FEATURE ARTICLE: February 1997 (No. 7)



South Africa: 1997

Changing SuperPower of Africa




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INTRODUCTION

Apartheid is gone and the most liberal Constitution in the World takes effect this February. But already a war of words erupted with the U.S. when Nelson Mandela announced a major arms sale to Syria. Home of the world's largest supply of gold, diamonds, titanium and other rare, exotic minerals, South Africa enters 1997 with white flight and soaring crime. Yet is it any worse than downtown L.A. (Los Angeles) or Detroit?

For the first time in their history since apartheid, blacks in South Africa have the power to govern themselves. Meanwhile, Mandela faces a huge brain drain. Vast business potential is limited by currency controls that make it very difficult for my clients to buy raw materials or other products from the U.S. or European suppliers. Each South African may convert to dollars and take out only 60,000 Rand per year (about U.S. $15,000).

It is clear that Mandela will have to liberalize South Africa's trade and currency exchange laws to the same extent as its Constitution to give it a competitive advantage with foreign investors who can always look elsewhere. These reforms may prompt some capital flight similar to those which have swept through Mexico and other countries; but history has shown that it returns, as it did to Mexico, when it is possible to make a profit. Without such economic reform, Mandela risks leaving South Africa as a declining country, slowly wasting away, without the liberal investment laws necessary to attract foreign investment so desperately needed by the country. Duties on imports are still extremely high.

As a personal example I found it easier to spend the money I made on the trip at the duty free shop rather than go through the hassle of exchanging it for dollars. My client had his imports confiscated for lack of the proper import permit. Yet he can import the same material into the U.S. without a permit and pay only a $62 duty.


GETTING THERE

It was 11 p.m. when our packed Delta/Sabena flight from Houston-Atlanta-Brussels touched down on a rain-soaked runway in Johannesburg. By sheer luck I had left Houston just as one of the worst ice storms in years was sweeping all the way south into deep Texas. But south of the equator, the seasons reverse; January is summer in South Africa -- 75 to 80 degrees Fahrenheit. A storm had just washed the city before we landed. This was a huge contrast after leaving a frigid 14 degree (F) Brussels where we took off in a morning fog for this 10-hour flight over the entire continent of Africa from north to south, most of it during daylight. I had a 2 hour layover in Brussels after a 10-hour overnight flight from Atlanta.

The next morning I boarded another flight for Cape Town, proposed site of the 2004 Olympics. A miniature San Francisco perched on the tip of the African land mass between the ocean and Table Mountain, it immediately got my vote. Just offshore two great oceans embrace—the Atlantic and the Indian oceans, the clash of their forces was the source of the great storms that caused many an ancient shipwreck off the Cape coast. It was a sea voyage rounding "the Cape of Good Hope" that sent a chill down an ancient mariners back. It was also a place where slave ships came calling. Other ships brought the Afrikaners, European whites with strong views of racial separation that was enforced by law not unlike the "Jim Crow" laws of the old American south. The only difference is that "Jim Crow" started dying in the 1960's; South Africa's lasted until the 1990's at a cost of over 17,000 deaths.

At the Cape airport, a small rental car was waiting -- steering wheel on the right side since S. Africans drive like the British (on the left). Incidentally, S. Africa has one of the highest crash rates in the world (according to the local paper), despite 4- and 6-lane divided highways connecting the major cities of Johannesburg and Pretoria. (At one point, I upheld my part by forgetting the left side of the car, which bounced off a curb, losing a hubcap). Coming from the airport into Cape Town, shifting the 4-speed standard transmission with my left hand, as I rounded a curve, the blue ocean opens up in front. A tremendous view! Then, a forest of office towers slide into view.


IMPRESSIONS

I had arrived on a Sunday and people were gathering along the miles and miles of beaches that hug the coast along SeaPoint. A market was in full swing along the road leading to the beach, but with only one day before I had to catch the Blue Train the next morning, I elected to drive around the mountains and see as much as possible. A block from the Cape Sun was an Intercontinental Hotel; I grabbed a quick lunch at a Subway sandwich shop and kept going, holding a video camera with my left hand and driving and shifting with my right hand (quite a trick, and explains the missing hubcap). I had little free time since meetings were scheduled to begin that night. English was spoken everywhere..

