NEW YORK, May 4: In a plush corporate boardroom high above Wall street, Joseph Makobe tells how far he's come from the hot, dusty str-eets of South Africa's Transvaal region.

The 34-year-old banker had to scrape for education and professional recognition under the apartheid system of racial segregation, writes AP.

But now Makobe and a dozen other black South African managers are getting a chance to prove that things are changing tn a country that systematically excluded them.

As guests of 13 US corporations for six months, the 12 man and one woman in the Professional Development Programme (PDP) are gaining

International contact, learning a new culture and getting a chance to deal in a larger, more competitive market than Johannesburg.

They are the second group to come to the United States for the executive training programme. The third group of 26 black South Africans in due in August

For a society just emerging from apartheid, the programme is creating "a cadre of well-trained black South Africans," said Ronald Gault, Chairman of the PDP Steering Committee and a managing director at the First Boston Corporation, Makobe’s host.

For eight South African companies—Including top financial institutions and the

national power utility—the black managers represent "an insurance chit" for the future, Gault said.

In a South Africa with blacks sharing power, businesses will need blacks with the management skills the New York visitors are gaining.

"It's a way to develop people who are going to play key roles in the future," Standard Bank training manager Ray Johnson said by telephone from Johannesburg.

Innocent Gama, 26, is one example. He said he constantly presses superiors at Standard Bank—South Africa's second largest by assets—for opportunities such as management training classes not usually open to blacks.

"They had . preconceived Ideas that black people woul-dn l be able to cope," he said. Hui "sometimes I've come in at the top" of the classes. In New York, he's studying corporate finance and risk analysis at the JP Morgan securities firm.

South African white business leaders, too. are speaking the language of conciliation.

There is no way that one section, a minority (white) section of the population, can provide the leadership in business and industry for all the people," Amalgamated Bank Chairman Here Hefer said by telephone from Johannesburg. "You need to exploit all your human material, Irrespective of colour or creed." The bank, South Africa's largest, has four people In the New York pro-

gramme.

South African blacks, 75 per cent of South Africa’s approximately 40 million people, hold less than 10 per cent of managemept positions in finance companies, according to a survey by the Institute of Race Relations, a think tank.

The business training programme was launched after First Boston's Gault met Mandela during his 1990 trip to New York. Gault and David Dinkins, New York City's first black mayor, traveled to South Africa in late 1991 for talks with some of South Africa's leading corporations.

"Enlightened businesses have come to realise that a strong corporate social response in good business." Gault said.