Clem Sunter: Why his high road still matters

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JEREMY MAGGS: South Africa, you might have heard, has lost one of its most influential long-range thinkers. Clem Sunter, the strategist and scenario planner who helped a generation of leaders and businesses think beyond the noise of the moment, has died of cancer at the age of 81.

If you’ve heard the phrase the high road or the low road used to frame South Africa’s choices, chances are you’ve felt Sunter’s impact without even realising it.

I want to reflect on his legacy and what he meant to business in South Africa and also the country, and I’m joined by a former colleague, Bobby Godsell.

Bobby, welcome to you. When you think of Clem Sunter, what’s the single biggest contribution he made on how South Africa learnt to think about its future? Have you applied your mind to that?

BOBBY GODSELL: Jeremy, let me just insert one note. Clem and I joined Anglo American at 44 Main Street in the same month of the same year in 1974. We shared an office for the first three years.

We helped, together with Michael O’Dowd, to jointly – the three of us – develop the scenario planning technique, which we had learned from the Shell Motor Company, designed actually by a very brilliant man called Pierre Wack.

At the heart of that exercise was the idea that the future was open and that citizens choose their own destiny, and the future is not predetermined.

In those years of the 1970s and 80s, there was a strong feeling both inside South Africa and out, that the country was destined for some kind of civil war or apocalypse.

It was in response to that that we developed the choice between some form of high road, which involved always high growth and non-racialism, and a low road that involved racial conflicts.

Clem’s particular unique contribution was that he was probably the best public communicator I’ve come across in my adult life.

He was somebody who had his own ego very much under control, who was likeable, who spoke well, who listened carefully, and most importantly, who infused in his audience a sense of their own agency that they had choices to make.

Read: Sunter: These five things will determine which way SA goes

He would start almost every presentation saying, I’m not here to tell you what to do, I’m here to tell you that you have choices to make and to urge you to make those choices responsibly. That for me, is, I think, the biggest single thought.

This was at a time when already our political oligarchy of the day, the Afrikaner nationalists who were running South Africa, had realised that the apartheid plan wasn’t going to work.

They were looking for plan B, and Clem gave them the freedom to realise that they had choices that they could make. There was a plan B and it could include the high road.

JEREMY MAGGS: Bobby, let me ask you this then, the high road, low road framing became part of the national discourse, part of the vocabulary, and exists to this day. Why did that particular idea, do you think, land so powerfully? And perhaps more importantly, why has it endured?

BOBBY GODSELL: Well, to just make your words even more acute, I would remind you that in 1986, PW Botha ran a national election campaign. His slogan on the posters on all of our lampposts, I remember very well, it said: Reform, yes. Surrender, no.

Clem was arguing that it was quite possible to negotiate without losing power, and that thought rested very much in the minds of, of course, PW Botha, and then after his heart attack, his successor FW de Klerk.

But beyond De Klerk, amongst Afrikaner intellectuals in the Broederbond, were the beneficiaries of Clem’s presentation many times – academics, journalists, business leaders – that it was in fact a false binary to say you either reformed or you surrendered, that actually a principled reform could lead to a better country for all, and that has been maintained.

It’s now an interesting time, and Clem’s death is a sadness, a life of 81 is a huge and rich life, but with the end of one-party rule in South Africa, it’s even more clear that citizens have choices to make, not simply identity politics – I’m white, therefore I’m DA (Democratic Alliance), I’m black, therefore I’m ANC (African National Congress).

The deep validity of having to make choices around values, hopes, beliefs in a public discourse, in a discourse with your political competitors, I this is a very good time for Clem’s fundamental message.

JEREMY MAGGS: Bobby Godsell, in that respect, he came out of big mining and industry leadership roles, and as you’ve said, he became a public thinker. The background, how did that shape his credibility with business and his ideas?

BOBBY GODSELL: Yes. He was amongst the top leadership of Anglo. He took over in the late 80s or very early 90s, I can’t remember precisely the chairmanship of Anglo’s gold division.

At that stage, Anglo was producing about seven million ounces of gold worldwide. It was the largest gold mining company by far.

He was a highly credible business leader, and he continued in that role until 1998.

He then took over the chairmanship of the Anglo and De Beers Chairman’s Fund, which was the largest philanthropic institution in the country, and so he helped to shape and give emphasis to the words of Ernest Oppenheimer that you can’t run a successful business in a failed society.

He was an articulator beyond the scenario point of the deep connection between business success and social cohesion.

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It was the way that he used his power both as an executive and then as a philanthropic funder. It’s very possible to fund good works in a way that is highly manipulative, that was never Clem’s style.

Read: Using scenarios to overcome uncertainty about SA’s future

Jeremy, if there’s one thing people must remember when they think about Clem, I don’t know of a single person who’s ever attended any one of his presentations – and over his life, these must have run into many thousands – who didn’t come out feeling a bit more hopeful about themselves and their society.

JEREMY MAGGS: Just a final question, Bobby. Looking at South Africa right now, would you maybe hazard a thought on what he would be insisting we confront at this time, maybe what signals he’d be watching most closely?

BOBBY GODSELL: I can’t offer a meaningful answer to that question.

I must tell you, my last contact (with him) was about six months ago, Clem came regularly to Johannesburg, as it so happened, he stayed in the Johannesburg Country Club in Auckland Park, in their accommodation, and I often bumped into him at breakfast or for a cup of coffee.

I think what he would say is that he’s got a deep and abiding hope for the country, and that its future and destiny lie in the hands of ordinary citizens.

I think those would be, if he was able to speak to us right now, I think that is what he would be saying.

JEREMY MAGGS: Bobby Godsell, thank you very much indeed.

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