I got up on a bright sunny Monday unaware that my home base in Texas was going down to 25 degrees and ice was coating the freeways. I dropped off the car, minus a hubcap, at the Cape Town station a couple blocks from the Cape Sun Intercontinental and boarded the most famous train outside of the Orient Express, the South African "Blue Train" for a 26-hour journey (and 10-course meals) in a private compartment through the heart of Africa to Pretoria, the capital city. I was in suite "E" of car 11, five suites in our car. Some of the suites also boasted a shower and toilet. My suite had a table, sofa-bed, stuffed chair, a little sink with plug-ins for a razor (which I used, with an adapter, to connect the video camera and laptop), a bottle of wine which I promptly opened and a closet you could lock. My shower and toilet were two doors down the hall. You could lock the compartment door from the inside but not the outside, but it didn't matter.

My neighbor in the next suite was the editor/publisher of the Namib Times, on vacation from Walvis Bay, Namibia (remember the war there in the 80's?). On the second morning over a 10-course breakfast (I had to pass on 5 of them) he said, "We should start seeing the gold mines soon." And we did. Passing gold mines became as common as driving past gravel pits. Yet I could not help but notice the brilliant yellow of the tailings piles in the sun. The Blue Train, which is blue, makes one stop at Kimberly, home of the world's biggest diamond mine. The train rolls past factory after factory, mine after mine, past grazing cows and corn fields.

We pass Johannesburg, the commercial center of S. Africa whose high rise office towers make it look like any metropolitan city -- Houston or Dallas -- set among trees and spread over beautiful hills. The Blue Train finally came to a stop in a Victorian style station in Pretoria, the capital. Pretoria reminded me of Austin, Texas, a governing center surrounded by green hills and trees. A 4- to 6-lane divided highway links the two. The drive takes less than 40 minutes and is like being on an American freeway, except that we were driving on the left, passing elegant homes sitting on hillsides, sleek auto dealerships and a stream of 18 wheelers.


ISSUES

Crime

That morning the "Star" newspaper headlined that South Africa was now the "rape capital of the world." For a week I read the reports and watched the news of robberies, rapes and other acts of crime.

Weapons Sales

South Africa is a key country whose industrial base manufactures everything and includes a huge arms-making infrastructure (remember the U.S. satellite that detected the nuclear explosion that turned out to be a collaboration between Israel and South Africa in the 80's?). Now under Mandela it is different. South Africa has rejected nuclear arms (publicly) but it wants to sell conventional arms to Syria, which is on the U.S. terrorist list. Ironically, I had just been in Syria the month before, trying to get a young American girl out of Lebanon, so the debate involved me personally.

A war of words between Mandela and the U.S. erupts over the issue. I can't help but feel that if South Africa's sales to Syria triggers another Mideast war, thousands of young Americans could once again be called to fight in Mideast deserts, fueled by arms manufactured in an African desert.

We Americans are inherently involved whether we like it or not because the political reality is that 4 countries in the Mideast control 40% of the world's oil – the oil that Americans use by the tanker to pack our freeways with millions of cars as we continue gulping gas as the world's No. 1 oil consumer. We need oil like an addict needs a fix. But to Mandela's point -- the U.S. is selling arms there and the Chinese supply M-11 missiles capable of carrying a nuclear warhead to Syria and Iran. Should S. Africa be singled out for doing what everyone else is doing? Are we being hypocritical in protesting their chance to fuel their economy on Mideast petrodollars and paranoia? Why jump on S. Africa when China's M-11 missiles are much more dangerous than S. Africa's sale of tank sights. (Because Syria's Assad can be trusted no more than his neighbor to the east-- Saddam?)

