The Causes of Ongoing Social Injustice
Ivor Chipkin
A Report for the RAITH Foundation
1
Table of Contents
Executive Summary................................................................................................................................... 3
The Causes of Social Injustice ....................................................................................................................... 8
1.
Introduction ...................................................................................................................................... 8
2.
A Just Society?................................................................................................................................. 10
3.
The Theory of National Democratic Revolution ............................................................................. 13
3.1.
Articulation of Modes of Production ...................................................................................... 15
3.2.
Another Relationship between Race and Class ...................................................................... 16
4.
Freedom and Capitalism today ....................................................................................................... 18
5.
Another Economy ........................................................................................................................... 20
6.
Bringing the State Back In ............................................................................................................... 25
7.
Public Sector Reform....................................................................................................................... 29
8.
7.1.
Integration .............................................................................................................................. 30
7.2.
Transformation ....................................................................................................................... 33
7.3.
Service Delivery ....................................................................................................................... 37
Social Justice in South Africa today ................................................................................................. 39
8.1.
The view from above .............................................................................................................. 41
8.2.
The View from Below: ............................................................................................................. 46
References .............................................................................................................................................. 51
2
Executive Summary
This paper is about the causes of social injustice in South Africa today. Drawing on previous work I
discuss social justice as a situation where economic goods, political rights and social status are distributed
fairly. In particular, social justice arises when the relationships between groups and between social
classes are justified on the basis of a more or less equitable distribution of public and private goods and
the benefits associated with national, economic growth. Central to this conception of justice, moreover, is
the idea of a fair distribution of rights, of entitlements, of benefits, of burdens, of responsibilities. In this
conception of a ‘just society’ the State is supposed to be the arbiter of this equilibrium between groups
and classes and is, therefore, understood to be the condition of social peace.
How, in South Africa, has a fair distribution of goods come to be understood? I will discuss the notions of
‘fairness’ and its opposite ‘unfairness’ in relation to their connotations in South Africa – rather than in
relation to a now massive philosophical literature. Resistance to Apartheid and before that, segregationist
policies produced a large repertoire of terms and concepts to describe and analyse the injustice of South
Africa’s political systems. I will focus on the notion of South Africa as a ‘colony-of-a-special-type’
because its terms and concepts informed the most important political movement that arose to resist
Apartheid, the African National Congress and its various alliance partners. Furthermore, the political
programme associated with this analysis, the pursuit of National Democratic Revolution, has been central
to the ANC government’s own reading of how to ‘transform’ the South African political-economy in the
interests of social justice.
One of the features of Apartheid society was the way that social and economic goods were allocated to
the benefit of white people and to the prejudice of black people. Moreover, in order to sustain this
situation, political and civic rights were denied Black South Africans, most notably through the denial of
the franchise and, in millions of cases, of formal citizenship. From the late 1960s in South Africa, the
social justice agenda was increasingly defined in terms of rights for blacks and for workers. In the 1970s
and1980s, women’s rights began to feature in their own right. Under the influence of gay and lesbian
activists in the 1990s, moreover, sexual orientation was also added to this cluster of issues.
What made it sensible to bring these diverse struggles into alliance was an idea of apartheid. Apartheid
was understood as a system of race and class domination that allocated benefits in society primarily to
whites and capitalists and burdens primarily to blacks and the working class. In later versions of the
Theory of National Democratic Revolution, apartheid was also conceived as a patriarchal system that
3
privileged men. Under the influence of gay rights activists, from the 1990s this notion of patriarchy was
extended to include hetero-normativity. As such apartheid patriarchy was said to discriminate against
gays and lesbians. In other words, apartheid was conceived as the primary obstacle to the liberation of
blacks, of workers, of women and of gays and lesbians.
This report reviews the progress made in South Africa in changing the social and economic structures of
social injustice in South Africa. It considers the ways that economic, political and social assets are
allocated in society today and the degree to which historical patterns of unfairness and discrimination
have been changed or are changing. In other words, is contemporary South Africa a place where race,
gender, class and region no longer or to a lesser degree determine patterns of accumulation, production
and consumption?
The paper starts with a paradox. Despite important and positive changes to the way that many private and public
goods are allocated in South African society, South Africa resembles less and less the society imagined in the
Constitution, a non-racial democracy where all citizens have more or less equal access to goods and services.
Instead there has been progress at ‘meeting basic needs’, including providing welfare support to nearly 16 million
South Africans and improving access to public educational and health facilities. There have also been important
steps in deracialising patterns of ownership and control of private control and creating and expanding the middle
class. Yet the quality of government services is often poor and uneven. Moreover, massive structural
unemployment condemns millions of South Africans to a life of dependency (on the State, on family members, on
charity). Hence, South Africa increasingly resembles a country of several worlds: ‘multiracial’ middle classes in
the large metropolitan areas, with access to high-quality, largely private services and facilities; populations of
mostly Black, unemployed or underemployed young men located on marginal sites on the urban peripheries or in
pockets of the inner-city; informal settlements around secondary cities inhabited by millions of farm workers
displaced from the land and/or farm workers earning very low wages and rural districts under chiefly authority
where rural women eke our precarious livelihoods. All of these large mentioned groups rely on the State for access
to various social services.
It is this state of inequality and fragmentation that is described by terms like ongoing ‘social injustice’.
What is usually at stake in contemporary debates about South Africa’s current condition and future
(developmental state, failed state as the two extremes) are the ongoing reasons for this situation.
This paper discusses that efforts to ‘transform’ the economy have focused on ownership and control of private, forprofit companies. In particular, Black Economic Empowerment policies, including Broad Based Black Economic
Empowerment, have tried to shift patterns of ownership of capital and the control of capital (that is, who occupies
4
senior management and executive board positions in South African corporations) away from mainly white men, to
Black South Africans broadly defined. Testament to the legacy of non-racialism in the African National Congress,
the term ‘black’ in these laws and regulations is not simply a racial one. Although the subject of intense political
contestation when it comes to the conclusion of actual business deals or the awarding of tenders, the definition of
the term carries the deep imprimatur of the ANC’s historic understanding of Apartheid as a system of racial, gender
and national domination. ‘Blacks’ thus refer to Africans, Coloured and Indians. There is strong emphasis on
privileging women in economic empowerment. Even white women have been, controversially, included in the
remit of these policies. So have Chinese South Africans. In other words, the term ‘black’ refers to women in
general and all those people historically discriminated against during the Apartheid/colonial period.
The difficulty lies with black economic empowerment’s organisational rather than institutional focus. It has not
done much to change the ‘rules of the (economic) game’ (institutional change), or rather it has addressed only the
demographic rules of business (organisational change). It has not resulted in changes to the way business gets done
between firms or, more specifically, the tendency towards centralisation and capital intensity in many economic
sectors. Black economic empowerment in its current form has done nothing to stall these tendencies. Yet it is the
low labour absorptivity of the capitalist sector in South Africa that accounts for very high unemployment,
especially amongst young adults. Moreover, weak market competition and associated commercial procurement
practices serve to make food and other basic household goods expensive for South Africans and especially
expensive for the poor.
This report discusses the institution of traditional authority and customary law. Despite initial efforts to
democratise rural local governments, especially in former Homeland areas, the power of chiefs has not only been
preserved but strengthened – especially in relation to the allocation of land. What this means is that in large parts of
the country, concomitant with the boundaries of former Bantustans, the remit of democratic government, especially
at municipal level, is constrained by the institution of the chief. This situation also represents a severe limit on
women’s’ citizenship, the exercise of which is again mediated in and through a patriarchal institution.
Most commonly, the situation is explained in terms of a ‘democratic deficit’ on the South African political scene.
Numerous scholars and activists refer to the absence of the ‘voice of the poor’ in policy processes or in decisionmaking concerning the allocation of economic resources and public funds. In other words, it is suggested that the
government has not tackled some of the more difficult challenges of socio-economic transformation because it does
not feel under sufficient pressure to do so.
