Ownership and Governance of Companies

Essays from South Africa and the Global South

Jonathan Michie, Vishnu Padayachee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000404005
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: International Marketing
• Index: Business

Apartheid South Africa was often thought to run in the interests of the business elite. Yet 27 years after apartheid, those business interests remain largely entrenched. Why? Did the South African business community play a role in engineering this outcome – perhaps recognising the apartheid era was over, and jumping ship in time? Conversely, the mission of the ANC was widely perceived to be to shift wealth and power into the hands of the whole community. Yet despite 'black empowerment' measures, corporate ownership remains largely in white hands – and certainly in the hands of an elite few, even though no longer restricted to whites.

This picture is replicated across the global south, where corporate ownership tends to be concentrated in the hands of an elite, rather than being more democratically spread. Why have alternative corporate forms not been pursued more vigorously, with ownership in the hands of customers, employees, and local communities? In the case of South Africa, where the majority of customers and employees are black, this could have delivered on the ANC's mission to replace the apartheid era with a democratic one – in terms of wealth, incomes and power, as well as in terms of voting and civic rights. This edited volume explores all these questions and looks at ways to align corporate forms with economic and social goals.

The chapters in this book were originally published as special issues of International Review of Applied Economics.

PART I

South African business in the transition to democracy

South African business in the transition to democracy

Michie JonathanPadayachee Vishnu

ABSTRACT

The transition to democracy in South Africa represents one of the most celebrated political moments of the late 20th C. While much has been said about the narrowly political and constitutional aspects of this period in South African and world history, little has been said about economic policy choices made in the transition years, or about the role of business in the transition or indeed about how business of all kinds responded to the changes. This collection of essays written by some of the leading scholars of South African business represents one of the first attempts to cover this lacunae in the literature. In the Introductory essay we review the context for these changes in politics and business relations, and summarise the findings of the papers that follow.

1. Introduction

It is almost a quarter of a century since Nelson Mandela and the ANC were elected overwhelmingly to form the first post-apartheid South Africa. There is something of a national and international consensus that the political transition was remarkably and thankfully successful, but that overcoming the huge economic and social inequalities that were created by apartheid has been less successful, and indeed surprisingly disappointing. At the time of writing [September 2018], the South African economy has slipped into its first recession for 9 years. Unemployment is above 27 per cent; fewer than 1 in 10 white people are unemployed, as against almost a third of black people. White people represent around a 10th of the population, yet still own three quarters of farmland. It remains one of the world’s most unequal economies.

The two of us collaborated in the early 1990s on the work of the Macroeconomic Research Group (MERG) which worked up policy proposals for an incoming ANC government, which aimed to tackle the economic and social legacies of apartheid (ANC, 1993). However, in the event, the ANC government chose to ignore the MERG recommendations for progressive economic policies and instead followed the advice of the ‘Washington Consensus’, which left the huge economic and social inequalities largely intact – and which also lay behind the global move towards ‘capitalism unleashed’, the 2007–2008 international financial crisis, the subsequent global recession of 2009 and, what for many has proved a lost decade of low growth, continued inequality and insecurity.

We did critique this missed opportunity for South Africa at the time, on which, see Michie and Padayachee (1997, 1998), in which we argued that to reconstruct and develop the South African economy and society would require something very different from the sort of economic orthodoxy represented by the government’s ‘Growth, Employment and Redistribution’ approach. We are now collaborating on a research project led by the University of the Witwatersrand on South African business in the transition to democracy, from which this Special Issue derives. Before commenting on the various papers, we give a brief overview of the context.

2. The role of South African business in shaping economic policy

In his paper on the MERG, Bill Freund (2013) emphasises the role of South African business, and in particular, the regular meetings at the Anglo-American Corporation’s (AAC) Brenthurst Library between the ‘doyen of South African business’ Harry Oppenheimer and Nelson Mandela. Freund stresses the complementary role of the series of corporate scenarios: one from Old Mutual/Nedcor, a second from Sanlam, and the Mont Fleur bird flight simulations of August 1992. (2013). Then, there was the role of the Consultative Business Forum, a pressure group set up by ‘liberal’ and progressive local business leaders whose aim was to engage the ANC on the economy.

