Businessmen urge easing of race laws

Press, 14 November 1981, Page 8

Businessmen urge easing of race laws

NZPA-Reuter Cape Town

Leading South African businessmen have called on the Prime Minister (Mr Pieter Botha) to relax the country's strict racial-segre-gation laws and let the private sector operate more effectively.

At a meeting yesterday between Mr Botha and 600 industrialists, a succession of delegates told the Prime Minister that the Government's racial policies were holding the private sector back.

“There was simply not one speaker who did not ask for an end to discrimination." Harry Oppennheimer, head of the Anglo-American Corporation, said.

"Very much more is urgently needed to be done . . . in order to set the private sector free to realise its potential for the country,” he told a news conference after the meeting. The meeting was called to follow up a similar conference in Johannesburg two years ago. At that meeting, business leaders enthusiastically greeted suggestions by Mr Botha that they work with the Government for the country's common good. "We were a bit less starryeyed at this meeting than we were at the last one," Mr Oppenheimer said.

A testy Mr Botha shrugged off the criticism at a press conference after the meeting, saving he had the backing of most of the industrialists for his policies. “I’m quite satisfied that we achieved quite a lot,” he said.

Mr Botha opened the meeting by urging the business community to help develop the country's backward rural areas, build more houses for blacks, and step up training programmes to alleviate the acute shortage of skilled labour. But the Prime Minister, who was flanked by his entire Cabinet during an hourlong speech, made it clear he was committed to the apartheid system of separate racial development. Mr Oppenheimer said all 19 speakers who replied to the Prime Minister, among them blacks and the heads of the country's largest and wealthiest ‘ conglomerates, called for an end to racial discrimination.

One delegate, who declined to be identified, said the Prime Minister was told the country needed "more change, more rapidly."

"He'll have a lot of trouble to get anybody to come to a third conference if he doesn't act after this," the delegate said.