Davies at the Neil Aggett Memorial Lecture, Kingswood College
25 September 2006
Principal
Programme Director
Ladies and gentlemen
Let me begin by thanking you and the organisers of this event for the great
honour you have bestowed on me by inviting me to speak on this truly auspicious
occasion. I have unfortunately not had many opportunities to revisit my old
school since I left it many years ago, but I regard it as a particular
privilege to be able to do so through participating in this commemoration of
the life and contribution of a prominent Old Kingswoodian and South
African.
I personally never had an opportunity to meet Neil Aggett, either while he
was here at Kingswood or later on. I cannot, therefore, offer any personal
reminiscences or anecdotes and will, therefore, reflect on the public
dimensions of his life.
Neil Aggett was an extraordinary Old Kingswoodian and South African. He took
full advantage of the opportunities given to him of a quality education here at
Kingswood, and went on to the University of Cape Town to study and qualify as a
medical doctor. After graduating, he dedicated himself to the cause of building
the Food and Canning Workers Union. He was a trade union organiser, activist
and leader. He was detained in one of the Botha regimeâs many States of
Emergency and on 5 February 1982, was found dead in a police cell.
There are many ways that we can look at the life and death of Neil Aggett.
We can focus on the circumstances of his death. He died in the custody of the
apartheid regimeâs police. He was one of a hundred or so political detainees
known to have died in the apartheid regimeâs custody. In this regard, he
followed in the steps of well-known figures like Ahmed Timol, who in 1971 fell
after being held out of a tenth floor window and Steve Biko, who was beaten to
death by Security Police in 1977. There were a variety of direct causes of
death of people in detention and some extremely bizarre explanations offered by
the apartheid regime at the time. What they all had in common was that victims,
without exception, were subjected to brutal physical and psychological
torture.
What stood out about Neil Aggett's death in 1982 was that he was one of the
first persons to die whilst being imprisoned as a trade unionist. By the 1980s,
the regime had been forced to concede the right, which they had withdrawn in
the 1950s, for black workers to organise themselves in trade unions and for
trade unions to enjoy bargaining rights with employers. For someone active on
the legal front of trade union organization to die in detention was a damning
indictment of the apartheid regimeâs repressive policies. His death therefore
is a poignant reminder of the gross human rights violations that occurred in
this country only two decades ago.
But another way of looking at Neil Aggett and the way I want to focus in
this lecture today is to look at the kind of life choice he made and what its
significance might represent in the conditions of South Africa today.
Neil Aggett was a learner at Kingswood College and had all the advantages
and benefits that a quality education at this college bestowed on him. After
matriculating with distinction, he went on to study at the University of Cape
Town and graduated as a medical doctor. His educational achievements were such
that he could have chosen to carve out a quiet and prosperous life for himself
in private medical practice, enjoying the comforts and privileges that were
available then to white professionals, as long as they were prepared to turn a
blind eye to the plight of their fellow black South Africans.
It would not have been inconceivable for someone with Neil Aggett's
background to have ended up in the position of some of the less honourable
members of the medical profession, who refused to speak out when asked to
examine Steve Biko in detention and connived in the cover up of his murder at
the hands of the security police. But we are commemorating Neil Aggett's life
precisely because he did not make either of those choices. He chose instead to
devote his energies and his skills to support the struggles of the masses of
our people, and particularly the working class.
He did not seek any particular position or prestige within the union
movement, but was content to work as an organiser and activist among the
workers themselves. I am sure that there were many of his contemporaries and
peers who thought that this was a bizarre choice, who saw it as a waste of his
talent and education and saw his as a life spent way below its potential if
measured in the then prevailing norm of the value of a monthly salary cheque. I
am sure that this was the judgement of many of his contemporaries and peers.
Yet if we look back with the benefit of hindsight, and through the lens of the
judgement we are making in participating in this occasion today, we would
concur that Neil made a brave and correct choice and that his was a life well
spent.