The democratic transition had important consequences for civil-society broadly speaking. In the 1990’s many of
the popular organisations that had arisen to oppose the Apartheid government either dissolved or were absorbed
5
into ANC structures. Organised social movements suffered a further set-back when international donors shifted
their funding strategies in the democratic period. Rather than support activist or community organisations directly,
many donors shifted to supporting the new government through bi-lateral agreements.
The growing gulf between formal politics (the space of law-making, parliamentary contestation, policy-making and
government action), civil society and political society has also been deepened by South Africa’s electoral
landscape. Since the first democratic election, the African National Congress has secured overwhelming electoral
majorities. Many authors have drawn the following conclusion: confident in its electoral majority, the ANC as an
organisation has been unresponsive to voters’ needs and unaccountable in. The image of a gulf or breach between
the political elite and citizens, especially poor South Africans, might not be a good one, however. New work is
beginning to show how electoral politics is in embedded in local strategies and contestation for wealth and income.
Under these conditions ‘blacks’ don’t simply vote for the ANC because it is a ‘black’ party, but because their
livelihoods are caught up in the electoral fortunes of the organisation.
Preoccupation with the ANC and government has also created blind spots.
The first concerns the character of the South African State. The paper explores what measures have been taken to
‘transform’ the South African state and how effective they have been. It makes the argument that even when there
is political will, government departments often lack the organisational means to perform their mandated tasks. This
is not, as so much of the public debate suggests, because public servants are simply unskilled or incompetent.
Instead, the uneven performance of the public service and of local governments has a lot to with how they have
been structured (the influence of New Public Management), how they recruit staff (there is no minimum
qualification, no entrance exam) and how they incentivise their staff. What the report discusses is public sector
reform privileged a model of managerial control at the expense of administrative and bureaucratic capacity.
Furthermore, the poor quality of government services is not the only cause of on-going social injustice.
Unemployment remains the principle driver of inequality in South Africa. Unemployment is, in turn, a
consequence of the capital intensity of business processes in South Africa. This situation is aggravated by
rudimentary market competition in many sectors that, in turn, drives high prices for consumer goods (food retail,
telecoms, electricity). South Africa, in other words, has a capitalist economy with a weak market economy. One
does not have to be a socialist to agree that this arrangement is unsustainable. It is not simply that ‘white’
ownership and control in the private sector remains high. The structure of the economy itself distributes benefits to
a small multiracial elite while condemning the vast majority of South Africans to a life of dependency (on social
grants and often poor public services). One of the glaring gaps in the social justice sector consists of social
6
movements agitating in favour of a just economy.
The report concludes with some remarks about the social justice agenda itself. Earlier work on the ‘social justice
sector’ revealed that the vast majority of social justice organisations were involved in some form of advocacy,
usually to advance the socio-economic rights of various groups. Often this work takes the form of litigation to force
government departments to make available the services they are constitutionally obliged to provide (HIV/Aids
treatment, school text books, shelter, basic services and so on) (see Chipkin and Meny-Gibert: 2013).
The social justice agenda could be further advanced by:

Addressing social injustices arising from the way that the South African economy works to drive
up prices of basic goods (like food and energy). Consumer activism is an especially propitious and
yet neglected field of action. In the first place, high consumer prices and poor services unduly
affect poor South Africans. Food prices are especially high. Most poor families survive on a diet
that excludes dairy products and only occasionally includes meat. High prices, moreover, are often
a consequence of weak or poorly performing markets. Consumer activism, that is, opens a hitherto
unexplored route to reforming or even transforming aspects of the South African economy.

Engaging more fully with the reasons why government fails or is seen to fail in changing the way
private and public goods are distributed. In this regard, the sector would be assisted by ongoing
research in relevant sectors, including on patterns of social stratification in South Africa and social
change, on the character of the South African economy, on the form of the State, on the dominant
political and intellectual traditions in South Africa.

Expanding the strategies and tactics social justice organisations use to pursue social justice. This
report has shown, for example, that understanding the limits of what government does in terms of
political will or in terms of accountability misses as much as it explains. There are opportunities
where partnerships with government departments/ agencies/ officials may be as valuable a form of
engagement as opposition and litigation.
7
The Causes of Social Injustice
1. Introduction
This paper is about the causes of social injustice in South Africa today. Drawing on previous work I
discuss social justice as a situation where economic goods, political rights and social status are distributed
fairly. In particular, social justice arises when the relationships between groups and between social
classes are justified on the basis of a more or less equitable distribution of public and private goods and
the benefits associated with national, economic growth. Central to this conception of justice, moreover, is
the idea of a fair distribution of rights, of entitlements, of benefits, of burdens, of responsibilities. In this
conception of a ‘just society’ the State is supposed to be the arbiter of this equilibrium between groups
and classes and is, therefore, understood to be the condition of social peace.
How, in South Africa, has a fair distribution of goods come to be understood? I will discuss the notions
of ‘fairness’ and its opposite ‘unfairness’ in relation to their connotations in South Africa – rather than in
relation to a now massive philosophical literature (from Rawls to Nozick). Resistance to Apartheid and
before that segregationist policies, produced a large repertoire of terms and concepts to describe and
analyse the injustice of South Africa’s political systems. I will focus on the notion of South Africa as a
‘colony-of-a-special-type’ because its terms and concepts informed the most important political
movement that arose to resist Apartheid, the African National Congress and its various alliance partners.
Furthermore, the political programme associated with this analysis, the pursuit of National Democratic
Revolution, has been central to the ANC government’s own reading of how to ‘transform’ the South
African political-economy in the interests of social justice.
One of the features of Apartheid society was the way that social and economic goods were allocated to
the benefit of white people and to the prejudice of black people. Moreover, in order to sustain this
situation, political and civic rights were denied Black South Africans, most notably through the denial of
the franchise and, in millions of cases, of formal citizenship. From the late 1960s in South Africa, the
social justice agenda was increasingly defined in terms of rights for blacks and for workers. In the 1970s
and1980s, women’s rights began to feature in their own right (Nzimande: 2009). Under the influence of
gay and lesbian activists in the 1990s (Cock, p.25), moreover, sexual orientation was also added to this
cluster of issues.
8
What made it sensible to bring these diverse struggles into alliance was an idea of apartheid. Apartheid
was understood as a system of race and class domination that allocated benefits in society primarily to
whites and capitalists and burdens primarily to blacks and the working class. In later versions of the
Theory of National Democratic Revolution, apartheid was also conceived as a patriarchal system that
privileged men. Under the influence of gay rights activists, from the 1990s this notion of patriarchy was
extended to include hetero-normativity. As such apartheid patriarchy was said to discriminate against
gays and lesbians. In other words, apartheid was conceived as the primary obstacle to the liberation of
blacks, of workers, of women and of gays and lesbians.
This report reviews the progress made in South Africa in changing the social and economic structures of
social injustice in South Africa. It considers the ways that economic, political and social assets are
allocated in society today and the degree to which historical patterns of unfairness and discrimination
have been changed or are changing. In other words, is contemporary South Africa a place where race,
gender, class and region no longer or to a lesser degree determine patterns of accumulation, production
and consumption?
The report offers a broad political-economic analysis of post-Apartheid South Africa to understand how
poverty and wealth, social value and political rights are distributed in society. It will provide examples
from a range of sectors and institutions. The study will explore:

the role of the corporate sector as an instrument of production and distribution, especially as it
affects consumers and the unemployed.

the role of the state in overcoming the ‘legacy of Apartheid’ and the consequences of policy
interventions in the fields of health and education, for example.

how the configuration of rights, benefits and burdens in society affects historical patterns of race,
class and patriarchy in South Africa

forms of resistance or opposition to changes or continuities on the South African political
economy.
