Book Extract | During the ANC’s salad days, big business enjoyed a complex and contradictory relationship with the government
During the ANC’s salad days, big business enjoyed a complex and contradictory relationship with the government. On the one hand it helped offset the party’s calcified credo of socialist economics, thus bolstering the Rainbow Nation’s democratic prospects.
The engagements were benignly overseen by the plutocrat and the president, rather than actively propelled by them. Nevertheless, here was the moment, its leftist detractors charged, when a coterie of powerful white capitalists and emergent black rulers, embodied by Oppenheimer and Mandela, struck a Faustian bargain. In secret, they hammered out a pact, the effect of which was to leave the structures of economic power largely undisturbed.
The impetus for the Brenthurst Group came from the ANC. It was Alec Erwin, the former trade unionist soon to become Mandela’s deputy minister of finance, who contacted Bobby Godsell at the end of January 1994, at Mandela’s behest, and got the ball rolling on the get-togethers.
economic planners Harry Oppenheimer and former finance minister Tito MboweniPHOTO: Brenthurst Library “It was an almost wholly useless exercise,” Godsell later recalled of the Brenthurst colloquies, “because on both sides people were excessively polite.”
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