Certainly there are very few who would now contend that the society which we
have in South Africa today is not infinitely better than the society in which
Neil grew up, lived in and died. The democracy and freedom, which we enjoy in
South Africa today, are the envy of many peoples around the world. While we
have many challenges on the economic and social fronts, the performance of our
economy today is much better than it has been at any time in the past 25 to 30
years.
Instead of being a pariah on the international stage, our country is
respected internationally and plays an active role in many of the international
fora. Young men studying at Kingswood (and it would have been young men only),
no longer have to look forward with dread to the prospect of two years
conscription into an army, fighting apartheidâs wars against neighbouring
states and involved in oppression in the country itself.
There are very few, I am sure, who would say today that we are not a good
deal better off than we were in the 1980s. What we must never forget, though,
is that this better society that we have today did not come into existence
easily. It is the product of heroic struggles and huge sacrifice of many
individuals who dedicated themselves to the cause of achieving liberation in
this country. Neil Agett was one of those. He was but one of many, many
thousands of people who dedicated themselves to the struggle. But the point is
that he was one of our own.
The fact that among many large numbers of black activists, there was also a
sprinkling of white activists like Neil Aggett was a significant statement
about the non-racial and democratic content of that struggle. At the same time,
it is very important that as institutions like this one grapple, as they must,
with the challenges of transforming themselves to the realities of our new
democratic non-racial and non-sexist society in the making, they are able to
identify among their ranks, people who selflessly committed themselves to the
struggle. In making this important identification through a commemoration like
todayâs, one of the important questions that I think we need to ask ourselves
is: What would the Neil Aggett choice entail in the realities of todayâs South
Africa and today's world?
The Neil Aggett choice to sum up what I have been arguing so far, entailed a
willingness to rise above the narrow, individual, material self interest, to
stand above narrow contemporary peer pressures and prejudices, and to commit
oneself to the improvement of oneâs society in the interests of ordinary
working people and the poor.
What then would this choice entail in the realities of todayâs South Africa
and todayâs world? Thankfully, in the society created by the sacrifices of many
thousands like Neil Aggett, taking this choice no longer means risking the
possibility of ending up dead in a police cell. But, having said that, I would
contend that we still face many challenges that call for the kind of spirit and
commitment of the kind we saw in the life choice of Neil Aggett.
In the Nelson Mandela lecture delivered a few months ago, President Thabo
Mbeki lamented the rise and emerging dominance in our society of narrow
capitalistic and market fundamentalist ideas. The President said, and I quote,
"many of us accept that our common natural instinct to escape from poverty is
but the other side of the same coin on whose reverse side are written the
words, at all costs get rich. In these circumstances, personal wealth and the
public communication of the message that we are people of wealth becomes at the
same time the means by which we communicate the message that we are worthy
citizens of our community."
The President goes on to say and again I quote, "In these circumstances, the
meaning of freedom has come to be defined not by the seemingly ethereal and
therefore intangible gift of liberty, but by the designer labels on the clothes
we wear, the cars we drive, the spaciousness of our houses and our yards, their
geographical location and the company we keep and what we do as part of that
company."
If narrow and shallow status symbols are fast becoming the content of peer
pressure to conform to vulgar materialistic measures of personal worth, then
the Neil Aggett choice must, I would contend, involve rising above and
rejecting such crass individualistic materialism. Let me not be misunderstood.
We want and need a prosperous society with a growing economy increasingly able
to produce a broadening range of high quality sophisticated goods and
services.
We need accelerated economic growth in this country, not least because
without raising Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth rates to higher levels we
will not achieve our goals of halving poverty and unemployment by the year
2014. But what we need to promote is not just economic growth, of any kind: it
is shared growth. This takes us back to the basic philosophy of the
Reconstruction and Development Programme adopted on the eve of our first
democratic elections in 1994.
The Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) acknowledged a
distinction long identified by progressive development economists between
economic growth, which is an increase in the output of goods and services, and
development, which is an improvement in the human condition. Development
economists have long recognised that it is perfectly possible in many
situations to achieve economic growth without promoting development.
This indeed was the case in the 1960s in South Africa. But the RDP argued
that under the specific circumstances we find ourselves in, in South Africa
today, it would not be possible to achieve sustainable economic growth without
simultaneously addressing acute problems of human development. The RDP argued
that this was so precisely because many of the key constraints to economic
growth in our society derive from problems of under development and
poverty.
For example, it is widely acknowledged that perhaps the most important key
constraint to economic development in South Africa today is a shortage of
skills. The skills shortage we face today is a feature of under-development,
directly traceable to apartheid policies that deliberately denied large numbers
of black South Africans the opportunity to upgrade their skills for the simple
reason that at that time apartheid was more interested in turning out large
quantities of unskilled labour for the mines and farms in this country.
The Neil Aggett choice, I believe, means that in whatever diverse activities
or professions we find ourselves in, we look beyond the narrow self interest
and personal benefits which those activities can bring to us, and ask ourselves
also what broader contribution can we make to uplifting and developing our
society. We need to move increasingly away from a society which judges
individual worth and contribution in terms of designer clothes, motorcars, and
the sizes of individual houses, and instead judge an individual's worth in
terms of the contribution he or she is making in terms of the broader effort to
overcome poverty, inequality and underdevelopment in our country.
The kinds of values which I am arguing that need to be reflected in the Neil
Aggett choice, also have relevance on the international stage. In the last few
months, I have been deployed in the World Trade Organisation Doha Round
Negotiations. I was asked to say a bit about this and let me do so with through
a reflection on what the kind of values represented in the life of someone like
Neil Aggett might mean on this terrain.
It is well known that we now live in a world of globalisation, characterised by
free movement of commodities and services across national borders. The Uruguay
Round of Multi-Lateral Trade Negotiations which concluded in 1993 and which
were formalised in the Marrakesh Agreement of 1994, are well known as an
important moment in that process. They ushered in sharp reductions in
industrial tariffs across the world, opening up national markets to
international trade. They also introduced a number of other measures requiring
recognition of basic norms in such issues such as intellectual property,
investment promotion measures and the like.
However, the Uruguay round has also been widely recognised as a very uneven
and unequal process in which the main benefits of trade liberalisation and
reduction of tariff barriers accrued not to the poorer countries and peoples of
the world, but to the richer developed countries. In particular, while
developing countries were obliged to open up their industrial markets and to
recognise patents, trademarks and copyrights from the developed world, they
found that in areas where they were relatively competitive in agriculture in
particular, but also in low technology manufactured products they continued to
face huge barriers to increasing exports to the developed world.
In agriculture not only did high tariffs remain in force, but developed
countries continued to be allowed to spend vast sums of money on subsidies to
their uncompetitive farmers. A cow in Europe today lives on a subsidy of around
2 United States dollars a day, which is more than many people in the poorest
countries of Africa survive on.
Under these circumstances, developing countries sought to rebalance the
international trading system more in favour of the needs of development.
Following the breakdown of the World Tourism Organisation (WTO) Ministerial
meeting in Seattle in 1999, developing countries gathered their forces and
managed at the next Ministerial in Doha in 2001 to secure certain commitments
from the developed world to at least begin to address some of the most glaring
inequities in the global trading system.
The 2001 Doha Ministerial launched a new round of negotiations which was
supposed to focus on the removal of all subsidies of exports, a substantial
reduction but not total elimination of other subsidies on production and
increased access by products of developing countries, both agricultural and non
agricultural, to the markets of the developed world, through addressing high
tariffs on competing products.
