S.A. businessmen demand radical law changes

Press, 16 August 1985, Page 6

S.A. businessmen demand radical law changes

NZPA-Reuter Johannesburg Top South African businessmen urged yesterday radical changes in laws that curb the movement of black people, partly blaming the restrictions for 19 months of riots that have claimed more than 600 lives.

The Urban Foundation, headed by the mining millionaire, Harry Oppenheimer, said the Government attempts to confine most of the country’s 73 per cent black majority to tribal homelands through apartheid laws had backfired. The business-funded group, set up in 1977 to try to improve urban living standards, said in its annual review that influx control laws were offensive and should be reviewed radically and urgently. “Migration policies designed to contain the black community within the homelands are having precisely the opposite effect.

For they have generated rural poverty to such a

degree that pressure to urbanise has significantly grown.” The review blamed “South Africa’s unwillingness to accept and plan for the process of urbanisation" as the underlying causes of worsening black unrest.

Mr Oppenheimer, the foundation’s president, wrote in the review: “South Africa is more unsettled than ever before and black grievances more acute.” He singled out the “offensive and intolerable” urbanisation curbs. The foundation said that other countries also had tried to control urbanisation. “Unique" to South Africa, however, is the determination with which these policies have been pursued and the racial discrimination on which they rest.”

It quoted black people who complained of the humiliation of having to produce “pass books” on demand to prove their right to be in an urban area, and gave 1984 statistics showing that arrests under the laws had

averaged one every three minutes. The foundation said that official population figures were inaccurate because many black people living illegally in cities had not filled in census forms. It estimated that there were eight million urban blacks in 1980 and would be 17 million by 2000, against official estimates of seven and 14 million. The South African business community was anxiously awaiting a speech by the President Mr Pieter Botha, this morning, in which he was expected to announce reforms because of increasing international diplomatic and economic pressure for change. A leader of the Dutchdescended Afrikaner business community, Anton Rupert, said that lack of planning had created urban housing, infrastructure and services shortages, leading to overcrowding and unacceptable social conditions. “These shortages have exacerbated an already volatile situation,” wrote Mr

Rupert, vice-president of the foundation. The review said that the Government had made significant reform moves, notably formal acknowledgement of the permanent status of South Africa’s urban black population.

“There remains much anger and resentment at unacceptable living conditions, high levels of unemployment, ineffective local government, poor law enforcement and — despite a much greater allocation of resources — unequal education.”

Revolutionary and criminal elements may have exploited this, the review said, while “the use of the Army to quell disturbances has created the impression amongst many observers that civil unrest has reached revolutionary proportions.”

A foundation survey showed that 55 per cent of employers wanted the curbs phased out, saying they undermined industrial relations and inhibited the growth of a skilled, settled work-force.