This report, however, seeks not primarily to describe the state of affairs in South Africa today. In
exploring the causes of ongoing social injustice, this paper considers how and why social, economic and
political benefits and prejudices continue to be allocated unfairly. That is, it considers those areas where
the State in South Africa has not made progress in regulating the distribution of private and public goods
or the benefits of economic growth fairly amongst South Africa’s diverse groups and social classes.
9
To the extent that this paper makes a contribution to the ongoing debate in South Africa, it seeks to move
explanations for ongoing social injustice away from the usual explanatory culprits: lack of political will
and/or lack of popular pressure. This paper engages with both explanations to find that they are not
sufficient to their task. As a result this paper offers two additional perspectives. It argues that the ANC
government has struggled to define a coherent social justice politics, vacillating between a definition of
social justice that, ultimately, priviliges a poltics of race and a politics of social justice that emphasises
class and gender. Furthermore, itt argues that there has been a tendency to overlook the organisational
make-up of the state and, hence, to over and underestimate state capacity to regulate affairs in the
direction of social justice.
2. A Just Society?
Let us start at the beginning, however. What would a state of social justice look like in South Africa? Let
us approach this question at a moment of unease, if not disappointment.
At least since the Presidency of Thabo Mbeki government officials and members of the African National
Congress have expressed ambivalent attitudes about the constitutional settlement of 1996.
“How do we understand April 1994?” Pallo Jordan asked in a paper prepared for the 50th ANC National
Conference in 1997. Jordan’s chief concern was with the ‘national question’ by which he meant the
degree to which “South Africans share a common patriotism and a common vision of the future of their
society” (Jordan, 1997). Was there still a “material basis of white racism”? (Jordan, Affirmative Action,
Corrective Measures and the Freedom Charter).
A cornerstone of the ANC’s non-racialism - that which distinguished it from say the Africanism of the
Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) - was that racism was not explained in terms of the peculiar psychology
or culture of whites as individuals or as a group. It reflected, rather, the way that capitalism had developed
in a colonial setting and the institutions created to sustain productive relations (Jordan, Towards
Solutions). This is what gave to the ANC’s platform its specific character and its peculiar terminology.
The ANC was engaged in a National Democratic Revolution that sought to eliminate the origins of white
domination in the colonial-capitalist economy (the base) and its supporting racist institutions (the
apartheid superstructure). The objective was a “democratic, non-sexist, non-racial” society.
What did 1994 represent on these terms? “The ANC,” Jordan writes, “had to make a number of distasteful
concessions to the old order in order to secure the beach-head of majority rule in 1994. These were made
10
with the implicit understanding that the main thrust of movement policy would be to consolidate that
beach-head and employ it to lay the foundations of a truly democratic society” (Jordan, Affirmative
Action, Corrective Measures and the Freedom Charter).
On Jordan’s terms, national unity was delayed as long as racism continued to be institutionalised – in both
apartheid institutions (that arose to support the productive forces) and in the structures of the economy
(colonial capitalism). Therein lay both the disappointment of 1994 and also its promise. “Distasteful
concessions” were made to the white minority regime, such that institutionalised racism, especially in the
economy, survived. In 1997, however, Pallo Jordan was hopeful that the bridgehead that the democratic
breakthrough represented, could be progressively advanced and expanded.
Thirteen years later there is an intemperate atmosphere in the ANC. It suggests that such optimism is over
or waning.
The ANC Youth League, especially under the then leadership of Julius Malema, argued that the legacy of
institutional racism was long. “The slow pace of transformation in the private sector,” it suggests, “is
mainly due to the dominance of white males, men who were bred and cultured under institutionalised
racism and who are unable to appreciate and comprehend that black people, and Africans in particular,
are human beings too, who are capable to do the job”. “The underlying message could not be worse,” it
continues. “White South Africa is still unable to embrace their black brothers. It doesn't stop with
corporate South Africa. Millions of farm and factory workers and domestic helpers live with brutal racism
on a daily basis” (ANC Youth League, 2009)1.
The Youth League’s insistence on nationalising the mines must be seen in this context; of a growing
impatience with past and current efforts at changing the structure of the economy. Whereas Jordan,
nonetheless, sees the Constitution as an opening, there are signs that in parts of the ANC, it is viewed as
an impasse. Let us note a subtle shift in the Youth League’s argument relative to that of Jordan. It is no
longer that certain institutions necessarily function in racist ways. Rather, it is that the now defunct
ideologies that supported such institutions survive in the minds of the white managers and directors that
run them. I will return to this point.
This sentiment was not that of then Youth League leaders alone. The former Director-General of the
Department of Labour, Jimmy Manyi, called for amendments to the Constitution. At a BMF function
Malema, Julius, ‘We should openly confront racism in SA’, ANC Youth League, Nov 27, 2009,
http://www.ancyouthleague.org/home/index.php?option=com_myblog&show=THE-NDR-AFRICANLEADERSHIP-AND-NON-RACIALISM-105.html&Itemid=0, consulted the 30 April, 2010.
1
11
Jimmy Manyi complained that the constitution’s property clauses were hindering efforts to transform the
economy. Referring specifically to land reform he is reported as saying: “We are yet to see government
taking issues of a transformational nature to court and winning them. [...] Why does it seem that the
Constitution does not support the transformation agenda of the country” (The Times, 20/4/2010, p.4)2. He
was no doubt reflecting views circulating amongst emerging Black capitalists in and out of the African
National Congress. He was, lest we forget, also head of the Black Management Forum (BMF).
There are many reasons to be surprised by the pessimism of these statements. From the perspective of
social justice there is much to celebrate. That is, in terms of the way that private and public goods are
distributed in South Africa, a lot has changed. By the end of the Apartheid period, for example, spending
on a white child’s education in urban areas was still two and half times higher that of a black child.
Compared to black children in rural areas, spending on white children was five times higher (Spaull:
2012). By 2012, government expenditures on education across provinces had largely been equalised (Ibid,
2012). Furthermore, the South African Institute of Race Relations (SAIRR) reported in its 2010/2011
account of living conditions in South Africa that there had been important service delivery improvements
across the country. Between 1996 and 2010:

The number of South African households living in formal houses increased from 5.8-million to
11-million or by 89.9%. Over the same period the proportion of all households living in a formal
house increased from 64% to 76%.

The number of South African households with access to electricity increased from 5.2-million to
11.9-million or by 127.9%, while the proportion of all households with access to electricity
increased from 58% to 83%.

The number of South African households with access to piped water increased from 7.2-million
to 12.7-million or by 76.6%. The proportion with access to piped water increased from 80% to
89% (SAIRR: 2012).
The tone and substance of the political debate in South Africa often obscures these distributional changes.
The deputy CEO of the SAIRR, when presenting the institute’s findings above, conveyed his frustration
Mokgata, Zweli, ‘Constitution under Fire’, The Times, 30/4/2010, p.4. The Business Day reports that after a
lengthy deliberation, panelists agreed that it was not so much the constitution itself that was at fault but the judiciary.
“All the fingers are pointing at the judiciary, as the people who are interpreting the laws, (they) are untransformed”
Jeremy Manyi is quoted as saying (Rabkin, Franny, ‘Manyi blames ‘interpretation of the constitution’, Business
Day, 30/4/2010, p.3).
2
12
with the public discourse: a "myth has taken hold in South Africa that service delivery was a failure,” he
was reported as saying. “However, research we have published over the past several years suggests that
this is not the case." (Frans Cronje cited in SouthAfrica.info, 21/09/2013).
It is not just ignorance that drives public debate. What is at stake in them is nothing less than the identity
of the social groups that are supposed to be the beneficiaries of social justice: Blacks (as Africans),
Blacks ( as those historically oppressed, including Africans, Coloureds and Indians, Blacks (as the victim
of colonial capitalism, especially the working class), Blacks as the victims of patriarchy (women and gays
and lesbians) – and the various combinations between them.
