PALI LEHOHLA | Apartheid was all fine and dandy, but this is what broke the camel’s back? Anglo, SA needs answers

Anglo’s exit from South Africa raises more questions than answers. Its legacy of 100 years straddles benefit from the worst forms of brutality. This is especially in their signal product, the mining of gold.

In these holes of death, migrant labourers from Malawi, Mozambique, Rhodesia, Lesotho, Botswana, Swaziland and the homelands of Transkei, Ciskei, Bophuthatswana and Venda, including the self-governing territories of Gazankulu, Ka-Ngwane. Lebowa, Qwaqwa and KwaZulu, perished.

It is in the tree plantations of Mpumalanga and KwaZulu-Natal and the factories of Gauteng that Anglo displayed its success on the back of black suffering and millennial exploitation of black labour and graves that cry for justice that Anglo is leaving behind.

Last week civil society woke up to an empty cave and grave that Anglo is leaving after a mere 30 years of the company trying to clear and clean its conscience. It will have none of the cries of civil society, especially when government is quiet.

Civil society is up in arms and has initiated a social movement that is calling out Anglo American for daring to leave not only its ancestral colonial home but its special godly chapel in which many a polygamous marriage was consummated. Out of this enclave of matrimonial pledges generations were conceived and born.

With constitutional freedom of choice of spousal surname, Anglo has taken advantage of name changes, starting last year with change of name to Valterra Platinum by dropping its polygyny in favour of not only a new nomenclature in polyandry but playing somewhat a game of multiple gender with its entry into Canada sometime this year with a new partner. In anticipation of the nuptial exchanges, it has reclaimed its Anglo origins and now is eloping to Canada to become Anglo Teck and divorcing the American as a surname.

Why Anglo decided to go this route is not clear. But its history suggests that with the drive for clean energy, it was at the forefront. It dropped both coal and platinum as options of its future.

In the meantime, the world seems to have cycled back to coal at least. As Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley said at UN 80, fossil fuels are not the enemy, but emissions are. It appears therefore Anglo ― whatever new name it takes in search for its new identity ― missed this point when it divested from coal.

The mineral wealth of South Africa stolen as it has been by Anglo and others still exists in quanta that can propel South Africa forward.

The question uppermost in civil society but seemingly void in government relates to why Anglo is leaving South Africa, when in fact it benefited from the 1910 Union and has since been at the centre of fuelling the success of the apartheid regime, only to skilfully change its tune when apartheid was untenable.

What is it that could be worse than apartheid that has offended Anglo, causing it to pull out of South Africa when as a corporate it should stick it out in the transformation so badly needed in the country, however much imperilled the current misgoverning regime has become?

There is no humanly possible reason for Anglo to pull out of South Africa when it did not pull out during apartheid. Would it know something that we do not know? Why is the government so quiet? Is it because the GNU is so hopelessly hollowed of policy direction that it cannot even raise its voice for what civil society has pointed to as a glacial betrayal of South Africa by Anglo? Is it an elite exit pact from which the connected are to gain unearned benefits? Are the GNU members to benefit personally from the exit, which is certainly at the pain and limb of South Africans?

The second edition of the Indlulamithi Scenarios about South Africa 2035 followed on the Indlulamithi Scenarios of 2030. The revision of the scenarios was prompted by the emergence of several signs in the environment.

The second edition painted scenarios that are bleaker for 2035 compared with the ones for 2030. Three scenarios were painted by order of severity of outcomes. These were the Vulture Culture Nation, the Hadeda Nation and the Weaver Bird nation. The scenarios preceding these ones were the Gwara-Gwara Nation, the Isibujwa Nation and the Nayi le Walk.

What is revealed in the Madlanga Commission and the ad-hoc parliamentary committee hearings after Lt-Gen Nhlanhla Mkhanazi’s media conference suggests we are a Vulture Nation, having just graduated from a Gwara-Gwara revelation characterised by an average economic growth drops below 2%, with periods of deep recession, an official unemployment that hovers about 25% or higher, investments in key sectors like mining, agriculture and manufacturing drying up and a country whose creditors doubt the nation’s ability to recover from a financial meltdown.

By all accounts the press conference by Mkhwanazi helps define South Africa at 31. The Vulture Culture is an environment characterised by scavengers ― domestic and foreign ― who seem to hold the upper hand, ripping the skin from the body politic.

Organised crime syndicates seize the initiative from an increasingly disorganised and corrupt state. Official unemployment rates exceed 43% and youth unemployment soars above 60%. Fiscal catastrophe looms as South Africa borrows from anyone willing to extend credit.

One-third of South Africans go to bed hungry more than one day a week. As a vulgar vulture culture grips the nation, life is hard for ordinary South Africans. Expansive gas and oil discoveries and their revenue ignite some hope, but the vultures are rapacious in diverting these windfalls into their own pockets.

However bad the picture from these scenarios appears, South Africans are still here as citizens and as corporates who have to look in the mirror. The mineral wealth of South Africa stolen as it has been by Anglo and others still exists in quanta that can propel South Africa forward.

South Africa still owes the African continent a badge of honour they bestowed on it. However, disappointed as South Africans are today by the dramatic failings of the latter 15 years of our democracy, we owe it to Africa to straighten our obligations to ourselves and the continent.

We have to face our demons with or without Anglo, but Anglo cannot get off scot-free on historical debt it owes the poor of this country.

A blockchain debt register has to be established by civil society now that government has abandoned its responsibility, and this register must be presented for claims against Anglo in the highest courts of the globe. That is certainly not too much to ask to restore black lives that suffered under this multinational capital. We owe it to generations to come.

The evidence is undeniable, the palliatives have to be rejected and the Anglo antics have to be called out. Anglo has to show up in the big hole in Kimberley, in the abandoned gold fields of the Free State, the platinum belt, the coal fields where tuberculosis ravaged lives and in migrant labour’s HIV/Aids orphans.

Chinua Achebe defines tragedy as understood by the Igbo, who say it is a state that is prolonged and unrelieved, like a bowl of wormwood a sip at a time, world without end.

This vile record of 120 years cannot go unpunished and unremedied.

Just as a reminder, Anglo was in the driving seat of the Mont Fleur Scenarios, and it is foolhardy for them to jump ship when they brought to bear the ingredients that are part of our post-apartheid being. The palace cannot be turned into a circus because of our choice of clowns. We have to restore the dignity of our institutions and it starts with putting Anglo on the straight and narrow to play a rebuilding role.

• Dr Pali Lehohla is a professor of practice at the University of Johannesburg, a research associate at Oxford University, a distinguished alumni of the University of Ghana. He is the former statistician-general of South Africa

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