Hard Line

Botha reaffirms apartheid

The host of dignitaries gathered last week in the main auditorium of Cape Town's spanking new civic center resembled nothing so much as a formal group portrait of South Africa's white-dominated power structure. On the dais, seated beneath half a dozen orange, white and blue national flags, were some 50 Cabinet members and senior officials of Prime Minister Pieter W. Botha's National Party government. Facing them were some 600 businessmen, industrialists, financiers and community leaders.

The keynote speaker was Prime Minister Botha himself, delivering what amounted to an extraordinary State of the Nation address. But what Botha had to say was far from what the assembled magnates wanted to hear: his government would not change the segregationist policies that have made South Africa an international pariah and that, many businessmen fear, are turning the country into a powder keg.

At a similar gathering two years ago, Botha had boosted the hopes of reform-minded businessmen with an outline of policies to ease the oppression of the country's 19.8 million blacks, who make up 71.5% of the population. Botha's program, which began well enough with recognition of black and mixed-race trade unions, has now stalled under pressure from his party's hard-line racist right wing.

Speaker after speaker rose from the audience last week to warn that the slow pace of the Prime Minister's program was endangering his goal of increasing economic prosperity because it was angering the blacks, who form 80% of the nation's work force. Said Industrialist Michael Rosholt, head of the giant Barlow Rand mining and manufacturing conglomerate: "A man can only be enterprising when he is free." Anton Rupert, head of Rothmans International Ltd. tobacco empire, described Botha's progress as "a shower of rain" that has dwindled to a few drops.

Specifically, the businessmen wanted blacks to get better housing and more sophisticated education, particularly in the technical field, where they are still refused entry into half-empty colleges. The nation badly needs skilled black workers. Liberal Industrialist Harry Oppenheimer warned that unless further changes are made, South Africa's 9 million urban blacks would use their growing trade union power "for political purposes, with gravely disruptive effects on the whole economy."

The businessmen got little satisfaction from Botha, who declared the meeting a success and said that he was "going home a happy man." That may be so, but the problems Botha seems so blithely ready to ignore can only grow bigger, and that raises the prospect of more unhappiness for South Africa in the future.

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