Hence, the argument in South Africa today is not that patterns of distribution have not changed at all.
Rather, it is often that the wrong groups have benefitted (white women, for example, or “other
minorities”) and/or that the right groups (Africans, African women, the poor) have not benefited enough
or at all.
Underpinning this discourse is a more fundamental debate: what processes are responsible for the way
that goods (economic and social) are produced, valued and allocated? What can and should be done to
change, limit or transform these structures, organisations, firms, networks and people? At the heart of
these considerations is a profound disagreement within the ANC and the Alliance and more broadly about
the nature of the South African economy. In particular, to what extent can economic growth facilitate
prosperity for all or, does growth largely reproduce Apartheid-era patterns of inequality and poverty?
3. The Theory of National Democratic Revolution
In 1963, the South African Communist Party innovated viz. the analysis of the South African ‘social
formation’. In the Road to South African Freedom, it proposed that “the conceding of independence to
South Africa by Britain in 1910 [ ... ] was designed in the interests of imperialism. Power was transferred
not into the hands of the masses of the people of South Africa, but into the hands of the minority alone.
[...] A new type of colonialism was developed, in which the oppressing White nation occupied the same
territory as the oppressed people themselves and lived side by side with them”. 'Non-White South Africa',
the document went on further, 'is the colony of White South Africa itself.' (SACP, pp. 43-44)3.
3
South African Communist Party, 'The Road to South African Freedom: Programme of the South African
Communist Party', The African Communist, 2.2 (January-March, 1963), 24-70.
13
This analysis was formally adopted by the ANC in 1969 at the Morogoro Conference in Tanzania. The
Strategy and Tactics document argued that: “South Africa's social and economic structure and the
relationships which it generates are perhaps unique. It is not a colony, yet it has, in regard to the
overwhelming majority of its people, most of the features of the classical colonial structures. [...] What
makes the structure unique and adds to its complexity is that the exploiting nation is not, as in the
classical imperialist relationships, situated in a geographically distinct mother country, but is settled
within the borders. What is more, the roots of the dominant nation have been embedded in our country by
more than three centuries of presence. It is thus an alien body only in the historical sense” (ANC: 1969,
The White Group).4
By this formulation white South Africans were rendered indigenous, despite that they were a settler
population. The 1977 Lisbon conference noted, for example, that “the white population in South Africa
has severed ties with their respective metropoles, that they recognise South Africa as their homeland”. As
a result, it continued, the “conference fully endorses and hails the ANC position, reflected in the
Freedom Charter, which declares that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white” (ANC:
1977)5.
If, however, whites and blacks were both, in effect, indigenous to the territory of South Africa, why
discuss the South African social formation as a colonial one at all? Why not, for example, simply describe
it as the Americans did – a civil rights problem?
The reason lay in the way that the ANC (and the SACP) understood colonialism. Following Lenin they
regarded colonial domination as a relationship between distinct peoples and capitalism. Blacks and
Whites may, in effect, be indigenous to South Africa, yet they constituted different nations nonetheless.
The domination of the one nation by the other was driven, not by cultural factors (or what Lenin
discussed as ‘superstructural’ phenomena), but by the development of capitalism in South Africa itself. In
other words, apartheid constituted a colonial situation because, firstly, it saw one nation dominating
another. Secondly national domination was a necessary outcome of capitalism at a certain stage of
development – that is, Imperialism.
4
African National Congress, Strategy and Tactics of the ANC, adopted by the Morogoro Conference of the ANC,
Morogoro, Tanzania, 1969, http://www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/history/stratact.html, consulted 4/5/2010.
5
African National Congress, ‘Colonialism of a Special Type’, Statement of the Lisbon Conference, March 1977,
http://www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/history/special.html, consulted 3 May 2010.
14
The theory of Colonialsm-of-a-Special-Type, however, left the precise mechanics of race domination
and its relationship to class exploitation obscure. It was left to a generation of Marxist scholars to
work them out in South Africa.
3.1.
Articulation of Modes of Production
Harold Wolpe’s major contribution was to understand that the conservation of the rural ‘reserves’
was key to the reproduction of capitalist relations of production. It is worth dwelling on this
argument for a moment because it brings to the fore the theoretical and political burdens of treating
apartheid as a form of colonialism.
“The crucial function thus performed by the policy of Segregation was to maintain the productive capacity of
the pre-capitalist economies and the social system of the African societies in order to ensure that these
societies provided portion of the means of reproduction of the migrant working-class. […]
Wolpe invokes here a distinction introduced by Ernesto Laclau between an economic system and a mode of
production, to argue that in the South African situation, the economic system was characterised by a
combination of modes of production, pre-capitalist and capitalist. During the period of segregation (ending
in 1948), the cost of labour power for the mines was subsidised by the pre-capitalist, agrarian mode of
production in the reserve areas. In other words, what made labour power cheap was that wages payable to
miners had only to cover the costs of their social and biological reproduction alone; and not of their
families as well. Therein lay the system’s fatal contradiction. As the rural areas became more and more
impoverished – a situation generated and necessitated by the migrant labour system itself – so subsistence
on the land became less and less viable for migrants’ families. As agricultural yields were no longer able to
provide for the reproduction of the rural population, so pressure increased on migrants’ wages to fill the
gap. Yet growing upward pressure on wages threatened the rate of profit.
“The policy of Apartheid developed,” on Wolpe’s terms, “as a response to this urban and rural challenge to the system
which emerged inexorably from the changed basis of cheap labour-power. What was at stake was nothing less that the
reproduction of the labour force, not in general, but in a specific form, in the form of cheap labour-power. Within its
framework Apartheid combined both institutionalizing and legitimating mechanism and, overwhelmingly, coercive
measures” (Wolpe, p. 446).
15
Therein lies the kernel of the CST thesis.
Whites and blacks may inhabit the same territory, yet the relationship between them was largely determined by their
respective positions in the capitalist relations of production. On Pallo Jordan’s terms we might say that the capitalist
system was the chief source of institutionalized racism. As long as gross repression was needed to reproduce cheap
labour, it was impossible to make democratic concessions in South Africa. As long as large-scale black urbanization
was a threat to the economic system, repressive and discriminatory laws were required to control the movement of
black people (Influx control, pass laws, group areas act, Bantustan policies). As long as black people were the
majority, it was necessary to deny them political rights in the state, less they change the laws and regulations that
sustained South African capitalism.
Let us note that on Wolpe’s terms the end of Apartheid was necessarily associated with the defeat of capitalism, at
least, with the end of the regime of cheap labour and the economic system that functioned on its back. This is the
proper sense of the National Democratic Revolution (NDR) as it was enunciated in ANC and SACP circles. Raymond
Suttner and Jeremy Cronin discussed the anti-capitalist character of the anti-apartheid struggle in terms of it being
‘socialist-in-orientation’ - this in recognition of the way that the capitalist economy was implicated in race domination
(Suttner and Cronin, 1985).
3.2.
Another Relationship between Race and Class
We can read Wolpe against himself, however. Wolpe’s own argument in 1972 suggested another more
ambivalent relationship between race domination and class exploitation. To the extent that the cheap labour
system was in crisis by 1948, there were other options than the Apartheid policy to preserve it. Wolpe
notes, for example, that “for English dominated large-scale capital (particularly mining but also sections of
secondary industry), the solution, both to the problem of the level of profit and to the threat to their political
control implicit in growing African militancy was to somewhat alter the structure of Segregation in favour
of Africans” (Wolpe, p. 445). In other words, even within the mining industry, it was possible to tolerate
higher African wages. Wolpe suggests that this would only have been possible by recovering the losses
from white, Afrikaans workers.
