Obituary

IN MEMORIAM

Prof WB (Ben) Vosloo (86)

(4 November 1934 – 23 March 2021)

Prof Ben Vosloo, one of the most eminent public governance scholars that South Africa has so far produced, recently passed away at the age of 86 in Wollongong, Australia, where he lived for the last 19 years.

Willem Benjamin Vosloo was born in Mtunzini, Natal on 4 November 1934. He grew up in a conservative Afrikaner nationalist environment in rural Zululand and matriculated at Vryheid High School. He then majored at the University of Pretoria (UP) in the fields of Political Science, Public Administration and Economics, and completed his B.A. and M.A. degrees, both cum laude. After lecturing at the University of South Africa (UNISA) for five years, he completed his PhD degree in 1965 at the Cornell School of Business and Public Management in the USA with a thesis on Collective Bargaining in the US Federal Civil Service.

Towards the end of his doctoral studies at Cornell, Vosloo was personally head-hunted by Prof SP Cilliers, head of the Department of Sociology at Stellenbosch to establish a new Department of Political Science and Public Administration (now a separate Department of Political Science and a School of Public Leadership) at that university. In 1966, he started the joint department at the tender age of 32, and headed it for 15 years until Dr Anton Rupert, chair of Rembrandt, recruited him in 1981 to establish the Small Business Development Corporation (SBDC, now Business Partners Limited). He retired in 1995 from the SBDC after 14 years as its Managing Director. In 1998 he moved to Australia, where he lived until his death on 23 March 2021.

Vosloo held from an early age pragmatic liberal views, despite his conservative family background. He started to question NP apartheid policies already in his student days at UP. In the middle 1950s, during his student days in Pretoria, Vosloo, together with Hennie Serfontein (later political journalist), Johann Kriegler (later Constitutional Court Judge) and UNISA Political Science Prof Willem Kleynhans, invited Chief Albert Luthuli, at the time the President of the African National Congress, to explain his views on political rights for black South Africans. Before Luthuli could start his address, however, Afrikaner right wing extremists, (mainly Iscor workers armed with bicycle chains) physically attacked them for providing a public political platform in Pretoria to someone that the reactionaries regarded as a terrorist. The police had to restore peace but Luthuli’s address was cancelled. Vosloo was disinherited by his father, a staunch, conservative rural Natal Afrikaner member of the NP, following a report and picture of those dramatic events on the front page of the Transvaler daily morning newspaper the next day.

In 1968 Vosloo was appointed as the youngest professor at Stellenbosch at the time (at age 34), after having established the Department of Political Science and Public Administration two years earlier. His direct exposure to the Civil Rights struggle in the USA during the early 1960s consolidated his instinctive laissez faire liberal pragmatism. His intellectual mentors at Stellenbosch were the relatively ‘liberal’ Proff SP Cilliers (Sociology), Jan Sadie (Economics) and Nic Olivier (Development Administration). He soon gained a reputation among his peers as a formidable academic with noteworthy academic publications to his credit. He was not a typical ivory tower academic.

In the 1970s and 1980s Vosloo adopted a relatively sophisticated Machiavellian policy change -by-stealth approach to pursue his own political goals. He did not take the simple moral or ethical route by leaving South Africa to go into exile because of his opposition to government policies, as many of his anti-apartheid contemporaries did. He adopted instead a morally and ethically more complex and controversial strategy of expanding and stretching the ruling National Party’s boundaries of internal political tolerance for change. He decided to use his direct access to the ideological centre of the Afrikaner political establishment towards persuading government policy-makers, through direct interaction with them from within the apartheid system, to change unacceptable policies in a constitutional and democratic, albeit more gradual and incremental manner, instead of openly declaring his opposition to that system.

He therefore started to promote the principles of the (at the time) mainstream American democratic political pluralism school of thought as espoused especially by Robert Dahl, and applied by plural society scholars like David Apter and Arend Lijphart to ethnically diverse contexts, as a potential institutional framework for political conflict management in South Africa. In 1974 he authored the founding article of the new Political Science journal Politikon, (the current Political Science flagship journal in South Africa), focussing on this topic.

He also decided to experiment with facilitating various crucial strategic governmental political, educational and economic policy transformation programmes in a number of sectors in South Africa. He became an institutional transformation advisor to senior political office bearers in the National Party and organised local government. These policy entrepreneurship exercises improved the political legitimacy of his professional public policy-making profile and standing, and provided him with more opportunities to try to directly influence policy change from inside the apartheid political system. His integrated political science, public administration and economic backgrounds were eminently suitable for these tasks. Three major policy entrepreneurship interventions defined his contribution to societal change in South Africa.

