 per cent annual growth for 10 years — and even that will only hold unemployment at its present levels. Otherwise, there could be six million black unemployed by the turn of the century. This has been one of the most interesting changes taking place in South Africa — the way the Afrikaner rulers have started to think in economic terms, not only in the familiar terms of race identity and ethnic survival. They clearly accept. that. if the economy fails, the Prime Minister’s reforms will fail, too. The minimum starting point for political reform in South Africa is regeneration of the economy. A stable, contented black labour force must be created, and created quickly. The priorities have become economic, not ideological, ones. This is playing havoc with the apartheid ideology, and the Afrikaners have become a ruling class in ideological confusion. They have had to scrap, for example, one of

the most sacred of apartheid principles — that Africans must be temporary sojourners in the white man’s cities, because if they are allowed permanence, they immediately construct a whole edifice of political and other demands. This kind of change in the Afrikaner’s approach would not have been possible 20 years ago, because then they still felt too threatened as a group: politically, economically, culturally. Since then they have been swept up in the economic expansion of the cities and become part of the wider white community — from which they had withheld themselves as an exclusive ethnic group. As a result, they are leav« fng behind many of the old ideological hang-ups which gave them almost no flexibility in handling the race situation. Their aim is still white hegemony, but the method is no longer to batten down the hatches, but to open safety valves. Ruling classes pay a price for opening safety valves: they can never shut them again. The Prime Minister Mr Botha, knows this. In South Africa a few

The South African Min- 1 ister of Finance, Senator O. P. F. Horwood, had plenty to smile about when he presented his latest Budget.

weeks ago, I asked Mr Harry Oppenheimer, chairman of Anglo-American and financial backer of the offi* cial Parliamentary Opposition whether he thought the process Mr Botha had started was reversible. He thought it was not — that Mr Botha had “stuck his neck out so far to the left of (his) party” that he could not pull back “without

intolerable loss of face to him and to those of his colleagues who’ve been supporting him.” Mr Oppenheimer is right. Mr Botha must go forward now, but first he must deal with the opposition from his own right wing. There can be no real progress until this struggle is resolved. The knives are out in the National Party. Mr Botha has planned a special role for the Englishspeaking business community in the new scheme of things. Traditionally, this community has been cast as the enemy of the Afrikaner: now, as the vehicle of the free enterprise system, it is being recruited to get the economy on the road, devel- . op the black homelands, and generally prove to blacks that capitalism can work for them and that they need not turn to African socialism or Marxism for their rights. In return, what the business community sees as its fetters will be struck off. Mr Botha is freeing the free enterprise system in the same way as Mrs Thatcher in Britain. He is even going to sell off shareholdings in some of the numerous State corporations that were created originally by an Afrikaner n, illHMimiMlOi—nnnw*

Government as a way of diminishing the economic power of the English-speak-ing business community. Set this against the black man’s growing intolerance of apartheid, the way in which he is beginning in a series , of new strikes to flex his industrial muscle, the inspiration he has derived.. from Mr Mugabe’s victory in Zimbabwe, and the general climate of expectations which has been created in South Africa by the public triumph of the idea of reform, and what do you have?. A recipe for change, whether it is intended or unintended, controlled or tin-, controlled. ‘ There is no way now In . which, the. ..lid , can. .be put back on the Pandora’s box which Mr Botha has opened. Certainly, it will mean increasing instability in both white and black politics, and certainly, too, the military will be invoked in its new political decision-making role to try to lock a regulator on the timetable of change. But, at the end of the day, change will be there. South Africa, quite simply, is about to break out of its apartheid straitjacket. It will be unrecognisable at the end of the 1980 s.