Hence, Wolpe’s argument is that, ultimately, Apartheid was driven by political, rather than economic
considerations. “The alternative for the Afrikaner working-class, resisting competition from African
workers, for the growing Afrikaner industrial and financial capitalist class, struggling against the
16
dominance of English monopoly capital, and, perhaps, for a petit-bourgeoisie threatened with
proletarianization by the advance of African workers (and the Indian petit-bourgeoisie), was to assert
control over the African and other Non-white people by whatever means were necessary. For the Afrikaner
capitalist class, African labour-power could be maintained as cheap labour-power by repression; for the
White worker, this also guaranteed their own position as a ‘labour-aristocracy’” (Wolpe, pp. 445-446)
Yet is also possible that mining capitalists would have accepted (or had to accept) a lower rate of profit. This is
hardly far-fetched. What constitutes an acceptable rate of profit is neither a law of economics, nor is it given by
strictly economic factors. It is contingent on the balance of class forces in the conjuncture and on a range of social
and cultural factors, including norms of remuneration, social attitudes to what constitutes value (greed, merit), the
attitudes of corporate managers, executives and shareholders to consumption and savings, the degree to which they
see value in state spending in welfare or infrastructure and so on.
In other words, from as early as 1948, on Wolpe’s own argument, the strictly economic relationship between race
domination and economic exploitation was weakening. Political factors were coming to the fore. Wolpe himself
uses a euphemism to describe this development – “somewhat altering” – though its theoretical and political
consequences are enormous. If Apartheid as a system of race domination was not driven (or, after 1948, no longer
driven) by the development of South African capitalism or capitalism in general, then it stops making sense to
define Apartheid as a form of colonialism.
There is more. Industrialisation in South Africa during and after the Second World War gave rise to a
manufacturing sector, whose conditions of production rendered it ambivalent to the system of racial domination.
Wolpe himself alludes to this, when he mentions industrial capitalists as amongst those capitalists ready to make
concessions to the African working class. In 1972, however, he failed to consider the origins of this ambivalence or
its political consequences6. Later it became a major theme of Wolpe’s work (Alexander, p.144). It fell to the
workers and trade-unionists of what became the Federation of South African Trade Unions (FOSATU), often
disparaged as ultra-leftists or ‘workerists’, to make the links. I have discussed this more fully elsewhere
(Chipkin:2007). In brief, what they argued was that South African manufacturing was less dependent on cheap
labour than, say, mining, and more interested in a better educated workforce, permanently settled near the point of
6
On his terms, industrial enterprises, like gold mines, relied on cheap labour. Yet, whereas the reserve economies
effectively subsidised the cost of African labour power in the mines, industrial firms relied on a different mechanism
to keep wages low. This is how Wolpe explained the rise of the Bantustan system, as a mechanism to reduce the cost
of African labour power in industry by encouraging industrial activity in areas exempt from labour reservation
(hence where they could employ Africans to do jobs normally reserved for higher paid whites), where concessions
made to trade unions did not apply and where workers where located in dormitory settlements where the costs of
living were lower than in established townships.
17
production7. Manufactures, therefore, were less invested in some of the core features of Apartheid, namely the pass
laws and Bantu Education. FOSATU argued, therefore, that by the late 1970’s the system of racial domination was
becoming unlinked from the system of class exploitation, such that the nationalist struggle and the worker’s
struggle were no longer one and the same (Chipkin: 1997).
The FOSATU analysis suggested a complex periodisation for the end of the colonial period, or rather that the
South African social formation comprised both colonial and postcolonial elements simultaneously. To the extent
that racial domination remained rooted in the conditions of capitalist production, colonialism was sustained in the
mining industry and perhaps in commercial agriculture. Yet in other areas of the economic and social domain,
racism and racist domination was chiefly an effect of cultural and/or political factors. In this case, the character of
Afrikaner nationalism and the religious, cultural and racial beliefs that underpinned it.
4. Freedom and Capitalism today
The language of these debates may seem obscure, especially in the light of the so-called postmodern turn in
academic and social science circles. In South Africa today, however, economic and industrial policy are still
contested on the horns of this debate. The terms have shifted slightly. Apartheid as a political system, entrenched in
discriminatory laws, regulations and institutions has been defeated. There are few people today who seriously
claim that powerful business groups are invested in the return of political Apartheid. To what extent, however, does
the capitalist economy serve to reproduce and entrench Apartheid-era patterns of inequality, poverty and misery?
Under what conditions would economic growth serve to deracialise South African society, lift millions of people
out of poverty and move South Africa towards a more inclusive society? What is the economic constraint, in other
words, on overcoming the legacy of Apartheid?
Let us restate the dilemma, a conceptual dilemma, in the language of social justice. What kind of intervention is
required by an ANC government in order to change the way the South African economy distributes goods? Are
measures required to expand the non-capitalist sectors of the economy or is it sufficient to reform the capitalist
sector itself by, for example, pursuing measures to deracialise the ownership and control of capital?
In the late 1990’s internal ANC discussion documents reflected fierce contestation within the National Liberation
Movement on the topic of the economy. The major issue of contention at the time was the abandonment of the
7
Peter Alexander argues that matters were more uneven than that suggested by FOSATU. Even in manufacturing
there was heavy dependence on migrant labour, exacerbating tensions within the ruling class (Alexander, p. 113).
18
Reconstruction and Development Programme and the introduction of the Growth, Employment and Redistribution
(GEAR) strategy in 1996. The key differences between these policies can be summarised in their respective key
slogans: ‘growth through redistribution’ versus ‘redistribution through growth’. These debates have been well
discussed elsewhere and it is not the intention to revisit them here (see Hein Marais 2010). Nonetheless, it is worth
noting an important report from 1998 – the State, Transformation and Property Relation - that, nonetheless,
constitutes a watershed in the South African debate. It provides the theoretical foundation of the GEAR strategy
and Black Economic Empowerment policies and its essential argument remains highly influential in parts of the
ANC and in wider South African society.
One of the tasks of the National Democratic Revolution, the report argues, is to change property relations in South
Africa, including patterns of ownership, investment and of procurement. How can this be done when capital is held
in overwhelmingly white hands? The solution is deemed to lie in the creation of a black capitalist class; one created
essentially through government procurement practices and regulatory interventions requiring minimum quota for
Black equity in private (White) firms. By virtue of their dependence on the ANC, black capitalists would be
amenable to influence from the National Liberation Movement. Patterns of investment could then be directed into
sectors and initiatives that benefitted the Black majority.
In a systematic way, the NDR has to ensure that ownership of private capital at all […] levels […] is not defined in
racial terms. Thus the new state - in its procurement policy, its programme of restructuring state assets, utilisation
of instruments of empowerment, pressure and other measures - promotes the emergence of a black capitalist class
(emphasis added) (ANC, 1998).
On these terms, what constrains the South African economy from overcoming the Apartheid legacy? Its Racial
demography does. What the GEAR strategy and later the Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative for South
Africa (ASGISA) did, in effect, was turn the ‘workerist’ argument on its head. FOSATU activists had concluded
that workers could no longer rely on the automatic support of Black nationalists in the struggle for socialism (see
Chipkin: 2007). The ANC government during the Presidency of Thabo Mbeki reached a different conclusion. If
capitalism no longer needed Apartheid, then the capitalist sector could be used as an engine of post-Apartheid
growth. The problem was not the structure of the economy but its demography. Capital was owned and controlled
exclusively by whites. Deracialise ownership through policies like Black Economic Empowerment and reduce
white management control (through Affirmative Action) and social redress could be achieved through economic
growth.
19
5. Another Economy
There was reason to be more sanguine, however, about the transformative potential of even a deracialised South
African economy.
