EXTRACT FROM A SPEECH BY PRESIDENT FW DE KLERK TO THE ENTERPRISE INVESTMENT FORUM, 9 FEBRUARY 1994
“We understood that the true agents of change in South Africa were the evolutionary forces which were being unleashed by millions of our people going about their daily lives; moving to the cities; improving their living conditions; getting better jobs, participating in the free market, acquiring better educations.
We recognised that it was these factors which changed societies – not political slogans; not protest marches; not “armed struggle”.
“Amandla” does not grow out of the barrel of AK47’s. Real power lies in education. It lies in economic and social development. It lies in the strength of our position in the marketplace.
During the past twenty-five years there have been dramatic – but largely unnoticed – shifts in these real power balances in South Africa:
The first major shift has been in the share of personal income.
According a study carried out by M D McGrath some years ago there was hardly any change in the racial distribution of personal income between 1917 and 1970. In 1917 Black share of personal income was 20,3%. By 1970 it had, according to him, actually declined slightly to only 19,8% compared with a White share of 71,1%.
However, between 1970 and 1990 there was a marked change in the relationship: the Black share climbed to 33% and the White share declined to 53,9%. In 1991 the Urban Foundation calculated that by 1995, at a economic growth rate of 2,5%, the share of Black South Africans would have increased to 37,3% and that of Whites would have fallen to 48,5%.
In practice, these dry statistics mean that black South Africans have moved into a dominant position in many sectors of the consumer market. The fact is that Black South Africans now buy more TV sets, more hi-fi sets, more furniture suites, more stoves, more fridges and more of many other consumer items than whites do.
That is Amandla!
According to the Small Business Development Corporation there were, by the beginning of the ‘nineties, more than 625 000 small black businesses in South Africa providing employment to millions of our people and support for millions more. Nobody knows what their combined contribution to the Gross Domestic Product is, but the lowest estimate is in the region of R 20 billion – or considerably more than the total gross domestic products of all but a handful of African states.
That is Amandla!
Last year there were 120 823 black undergraduate students – compared with 116 631 Whites – at out universities. There were 41 342 Black Technicon students and 41 343 trainee teachers. Despite the disruption of black education and despite the low pass rates, Black South Africans now make up a large majority of the people who matriculate each year.
That is Amandla. That is power. But it is constructive and positive power – not the destructive power of violence, rioting and intimidation.
The fact is that during the past generation the face of South Africa has changed.
Millions of black South Africans have come to the cities and improved their standard of living and education – just as many Afrikaners did a generation or two earlier.
They have moved into key positions in our industrial and commercial sectors. Increasingly they are moving into white collar professions.
Influx control legislation was abolished by the reality of millions of people migrating to the cities, long before we scrapped it from the law books in Parliament.
The Group Areas Act was abolished by the reality that thousands of people had peacefully moved into supposedly white areas. By the time we abolished the Act in Parliament there were already tens of thousands of black South Africans living peacefully in Johannesburg.
The Separate Amenities legislation was doomed from the moment that young black and white people with the same qualifications began working side by side in banks, shops and factories.
There is nothing new in this. Much of history has been the story of how changing economic relationships have led to changed social relationships. Ultimately these changed relationships have placed unbearable pressure on antiquated constitutional relationships and have led to the emergence of democratic societies.
The engine of this process is economic growth. There is an undeniable relationship between the stage of economic development that a society has reached and the level of civil and political rights which its citizens enjoy.”