US civil rights legend Andrew Young jolted many in his audience at the University of Johannesburg last week when he advised them to stop counting on the government to eradicate poverty and to rely instead on themselves – and the private sector.

“When people talk about governments ending poverty, it’s just not realistic…governments are all in debt,” he said.

“We’ve got to do it ourselves and we can’t hold anybody else responsible.”

Young, 87, who stood at Martin Luther King’s side in leading the civil rights movement in the 1960s and then went on to become a US Congressman, US ambassador to the UN and then mayor of Atlanta, was at the university to receive an honorary doctorate.

The degree was to pay tribute to “an icon in his own right, a legend who has inspired the global struggle for justice… and helped change the course of history…,” said Professor Alex Broadbent, the Executive Dean of the Faculty of Humanities.

At a seminar before receiving the honorary degree, Young raised a few socialist eyebrows with some politically-incorrect advice about how to tackle South Africa’s social and economic ills.

The seminar discussed the role which Americans had played and could still play in developing South Africa. The focus was on how African-Americans could help black South Africans.

The South African debate on how to tackle the country’s triple scourge of poverty, unemployment and inequality usually stresses the government’s role. But Young instead emphasised self-reliance and entrepreneurship.

Sharing lessons from his eight years as Atlanta mayor between 1982 and 1990, he first gave a lot of credit to his predecessor Maynard Jackson, the city’s first black mayor, for desegregating Atlanta’s economy.

Jackson had opened the city’s economy by insisting that 25% of all businesses which participated in city projects, such as the major reconstruction of the airport and the construction of the mass transit system, should be owned by minorities or women.

Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson airport was now the busiest in the world, generating about $50-billion in revenues annually.

“And we don’t have any government money in it. We put it together dealing strictly with Wall Street. When people talk about governments ending poverty, it’s just not realistic. Governments are all in debt… You cannot deal with poverty when you’re in debt. So we’ve got to free up our minds.

“I knew there was money all over the world and I decided I had to become mayor to bring some of the money into Atlanta. And money was so glad to come to Atlanta. As it would be to South Africa.”

Atlanta didn’t have a convention hotel so he persuaded Dutch pension funds to build three in his first term.

“Conventions attract money. The convention and visitor business is still Atlanta’s largest employer. We now have 72 Marriott hotels in Atlanta. I see the makings of that here in Johannesburg and Cape Town and we don’t even have the wildlife parks you have.”

He had attracted major international airlines like Lufthansa, KLM and Japan Airlines to Atlanta. He told Japan Airlines it couldn’t do so unless its subsidiary company built a hotel in the city, which it did.

All the private deals were structured to pay for themselves. But to attract the big capital, the Atlanta city government had had to be honest and efficient.

“I would say, you don’t have to pay anybody under the table. If someone tries to shake you down or you’re not getting the efficient service that we promised, call me personally. And I didn’t get one call in the eight years because I gave the person my home number in the presence of the staff who were dealing with their contracts. So it’s just being transparent all the way.”

Young explained that he also reduced the time taken to get a business permit from seven months to seven minutes. The goal was less than one hour so that the applicant need not go back to the street to put another quarter in his parking meter.

And Young told his officials: “We’re not going to increase taxes to give you a raise. You have to earn your raise by growing the economy.”

In his first term, $70-billion of private investment flowed into the city and 1,100 companies moved into Atlanta, creating over a million new jobs.

And the population had grown from about one million people then to six and a half million people today.

The major international companies came to Atlanta because “people are so anxious to find quality, honest and efficient places to do business. I think South Africa has all the ingredients we had. You have space, you have bright people and you have a near-perfect climate.”

Young added that he also sold Atlanta to investors with the argument that they could get to 80% of the rest of the US within two hours.

“Now you can do that from here. And if half the population of the planet is going to be in Africa by some time this century, then everyone who wants to be in business has to be in Africa. This is the perfect place to base your business.”

Young recalled how he had once advised Robert Mugabe during the apartheid years that he had a 10- to 12-year head start on South Africa to make Zimbabwe the gateway to Africa.

But Mugabe hadn’t taken his advice because he didn’t trust capitalism.

“I told him it’s not about ‘isms’. It’s about money!”

It was put to him by Professor Chris Landsberg, UJ’s head of Africa diplomacy and foreign policy, that South Africa was still the most unequal country in the world. Landsberg recalled former President Thabo Mbeki saying South Africa still comprised two nations, one white and rich and one black and poor. Landsberg did note, however, that although the rich “nation” was no longer exclusively white, the poor one remained solely black.

Professor Fiona Tregenna, head of UJ’s industrial development department, identified South Africa’s key economic problem as being that “our growth and development path has been more redistributive than transformative in nature”.

“I characterise it as ‘redistributive’ in that concentrated ownership and control and a low proportion of the working age population in gainful employment, co-exist with some levels of redistribution through the fiscal system to provide incomes to those not receiving incomes from work (and to a lesser extent through other formal and informal redistributive mechanisms such as remittances).

“Some advances have thus been made in reducing poverty, in particular through social grants. A large proportion of the South African population receives these grants, with the Child Support Grant and Old Age Pension, in particular, having a huge impact. Without these, poverty would be much, much higher.

“Yet it is of course far from ideal to depend on social grants to lift people out of poverty. We have largely not succeeded in making the basic productive structure more inclusive, such that more people earn incomes from work or from direct stakes in the economy.

“What we really need is a structural transformation towards a more inclusive economy, in which the majority of people are involved in and gain incomes from the productive economy.”

Young was asked if he had a spiritual message to bring to South Africa.

He said that “feeding the hungry is about as spiritual as you can get. And we must feed our brothers and sisters”. But he reiterated that “the one thing we cannot continue to do is to blame it on anyone else. Not that they’re not to blame. They are. But they don’t feel the least bit guilty. They will keep on exploiting as long as they can. What we have learned is to compete.”

He cited various examples of business and academic successes of black South Africans and African-Americans, through collaboration, including African graduates of his alma mater, Washington’s Howard University, who had returned to the continent to achieve success.

“We’ve got to do it ourselves and we can’t hold anybody else responsible…

“Ultimately you have to take responsibility for your own destiny,” he summarised.

Anthony Carroll, vice president of Manchester Trade, a US international business advisory company, agreed with Young that South Africa could and should be the gateway of US companies into Africa.

He noted that 600 US companies were already here, and the boost which America’s African Growth and Opportunity Act had given to South African exports to the US, especially cars and fruit, by eliminating import tariffs and quotas.

He agreed with businessman Moeletsi Mbeki that America’s greatest contribution to South Africa’s development would be to deploy its creative capital and technology.

That was already starting to happen with US companies using South Africa as a base for technology, included GE’s Innovation Centre, IBM’s Research Lab and P TECH venture to teach IT skills, Johnson and Johnson’s Chris Hani- Baragwanath Hospital Burn Centre, and Broadreach, a data analytics firm started by two Harvard doctors now with 1,000 employees across Africa.


The same eyebrows in the audience rose again when Carroll added that skills development was not enough.

“There has to be labour flexibility. To create more jobs, businesses must be freed from over-regulation, and this includes hiring and firing people.” DM