In 1996 Ben Fine and Zavareh Rustomjee took on what was becoming the conventional view of the South African
economy; of a declining mining industry and an ascendant manufacturing sector (Fine and Rustomjee, p. 76). The
distinction between these two sectors, they argued, was often little more than a fiat of accounting. To reflect the
real linkages in the South African economy, Fine and Rustomjee proposed a new taxonomy. The South African
economy was dominated by a Minerals-Energy-Complex comprising coal, gold, diamond and other mining
activities; electricity; non-metallic mineral products; iron and steel basic industries; non-ferrous metals basic
industries; and fertilisers, pesticides, synthetic resins, plastics, other chemicals, basic chemicals and petroleum
(Ibid, p.79). How did these sectors link to form a complex? More than 90% of electricity, they argued, was
generated from coal mining, while 21,6% of electricity was consumed in mining. Meanwhile another 21,3% of
electricity was used for energy-intensive smelting and refining in only 3 manufacturing sub-sectors – all closely
related to the mining industry (Ibid, p.80). All in all, since 1960 non-MEC manufacturing sectors had stagnated to
between 15% and 17% of GDP. In contrast the MEC’s contribution to GDP had grown to as much as 32% in 1980
and then settled to between 25% and 27% during the rest of the decade (Ibid, 81). “What particularly stands out,”
argue the authors, “is that the growth of the MEC has been accompanied by the stagnation of the of the non-MEC
manufacturing since 1960” (Ibid, p.82). Hein Marais puts it this way: industrial development was basically arrested
around the Mineral-Energy-Complex (Marais, p. 30).
On these terms, robust economic growth, even in a ‘deracialised’ economy, referred to the further development of
the Minerals-Energy-Complex at the expense of other more labour absorptive sectors and came at the cost of a
highly centralised system of conglomerate control. Does this analysis help us understand the divergence between
the way that the restructuring of the electricity generation industry (EGI) happened from 1998 and the relevant
policy? The electricity white paper of that year looked forward to an industry whose dependence on Eskom and
coal mining had been reduced, firstly, by opening up a market in generation and secondly, by encouraging the
participation of renewable energies (solar, wind) and nuclear. Since then, the dominant position of Eskom has
been secured. Independent Power Producers (IPPs) will only contribute 30% of new power to the grid. Eskom will
provide the lion’s share at 70%. What is more, Eskom’s new power stations are all coal-fired, which, over and
above the worrying environmental consequences, entrenches the centrality of coal mining as an input for the
20
domestic economy (PARI: 2013).
There are other features of the South African economy that ‘de-racialisation’ in itself will not address. In 2002
Sampie Terreblanche wrote a critique of then existing economic policies, ASGISA (see above) in particular. Many
of his central claims have turned out to be prescient. His argument was that such policies rested on five
questionable assumptions: that that South Africa has a high growth potential, that integration into the global
economy will be benign for South Africa and enhance economic growth, that high growth will create employment,
that the poor will benefit and that the economic restructuring should be left to the market (Terreblanche, pp. 424425). What this policy underestimated, he complained, was the particular history of economic development in
South Africa, especially the way the economy had until the 1970’s been based on the availability of “docile and
exploitable” black labour (Ibid, p.420). The Durban strikes of 1973 ended this century-long trend, bringing forth a
militant Black working class organised through powerful trade-union federations – from 1979 in the form of the
Federation of South African Trade Unions (FOSATU) and after 1986 in the form of the Congress of South African
Trade Unions (COSATU). Drawing heavily on the radical critique of the South African political-economy,
Terreblanche concluded that from this moment on “the white employer class lost one of the central pillars of its
colonial plundering” (Ibid, p.421). The way the corporate sector responded to these changed circumstances set the
mould for South Africa’s economy into the present.
In the first place, South African corporates changed their production methods replacing labour for capital
equipment. “These changes,” he writes, “have substantially increased the capital intensity of the modern sector of
the economy. […] As a result, the labour-absorptive capacity of the South African economy is far weaker than
those of many other developing countries” (Ibid, p.421).
In the second place, corporations responded to the risk of declining profitability by “increase[ing] their size and
influence through mergers, takeovers, minority shareholding in other companies and, lately, ‘globalisation’” (Ibid,
p. 421). In the 1980’s when capital controls and international sanctions prevented much of this capital from
moving abroad, profits were directed into a “huge and sophisticated financial system” that emerged in response to
the isolation of the South African economy (Ref). The ‘financialisation’ of the South African economy was a
corporate response, therefore, to crisis of accumulation of the 1970’s. Some of this money financed a property
boom, especially in new, decentralised office parks (provoking the collapse of property values in the Johannesburg
Central Business District) as well as in shopping centres and sectional title residential estates (see Chipkin, 2005,
see Chipkin, 2013). In the new millennium the South African government permitted a lot of this capital to be
expatriated overseas. In 2010 seven of the country’s largest corporations were allowed to list on foreign stock
21
exchanges. Amongst them was Anglo American and Billiton (formerly Gencor) as well as two large pension-funds,
Old Mutual and Liberty. “The cardinal economic legacy of post-apartheid economic policies,” writes Hein Marais,
“has been the facilitation of capital flight and divestment, the globalisation of South Africa’s largest corporations
and corporate unbundling and restructuring” (Marais, p.124). Marais adds bitterly:
“As government eased the sluice gates open, vast wealth was transferred out of the country. Much of it had been
amassed with the labour South African workers and by extracting mineral resources from the country’s soil. The
word ‘looting’ comes to mind. Yet it occurred not in a broken-down system […] but as part of a phased economic
strategy, managed by a democratic government espousing an African Renaissance” (Ibid, 125).
It is unlikely, therefore, that massive unemployment in South Africa is a result simply of weak economic growth or
labour legislation (see Bureau of Economic Research: 2006). Even if the labour market was more flexible and the
economy grew more rapidly, it is unlikely that employment would rise to levels needed to begin to address
inequality and poverty. Stephen Gelb reminds us that inequality and poverty in South Africa depend heavily on
one’s employment status (Gelb, p.7). In 2000, only 22% of people in the poorest households were employed (Ibid,
p.7). This is because over the last 30 years the dynamic sector of the economy has “disengaged”, as Terreblanche
puts it, from the black labour force (Terreblanche, Op Cit, p.422). Like the Apartheid-era economy, the current
economy “systematically and undeservedly enriches” a small elite while impoverishing the majority of the
population; even if today the small elite is increasingly multiracial (see Nattrass and Seekings, 2006)
5.1.
Oligopoly
David Lewis, former head of the Competition Tribunal in South Africa warns that mergers can have a long-term
effect on the structure of markets. “They may result,” he cautions, “in single-firm dominance, thus strengthening
the prospect of abusive, unilateral conduct, or they may enhance the prospect of anticompetitive horizontal
agreements” (Lewis, p.76). This is especially true in an economy experiencing major structural change. Lewis’
point is especially prescient in the context of a South African economy where corporates were tackling the crisis of
accumulation starting in the 1970’s. They did this by substituting machinery for labour and through mergers and
acquisition – that is, by shoring up markets, rather than labourers, for exploitation. I will discuss one example here,
the agricultural sector.
One of the key challenges of developing a small-scale farming sector in South Africa is access to markets. In
policy circles the obstacle has been thought to lie mainly with the producers. If small farmers can be assisted to
22
improve the quality of their goods and the consistency of their production it is assumed that supermarkets will
happily buy from them (van Der Heijden and Vink, pp. 2-3). In South Africa the Department of Agriculture,
Forestry and Fisheries works from this model: if granted land and technical and financial assistance small farmers
will be incorporated into markets. This approach takes inadequate account of the way that agricultural markets
work in ‘modern’ economies, including in South Africa.
Supermarkets operate in low profit-margin environment; write van Der Heijden and Vink. They work to keep
prices low for consumers while maintaining the quality of their products. Like companies in other retail sectors
they have reconciled these pressures by increasingly adopting the principles of Supply Chain Management. This
means taking control of the whole chain of operations that eventually result in the display of a product on a shop
shelf: buying, packaging, labelling, transport and so on. Competitive advantages arise from the way that companies
manage the supply chain, rather than simply from the difference between the wholesale and retail price. In this
environment supermarkets are ‘gatekeepers’ to the retail markets by being the ‘lead firms’ in agricultural value
chains (Ibid, 4). That is, they dictate the terms under which products are able to enter the market at all. In
countries with high levels of supermarket concentration, such as the United Kingdom and the United States, the
options for farmers are very limited. They must sell their produce on terms dictated to by the supermarkets.