Mr. Mandela went on television to declare that he was not going to be bullied by the U.S. which itself is selling arms into the Mideast. Mandela explained that S. Africa should be entitled to its share of the business. He has a point except for one thing. Selling to Syria is only a step away from selling to Saddam. Syria, like Iraq, has harbored terrorists and is still an international way-station for shady characters like the one who sat across the aisle from me last month on a flight from Damascus to Frankfurt—a guy I would not have paid much attention to except that he almost seemed to jump out of his seat each time I looked in his direction. Since I was one of the only foreigners on board, he apparently assumed I was either an American CIA or a State Department spook assigned to follow him. (The German-English newspaper I picked up after that Lufthansa flight reported that the terrorists who had just bombed the Paris Metro a week before were believed to be holed up somewhere near Frankfurt).

Brain Drain

I am thinking about this as I find South Africa to be a place of incredible beauty — one of the most beautiful I've seen after being in nearly 60 countries. It is a place of enormous wealth with great potential, but it is suffering a dramatic brain drain, due to the shrinking funding at its universities and white flight.

Flight

I arrived in Johannesburg at a time when over 6,000 whites a month were leaving South Africa, convinced a better life lies elsewhere. But are they leaping from the pot into the fire? To demonstrate how the center city of "Joburg" (shorthand for Johannesburg) has gone downhill, my hosts took me downtown to see it.

The whites are fleeing from reports of increased crime in pursuit of their desire for more economic opportunities in places like Canada, the United States and Australia. But after seeing the squatters of illegal immigrants in central Johannesburg cooking corn on the streets, now an urban ghetto as the whites have fled their stores for the suburbs, I couldn't help but think that this was no worse -- and no different -- than the white flight of America if you venture into central L.A. or Detroit or any number of other American cities.

In fact, I couldn't help but think the white Afrikaners' panic was a bit too extreme, that their "crime problem" is not as dangerous (final) as what they will find in the ghettos of New York, Chicago or L.A. In South Africa, most of the crimes reported are rape and robbery. In America, they try to kill you. And while this is truly heinous, a guy in Houston murdered another man because he didn't like the way he looked at him. In Johannesburg the common thread of crime stories is that they break in, tie up the family, rape the daughters and rob them. But the family is usually alive when they leave. In L.A., Detroit or New York, they point a gun in your face and are just as likely to pull the trigger whether you cooperate or not. At least the killings in S. Africa are not on the scale of those in the United States! According to the last 1996 gun death figures I saw in the U.S., there were over 50,000. Every year! For those trying to escape the terror in South Africa by coming to America, they may end up preferring their crime problem to ours.

Illegal Immigration

Like Texas, California and other states with problems with illegal immigration (mainly from South America and Mexico), South Africa also has an illegal immigration problem. But in their case it is poor blacks flooding in from Botswana or Mozambique from the north. Most of them have no money and you see them camping out on the streets of downtown Joburg. I saw them roasting corn on the sidewalks. Rotting fruit and vegetables are piled up and lining the downtown sidewalks for block after block.

Hollowed Cities

All the businesses have shuttered their doors and fled for the suburbs, leaving nothing but empty storefronts. In the midst of this, the S. Africa Supreme Court building sits alone (maybe it will force the lawyers to face it until they do something about it). Even the downtown train station has been abandoned. The Blue Train no longer stops in Joburg because its passengers were being confronted by these desperate people. But is this any different than the hollowing out of American cities like L.A., Detroit, or Houston where businesses have fled to the suburbs?

My hosts tell me that their daughter once stopped at the light nearby and a man reached in the window and pulled off her necklace. I kept thinking about news headlines back in Houston, where a man stuck a pistol in the car and shot a young woman to get her car.

Haves vs. Have-Nots -- contrasts and extremes

At my hotel in Johannesburg, a black waiter tells me "Everything is good" and a young white couple I meet over lunch agrees with him. "It is better for them under the new system," they say. They are worried about their children's future, about crime and jobs. They also want to leave but don't have the connections to do it.

I am staying near the northern suburb of Sandton city which looks very much like the Galleria in Houston, a modern air conditioned mall surrounded by chic stores, bank ATM's and family restaurants joined by glass, escalators and a parking garage to whisk you to different levels. English is so common in South Africa you could wake-up and think you were in a St. Louis or Washington D.C. mall along with a mix of nicely dressed blacks and whites shopping, eating and drinking with friends. This is not the South Africa of CNN news shots of Soweto. This is the real South Africa of 1997 that you never see in the news.