Of course, developing countries realized that trade negotiations are tough
bargaining processes. From the start, they realised that to achieve these
objectives some concessions would have to be made to demands of developed
countries for increased access to markets including developing countries across
the world. The Doha Round Negotiations missed many, many deadlines, and as we
meet, have been indefinitely suspended.
The main reason for this is simply that the governments of the developed
world have not been able to generate the political will to make even modest
reforms of their agricultural trading systems, long identified as major
impediments to growth and prosperity in developing countries. Most recently,
the United States, facing imminent congressional elections, has found itself
unable to make an offer on the reduction of domestic support subsidies to a
level that would have any real impact on these highly distorting
programmes.
The beneficiaries of such programmes are a few thousand rich farmers in
certain states of the United States. Commenting on this situation, Nobel
Economics laureate, Joseph Stiglitz wrote and I quote "With congressional
elections looming in November, President George Bush could not sacrifice the 25
000 wealthy cotton farmers or 10 000 prosperous rice farmers and their campaign
contributions. Seldom, so many had to give up so much to protect the interests
of so few".
Not only had the major trading powers been unwilling to make sufficient
concessions, but also in areas where they had been willing to make concessions,
they insisted on this being matched by more than proportional adjustments by
developing countries. In the industrial tariff area we have seen developed
countries demanding that in return for insufficient reforms in agriculture,
they must be paid by much more significant and much more costly adjustments by
what are called "Advanced Developing Countries" South Africa being one, in
industrial tariff cuts. Within the WTO process itself; our delegation joined
other developing country delegations in arguing a necessity to inject
principles broader than narrow bazaar haggling into what after all was supposed
to be a development round. We submitted and tabled a paper which we titled
"Reclaiming Development."
What I want to argue is that in this arena too, we need to find ways to rise
above narrow peer pressure, narrow self interest and the conventional values of
crass narrow materialism and find elements of what I have called the "Neil
Aggett Choice". Of course, there are limits to what we in small countries can
do on the larger international and multilateral stage. But we can and must be
active in trying to shape the environment outside our own borders.
One of the areas which will become more and more important the longer the
multilateral process is held up, is one which we have long identified as a top
priority: that of promoting equitable and mutually beneficial regional
cooperation and integration. Within our own Southern African region, and on the
broader continent, we need to re-energise efforts to advance a programme that
will both provide opportunities for faster economic growth by enlarging
markets, promoting investment, advancing sectoral co-operation and so on, while
at the same time addressing imbalances and inequities in current trade
relations.
We need to develop, and this will be one of the debates we need urgently to
take forward, practices among South African companies involved in the region
and the broader African continent that are consistent with the values of
co-operative regionalism which we seek to promote. We need our companies to
continue to be involved in expanding investment and trading relations with
other African countries, but we need them simultaneously to become more willing
to rise above the pursuit of short term partisan commercial advantage and to
look, even in their own longer term interest, also at the broader impact of
their activities on the quest for the kind of balanced and equitable
regionalism long identified as essential to the achievement of lasting shared
prosperity in our sub-continent. Here again, I would suggest we need to find
more of the values which someone like Neil Aggett's life represents for us.
Programme Director, Headmaster, ladies and gentlemen, I have argued in this
lecture that in commemorating the life of Neil Aggett as we are doing today, we
need also to reflect on what the kind of choices and commitments his life
represented would mean in the reality of todayâs society, both nationally and
internationally. We do not all have to become political activists or trade
unionists. In todayâs reality, thankfully we have many broader options meaning
that we will find ourselves involved in many different professions and
activities.
What I am suggesting though, is that wherever we find ourselves, we need to
find ways to rise above the narrow individualism measured and reflected in the
size of oneâs own personal wealth, and recover the values of Ubuntu and common
destiny for which many dedicated their lives and were willing to die in the
struggle for liberation in this country.
Long live the memory of Neil Aggett, long live.
I thank you.
Issued by: Department of Trade and Industry
25 September 2006
Source: Department of Trade and Industry (http://www.dti.gov.za)