In South Africa four companies dominate the supermarket sector: Pick n Pay, Shoprite, SPAR and Woolworths.
Between them they control between 90% and almost 95% of the supermarket sector itself and at least 52% of the
national food retail market (Ibid, p.8). Under these conditions they have been able to dictate prices to farmers and
squeeze out small retail competition in townships (spaza shops) and remote rural areas (see Philips, 2011). This is
why van Der Heijden and Vink claim that the agricultural sector in South Africa more closely resembles ‘modern’,
that is, European and American ones, that those of developing countries (van Der Heijden, Op Cit., pp. 8-10).
Not only has this made it extremely difficult for emerging, mainly Black farmers, to enter the market and become
sustainable enterprises, but it has worked to constrain wages on farms and, thereby, reproduce rural poverty.
Responding to recent, violent strikes in Delft in the Western Cape, where farm workers are currently paid as little
as R60 per day, Tracy van Der Heijden has raised the following paradox: “Firstly, any farms would become
unprofitable if required to pay the R150 a day minimum. Secondly, even if workers did receive the R150 a day
wage, they would probably still be unable to afford a nutritious basket of food’ (van Der Heijden, 2013). What is
happening in this situation? The reason is that as a proportion of the retail price, farmers earn only a fraction. In the
case of milk, van Der Heijden reports, farmers receive about R3 for every litre they sell, despite the fact that they
bear all the costs of producing the raw milk. Milk sells, on average, for about R9 a litre. Two-thirds of the value is
23
captured by supermarkets. This is the case with most food stuffs.
“The reality is that many small farmers hardly earn enough from agriculture to feed their families. Falling farm
incomes and the declining share of producers in food prices are the main reason why the number of farms in
South Africa is declining, and why the average farm size is on the increase. Paper-thin margins mean that only
the biggest farming units can survive” (Ibid, 2013).
The agricultural sector is not alone in being dominated by a few corporates that ‘manage’ the Supply Chain or that
control prices through market dominance. In the gas sector (SASOL), in the airways industry (SAA), in
telecommunications (Telkom), in the steel sector (Acelor-Mittal), in beer production (SAB Miller), in the gold
industry (Harmony Gold), in the automotive parts sector (Midas) there are large firms that have the means and the
will to exclude their competitors from the market or to exploit customers (Lewis, p.140). Terreblanche remarks
wryly that the oligopolistic character of the South African economy belies the notion that it functions as a free
market (Terreblanche, Op Cit., p.421). We might add: this oligopolistic structure belies claims that the main
constraint on the market is state intervention.
An uncomfortable and surprising judgement arises from this analysis. Even if we say that the economy no longer
works to produce or reproduce racist political institutions, it does not follow that the economy no longer works to
reproduce racialised patterns of inequality and poverty. This would be true even if there were no longer any whites
in corporate and institutional life in South Africa.
Let us return to a question that is raised, not without incredulity, by several authors. Why has an ANC government
failed to address the structural constraints in the economy – even when this was exactly its intention (see ANC,
1997, 2002, 2007, 2012). Hein Marais argues that it reflects the balance of forces in South African politics.
Ultimately, he argues, that the ‘left’ (by which he means those people and organisations pushing for structural
reform of the economy) were defeated – “bullied” - by an alliance of international capitalists and a local
bourgeoisie into pursuing a programme of “neoliberal development” (Marais, Op Cit., p. 139). Black Economic
Empowerment occupies a special place in the explanation of how this happened. The granting of shares to the new
black elite, including many ANC leaders, gave them an economic interest in the system as it was. Jeremy Cronin,
for example, takes up this argument: the “old economic elite,” he suggests, “did not stand idly by in the face of the
impending new, post-1994 political reality”.
“It continued to pursue the agenda of late-apartheid, namely to build a “buffer” black middle strata, the better to
be able to entrench its own powers and privileges, linked to an historical growth path dominated by the mineral24
energy-finance complex. In the early 1990s negotiations period, for instance, it was no longer a question of
preventing the ANC coming to power, but rather of ensuring that the ANC that came into power would be
hegemonised by the “doves”, the “sensible moderates”, those who would distance themselves from the
dangerous “radical populists” and their “volatile” mass base” (Cronin, pp. 3-4).
The argument is compelling until we recognise that these commentators assume that what is to be done is,
somehow, self-evident. It is not. It depends on how we understand the composition and form of the South African
economy, who owns and controls what, who it employs and who it does not, how it sources labour and under what
conditions, the extent of the market and the extent of market competition and so on.
This has important consequences for how we think about the conditions of social justice. I will say something
more about this later.
In the next section I want to look beyond ‘subjective’ constraints on social justice in South Africa (lack of
political will, ideological contestation) to consider more ‘objective’ ones. In this regard, I want to make an
argument about the limits of the South African state. We can approach this topic by way of South Africa’s rural
areas.
6. Bringing the State Back In
Lungisile Ntsebeza argues that the situation in agriculture today is worse than it was in the Apartheid period
(discussion with Ntsebeza, 15/05/2013). It is not so much that land reform is slow, but that the government after
1994 has reneged on some of its key promises viz. democratising local government, especially in rural areas.
One of the legacies of Apartheid administration is that rural residents of former Bantustan areas do not have
freehold rights to the land that they occupy and that they have lived on and worked, often for generations. Instead
they have to apply for a Permit-to-Occupy (PTO) from the local tribal authority. In the early 1990’s these rights
were contested by local activists operating under the banner of the South African National Civic Organisation
(SANCO). Like their urban counterparts, rural civics sought to democratise local government and, more
specifically, the allocation of land. In this way they challenged the authority of chiefs. “The issue here,” Ntsebeza
wrote in 2004, in language reminiscent of Mahmood Mamdani, “ is whether rural residents will continue to be
subjects under the political rule of unelected traditional authorities or will enjoy the citizenship rights, including
the right to choose leaders and representatives, that the South African Constitution confers on all South Africans”
25
(Ntsebeza, p. 73). There were some optimistic signs. The Department of Land Affairs wanted traditional
authorities subject to a system that would make them more accountable to local communities and more
representative (Ibid, p.82). In the Eastern Cape, moreover, the provincial government was preparing legislation to
divest traditional authorities of all development functions and to give this role, rather, to elected councils (Ibid,
p.82). In the early 2000’s, Ntsebeza was worried, however, that government had succumbed to traditional
authorities, preserving their rights to land tenure (through customary law) and weakening elected and
representative rural local governments (Ibid, p.82). By 2006 he was less sanguine.
The Traditional Leadership and Governance Framework Act of 2003 made the “much hated” Tribal Authorities of
the Apartheid era the foundation of new Traditional Councils (Ntsebeza: 2006, p. 257). The Communal Lands
Right Act of the same year, moreover, granted Traditional Councils the right to allocate and administer land in the
rural areas.
An ANC-led government had failed to advance the project of democratisation in the rural areas by addressing the
obstacles to inclusive participation in land allocation and local politics. In ways reminiscent of Hein Marais,
Sampie Terreblanche and other scholars and activists viz. the economy, Lungisile Ntsebeza notes his surprise that
“an organisation such as the ANC which fought for a democratic unitary state after apartheid would embrace the
institution of traditional leadership” (Ibid, p. 258). Ntsebeza himself explains this turn-about in much the same way
that Marais and others (Patrick Bond, Jeremy Cronin) have explained why the ANC government retained the status
quo in the economy, essentially in terms of the ‘balance of forces’8. The establishment of the Congress of
Traditional Leaders in South Africa (CONTRALESA) from within the United Democratic Front created a
powerful lobby in favour of the institution of chieftainship in the ranks of the ANC-led alliance itself9. Coupled
with concessions to the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) in the run-up to the first democratic election and an
international environment favourable of traditional governance, the scene was set for the retention of the status
quo.
