I have been struggling to interpret the gist of a news story on the front page of the latest Sunday Times. “Still too many billionaires from Stellenbosch — Reuel Khoza”, ran the headline.
Almost anything Khoza says is newsworthy and, in his case, probably important. Khoza is, by any standards, a remarkable and widely admired business leader. Relentlessly critical of successive ANC governments when it would have been more comfortable to keep quiet, he has been chair of Nedbank, chair of Eskom and is chair today of Discovery. Now semi-retired, he is a major local cultivator and exporter of avocados.
Speaking at a Black Management Forum seminar, the Sunday Times reported he was among top black business leaders who had “blasted the slow pace of economic transformation” and that he had picked out, particularly, Stellenbosch.
“We probably have the densest concentration of billionaires in Stellenbosch,” the report quoted him saying. “It is not by accident, it is by absolute design. They [Afrikaners] laid the foundation legislatively in a manner that was not open to misinterpretation: they meant business.
“To produce something like two, three or four but fewer than 10 [black] billionaires in those 30 [since 1994] years, it cannot be justified.”
My struggle involves trying to decipher what he means. Is he criticising the Stellenbosch billionaires for being undeservedly rich, or the government for failing to achieve the same results among black people?
I haven’t been able to talk to him or read his original speech. But my guess, based on the record, is that he was criticising the ruling party and its policies in office. And yes, we all know its record in the wealth creation department is abysmal.
Just this week we’ve heard that despite the best efforts, since 2009, of industry ministers Rob Davies and, now, Ebrahim Patel, and despite the billions of rand thrown at the black industrialists’ programme, SA’s manufacturing sector has been in free-fall for 16 years, including every year the two gentlemen mentioned have been in office, according to Stats SA. By the end of the first quarter of 2023, manufacturing contributed 11.2% of GDP, compared to more than 23% in the late 1980s.
Now there’s a pointer for Khoza. In the ’80s many of the Stellenbosch billionaires were out of university and on the road. Obviously, and tragically for us stuck with the ANC today, the then Afrikaner nationalist government didn’t allow black people to go to “white” universities. So, many of the black people who should be wildly rich by now never made it.
We live with the catastrophic results of this policy stupidity now and it is surprising to hear that Khoza may have encouraged the current government, as the report suggested, to “repurpose” for black people “the same legislative framework (does he really mean apartheid?) that underpinned the economic successes of the Afrikaners”.
Creating racial or national exclusivity anywhere almost guarantees future disaster. But what those Stellenbosch billionaires were doing in their 20s is simply impossible now, however much repurposing the government does.
Mainly, the billionaires were at university and, surprise surprise, the University of Stellenbosch. In the ’60s and ’70s Stellies — particularly its commerce and law faculties — turned out brilliantly-prepared graduates. Whitey Basson, Christo Wiese, Paul Harris, Jannie Mouton, Michiel le Roux, GT Ferreira, Pat Goss and, a little later, Koos Bekker. Johan Rupert studiously avoids the Stellenbosch tag though he had a good decade as chancellor of the university from 2010 to the end of 2019.
I guarantee that all of these guys would credit Stellies as one of the main contributing factors to their subsequent success. For the most part they had not attended fancy private schools and the fact that Stellies taught only in Afrikaans would have demanded extreme levels of concentration and effort especially from the English speakers. Many stayed on an extra year.
From where in SA today should black billionaires spring? How does Khoza get to double-figure black billionaires, even in these dark hours when a billion rand is a fraction of what it was 30 years ago?
It simply has to be from networks at university and, if that is true, they would still be young. And, frankly, which university? Black parents queue up to get their kids into Stellenbosch. I wonder whether the fact that the language of tuition is now English has blunted the Stellenbosch experience? Making something hard sometimes increases the quality of the people who achieve success.
The Stellenbosch billionaires Khoza was referring to are mainly retired now, though not one has left the country. What’s required from the government are policies that encourage enterprise and effort and which recognise that in a democratic SA, a very different place from the land that bred the billionaires, the hankering after the old Afrikaner route to the top, every step planned and detailed, is a waste of time. This is not an invitation to keep making the same stupid decisions over and over again.
• I made a foolish error in my column last week by describing a payment to now deputy president Paul Mashatile from businessman Edwin Sodi in 2015 as being R11,211,873 when in fact it was R112,118.37. No excuses, and grovelling apologies.
• Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.
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