Before we turn to these developments in the 1990s, it is worth commenting briefly on AAC CEO Gavin Relly’s meeting with Oliver Tambo and the ANC in Lusaka in 1985. Relly apparently defied Harry Oppenheimer, ‘who had ordered him to cancel the trip, and led a delegation of seven Whites, including Tony Bloom of the Premier Group; Harald Pakendorf, editor of Die Vaderland; Tertius Myburgh, editor of the Sunday Times; Hugh Murray, editor of Leadership SA; and some opposition leaders. The ANC delegation included Oliver Tambo, Mbeki, Chris Hani, Mac Maharaj, Pallo Jordan and James Stuart. The meeting, hosted by Zambian President Kenneth Kaunda, took place at Mfuwe, Kaunda’s presidential game lodge’. http://www.sahistory.org.za/topic/delegations-and-dialogue-between-anc-and-internal-non-government-groups.

Former AAC Chief Economist, Professor Gavin Keeton, who previously worked as an economist in the AAC Economics Department recalls the scenario planning work undertaken by Clem Sunter and others. Not everyone at AAC was apparently happy with this ‘diversion’ from normal duties but Gavin Relly was. The scenario planning exercise, according to Keeton, which led to the book by Sunter entitled The World and South Africa in the 1990s (1987) was influential among the white population in giving them a sense of hope for a post-apartheid future, that all was not necessarily lost. Sunter even went so far as to present a copy of the book to Nelson Mandela in his Victor Verster Prison house. He also went to Maputo to present it to the ANC leaders there sometime in the late 1980s. Apparently, the ANC/SACP South African Communist Party (SACP) activist and revolutionary Rob Davies was so incensed at the suggestion that the Soviet Union was going to collapse that he told them they would not be allowed to live in the new South Africa (Keeton, Interview 12 June 2015).

In 1986, Gavin Relly visited the ANC in Lusaka. In an interview with the ANC on that visit, Relly is reported to have said ‘we accept the likelihood of some form of mixed economy with a measure of state planning and intervention … because there is a quite justifiable emphasis on the part of black South Africans on a more equitable distribution of wealth to compensate for the errors of omission and commission of the apartheid era’ (Louw 1989, 80). This is without doubt a significant statement coming from (at the time) the leading and most globalised corporate entity in the country.

This view is picked up by Gavin Keeton (also a senior AAC executive at that time), who reports that the AAC leadership in the early 1990s began to explore various fiscal policy options to support some degree of post-apartheid redistribution, with briefing papers for the AAC leadership being produced along these lines, until they realised much to their surprise that the ANC leadership was not interested in such options. This is a crucial point, and it is worth quoting our exchange with Keeton on this:

GK:I was involved in writing some briefing papers for our people involved in it and you know, there was the talk at the time that … a percentage of the market capitalisation, the JSE, should be taken and put it into a fund to help, you know, restructure South Africa. And then basically we were told well, you know, you must stop writing these things, the ANC is not interested, you know. That is not what they want to do. So quite how that happened, I do not know.

VP:Did you get a sense of what people thought the ANC wanted to talk about?

GK:Well, I mean, I think already they began to think the ANC actually wants a very conservative fiscal policy, you know. They do not want this sort of expenditure type thing which people were looking to the capital market to fund. (Interview, 12 June 2015)

It would appear that Mandela often took the lead in cultivating close relationships with major international and local businessmen. He spent holidays with Clive Menell, the powerful head one of the country’s leading mining empires, and ‘he entertained at the home of one of Johannesburg’s most ostentatious businessmen, insurance magnate Douw Steyn, where guests were met in the driveway with champagne on silver salvers….’ (Waldmeir 1997, 255/6). Steyn in fact bought a luxurious home for Mandela (and Grace Machel) after his divorce from Winnie Mandela. We know a fair amount about the role played by established business like AAC in the transition but little about any influence Steyn and others of his ilk had on Mandela on matters of economic policy, and this remains a significant lacunae in understanding more fully the role of business in the South African transition. Perhaps not unexpectedly key players in the business sector tend now to downplay their influence and that of big business on ANC economic policy thinking.

Bobby Godsell (a long-standing former executive director of AAC), responding to a question about this issue at a Wits workshop to launch a new project on the role of business in South Africa’s transition, argued strongly against the view that big business had a major influence on Mandela and the ANC on economic policy, and that neither the Brenthurst meetings (which he often atte...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: How to align corporate forms with economic and social goals?
• Part I: South African business in the transition to democracy
• Part II: Alternative forms of ownership and control in the global south
• Index