The first was the Erika Theron Commission on the ‘coloured community’ in South Africa (1973-1976). He drafted the Commission’s majority recommendation for a fundamental restructuring of the South African constitutional and political system. This recommendation was a direct trigger for the decades-long process of constitutional and political transformation in the country, resulting in the end in the full democratisation of South Africa under a liberal democratic constitution in 1994. In 1981 Vosloo proposed that the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act should be abolished. This was received very negatively in the Afrikaans media, and he received a number of death threats as a result of his views.

His second major practical policy change intervention was his participation in the De Lange Commission on educational reform in South Africa (1980-1981). The commission’s report paved the way to racially fully-integrated primary, secondary and tertiary educational systems in South Africa. This policy change exercise facilitated the transformation in Afrikaner cultural values needed for the eventual successful transition of the apartheid state to the post-apartheid state in South Africa between 1990 and 1996.

Thirdly, as Managing Director of the new SBDC, Vosloo played a major role between 1982 and 1995 in promoting small business development in South Africa and highlighting the importance of this sector for job creation and economic growth. The Institute of Management Consultants of Southern Africa honoured him as Marketing Man of the Year in 1986 and Man of the Year in 1989, while the Institute of Personnel Managers honoured him as Personnel Man of the Year in 1990. Business Times regarded him as one of the Top Five Businessmen of 1993, and ‘Beeld’ newspaper in 1995 as one of South Africa's Top 21 Business Leaders of the past 21 years. His initial university alma mater (UP) awarded him with an Honorary D Comm degree in 1995.

After retiring from the SBDC, he practiced as a business consultant, focussing especially on export marketing to Europe, the USA, Canada and Asia. He also retained an active interest in plural society issues throughout his life, as his wide-ranging scholarly and popular publications on contemporary global economic, management and political trends reflect (www.benvosloo.com). Until 2016, he devoted much time and effort to summarising and assessing what he regarded as some of the most wicked or intractable global sources of conflict. A summary of the highlights of his career is available at https://youtu.be/gppY9nmgylE.

Vosloo will be remembered as an independent-minded and innovative scholar as well as a professional policy and management practitioner. He further had an important role model influence on successive generations of students (including this author), based on his formidable rational logic, pragmatism, humility and soft-spoken, informal conversational teaching style. He never raised his voice. He was also renowned for his ability to contextualise and explain highly complex issues in relatively simple and practical terms. Another of his former students and also successor as Head of the later School of Public Management and Planning, Prof Erwin Schwella, remembers that

… he was a sharp and informed intellect who continuously challenged the young mostly Afrikaner nationalist students with ideas of modern government … He struck a distinguished figure ..dressed meticulously and smartly and was an example of sophistication with a soft spoken but intellectually hard-hitting bearing and well-reasoned arguments.

He was not only a born educator but also a practical problem solver as his successful policy entrepreneurial excursions into the messy worlds of political and economic transformation summarised above, illustrate. His realist and cynical perspectives on the dynamics of power-relationships in politics and government are summarised well in his ‘Three Laws of Political Power-relationships’ that he fervently believed in:

1st law: Politicians normally crave and pursue power.

2nd law: Once in power, no politician normally voluntarily relinquishes power.

3rd law: If a politician relinquishes power voluntarily, the degree of power relinquished is normally directly proportional to the degree of pressure exercised on that politician to relinquish his/her power.

Vosloo and other scholars who chose similar internal political transformation routes faced heavy criticism from a number of ideologically more purist academic colleagues who refused in principle to ‘tinker’ with the implementation of the apartheid system. Many of them attempted to withdraw from the system and preferred to go into either internal or external exile. This was more successful in the case of exile abroad than attempts at internal isolation from the effects of apartheid. Vosloo was unperturbed by this opposition. He just echoed the sentiments of the South African rugby legend, Boy Louw, who shrugged off criticism of the SA rugby team’s performance despite their successes, with the comment: ‘Just looks at the scoreboard’!.

During his productive career, Ben Vosloo made a number of trail-blazing and strategically significant contributions to the democratic, constitutional transformation of political, administrative and economic thought, teaching and practice in South Africa.