South Africa is the SuperPower of Africa:

If South Africa combined with neighboring Namibia and Botswana to form a "NAFTA" or "Economic Union" as suggested by my editor friend, the entire economic region could expand dramatically.

Beyond these contrasts, Pretoria -- the capital, is not what I expected. It is quiet, beautiful and filled with trees. It could be Austin, Texas, inhabited mainly by civil servants and technicians for the country's largest companies. Eerily, on "Proclamation Hill" overlooking the city, the stone faces of the fathers of apartheid—who invented the official policy of racial separation—blindly stare out over the city. In Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the statutes of Marx and Lenin were torn down. The Berlin Wall was torn down. But Nelson Mandela, the country's first black President after being imprisoned under the apartheid system for 30 years, has not done the same. I admire his restraint and doubt I could have done the same. There is talk of dismantling it but it remains in place as South Africans voted on and adopted the most liberal Constitution on the world (even guaranteeing equal rights to gays).

I wonder what will happen here when there is no longer a Mandela. He is clearly the glue holding this country together.


LEAVING SOUTH AFRICA

My flight left at midnight on the 8th day. Nearly one-fourth of the packed 747 is filled with soldiers with "UN" police patches. It turns out that 90 Dutch soldiers are being rotated out of peacekeeping duties in Angola. They are friendly and happy to be leaving behind perhaps the world's biggest mine field (many of them U.S.-made). As we fly north over the length of Africa, dawn breaks over the Sahara. At the same time, somewhere below us is the balloonist who is attempting a solo around-the-world flight. We are at 33,000 feet going north and he is dangling down there somewhere at 19,000 feet, crossing our path from west to east over the desert. It happened as the sun comes up before we pass near Algiers. Even in the morning sun I could see gas flares from oil wells lighting up the desert. Then the desert suddenly gives way to the blue waters of the Mediterranean; we cross the Alps for Brussels, and then catch a westbound flight. Taking off out of the dismal gray fog of Brussels, we chase the sun for the 10-hour day flight home.

I get back and see little evidence that the worst week of ice in decades has ever happened. It has vanished. Except for seeing recorded videos of cars skidding sideways on overpasses, it's hard for me to believe there was a U.S. ice storm, paralyzing balmy Houston under a blanket of treacherous ice. While I had been driving around in 75 degree sunshine 10,000 miles away, my devoted wife had to deal with being locked up in the house for a week with a child running a 102 degree fever from type A flu while dreading her upcoming appointment for major surgery three days after I got back. Fortunately, she did come to meet my return flight (a sign of forgiveness).


IN CLOSING

As we drove to Sugarland, passing the Galleria, I was no longer the same person. The gold glass made me think about high-tech Sandton and how the perceptions of reality of South African whites and blacks mirrors our own country's long struggle with its racial attitudes.

If the whites continue to abandon their home country for new lives in Canada, Australia and the U.S., then I believe that not even the most liberal Constitution will save South Africa. It will become as hollowed out as downtown Joburg unless something is done. Like Americans polarized by the O.J. Simpson case, blacks and whites in South Africa seem to be talking at each other instead of communicating with each other. Yet I also saw evidence of young white and black businessmen discussing deals over coffee and drinks in my hotel. The jury is still out.

With the right leadership in business and government and new attitudes by whites and blacks—by all of us—this could be the beginning of a new era of cooperation and increasing opportunities between all races of both our nations. Without it, poor people without hope of jobs will still be driven to robbing others to survive — and we will be no more civilized or politically correct in the high tech 21st century than we were when our ancestors sold each other as slaves.

This Feature Article is intended as a public service.

Your comments or questions are always welcome.

Opinions expressed are those of the author and not necessarily those of the operator of this network or site.


Michael Fjetland, Chief U.S. Counsel
International Legal Group, P.C.
3435 Westheimer, Suite 1110
Houston, Texas 77027 USA
Tel: (713) 622-1101
Fax: (713) 622-1144
E-mail: Fjet@aol.com

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