Ntsebeza himself argues, however, that the die was only cast in 2003, that is, nearly ten years after the 1994
election. What had happened in between to shift the balance in favour of traditionalism?
8
This question is not well framed, however. Ntsebeza demonstrates clearly that even though there was strong
opposition to the institution of chieftainship from some quarters in the ANC, others, including Nelson Mandela,
were more sympathetic to it, even if for only tactical reasons. In other words, the ANC as an organisation was
historically ambivalent to chiefs and traditional authorities.
9
Ntsebeza discusses the “contradiction” of an organisation established to support the institution of chieftainship
emerging from within the ranks of the United Democratic Front and using the language of ‘National Democratic
Revolution. The UDF was committed to the eradication of chiefs and their replacement with democratically elected
local governments. (see Ntsebeza, pp. 262-266).
26
In the economic sphere, like in the agricultural sector, ideological contestation is not enough to explain the
practices of the ANC-led government after 1994. I suggest that we have to look elsewhere for an explanation; not
simply on the political stage (narrowly defined) but in the administrative sphere (broadly defined).
When the fate of traditional authorities still hung in the balance, Lungisile Ntsebeza noted that government
officials were still using traditional authorities to allocate land, rather than recognise the elected councillors as they
were supposed to. He writes: “It is quite clear from interviews with many rural inhabitants across gender and
generation that there was a lot of expectation that a developmental government would transform their lives. By the
end of the transition period in 2000, though, rural councillors had lost the confidence of ordinary rural residents
who initially supported them. The main cause of the disgruntlement seems to have been lack of delivery of even
basic services such as water and road maintenance” (Ntsebeza, Op Cit: 2004, p, 77). The implication is clear: had
democratic councils worked effectively they would have stood a greater chance of replacing chiefs as institutions
of government. Or put differently, ideological support for traditional authorities was strengthened by the
institutional failures of elected authorities.
The institutional character of the South African government and the state generally is barely understood. Apart
from some descriptive work done by public administration scholars there is very little analytical work on the
histories, structures, cultures of government departments and agencies, how they connect to one another, who they
employ, how public servants are motivated and engaged, how power is exercised in these organisations and by
whom. There is very little research on the relationship between the formal structures of government and the ruling
party and/or other social and political networks, including those of business or, in some locations, traditional
authorities. Instead, the analysis of the South African state is too political.
Drawing on a long tradition of political economy10, the ANC has tended to debate the options and possibilities for
armed struggle, negotiated settlement, democratic consolidation or economic transformation in terms of the
‘balance of forces’.
“A proper understanding of a given balance of forces,” notes the 1997 Strategy and Tactics document of the
ANC,” is critical in defining the tactics that the liberation movement should adopt at each stage of
transformation. To ignore this would be to fall victim to voluntarism and a revolutionary militancy that has
10
In 1976 the Review of African Political Economy brought out a special edition on South Africa. Of special interest
was the State. Robert Davies, David Kaplan, Mike Morris and Dan O’Meara contributed an essay that developed a
perspective and a vocabulary that proved to be extremely influential over the next 30 years in both academic and,
more importantly, in political circles. They discussed the South African state in relationship to the concept of ‘the
power bloc’ and to the concept of ‘hegemony’. “Differences in the form of state are determined firstly, by changes in
the composition of the power bloc and its allied and supportive classes and secondly, by changes related to which
class/fraction is hegemonic” (Davies et al, p. 5).
27
nothing to do with revolution” (ANC, 1997).
In the late 1990’s this approach informed the ANC’s government attitude to the public sector and to state
transformation as a whole. Even though the National Party had made “tactical blunders” during the negotiated
settlement that saw it “concede the basic outlines of a democratic settlement”, it was necessary for the ANC to be
“guarded” in power (Ibid, 1997).
“[The] democratic movement took over an Apartheid state machinery that was intact, orderly within its own
rules, and with the majority resolved to continue in their positions. […] [The] majority of public servants,
especially at senior level, the captains of industry, and editorial rooms in most of the media shared the
perspectives of the former government or its white opposition, including racial and gender stereotypes - all of
them strategically placed to influence the agenda of transformation in favour of the privileged classes” (Ibid,
1997).
This overly political reading of the State goes a long way to explain the often puzzling combination of boldness
and timidity that characterises government policy-making and practice. Simply put, where government has
believed that the ‘balance of forces’ favour it, it has been prepared to intervene ambitiously. Where it believes that
there are powerful forces stacked up against it, the ANC-government has behaved cautiously, even conservatively.
Economic policy is a case in point. Hein Marais and others lament the conservatism of economic policy under the
ANC. On his own terms, however, he may have been unduly optimistic about what was the ANC could do. He
argues, for example that the “main institutional casualty of globalisation has been the nation state, more
specifically its ability to inhibit capital’s scavenging for profit […]” (Marais, Op Cit, p. 139). Like Hein Marais
himself, the ANC believed that it was constrained against the liberal consensus on economic thinking. The ANC’s
Strategy and Tactics document from 1997, for example, notes that the transition from Apartheid is “take[ing] place
in a world in which the system of capitalism enjoys dominant sway over virtually the entire globe” (ANC, 1997).
Yet even in the domain of the economy, when the ANC government believed the political environment was more
favourable, they acted boldly. Black Economic Empowerment is a case in point.
The Employment Equity Act of 1998, the Skills Development Act of 1998, the National Empowerment Fund Act
of 1998, together with the B-BBEE Act of 2003 all give the South African government the right to set equity
targets for South African businesses and to push for changes in patterns of ownership (PARI, 2013). Even if the
successes of BEE, especially on its own terms, have been mixed, it nonetheless constitutes a bold and wide-ranging
intervention in the way private businesses operate. There are many other examples where the South African
government has not been shy to act on its agenda. In a moment I will discuss the situation in education.
28
Whatever the ‘balance of forces’, the institutional capacities of government departments and agencies have not
been taken into consideration adequately. As a result the ANC government has often overestimated its ability to get
things done while simultaneously underestimating the legacy of Apartheid. It is to this institutional environment
that we must now turn.
7. Public Sector Reform
Since 1994 there have been numerous interventions to restructure the State. The first of these aimed at the
unification of the public administration.
Even before the balkanisation of South African in the 1970’s into separate Bantustan territories, Blacks and Whites
were administered through distinct and parallel agencies. Until the 1940’s Blacks in rural areas were governed
through the institution of customary law and the chief, usually in the absence of basic administrative processes like
civil registration (Breckenridge, 2012). From the 1950’s the Department of Native Administration emerged into a
“state within a state”, amassing vast powers and implementing ambitious programmes to control the movement and
location of Black South Africans. In particular, it was the nerve centre of the system of labour bureaux, the planned
‘native locations’ and the homelands (Evans, pp. 2-3). The introduction of Bantustans, self-governing territories
and nominally independent states saw a frenzy of administrative and political fragmentation. By the end of the
apartheid period the territory of South Africa was splintered between 10 ethnically-defined ‘homelands’ (Venda,
Lebowa, QwaQwa, Ciskei, KwaZulu, KaNgwane, Transkei, Gazankulu, KwaNdebele, Bophutatswana) and
administered through 14 legislatures and 195 departments (Kuye,p.295). After 1982 the South African government
was further fragmented on the basis of racially defined, ‘own-affairs’ administrations for ‘Whites’, ‘Coloureds’
and ‘Indians’ as well as a ‘general affairs’ administration ostensibly for matters that related to all race groups.
The Public Service Act of 1994 (Proclamation 103 of 1994) formally unified these separate administrations. We
should not overlook the significance of this event. For the first time ever in the history of the territory of South
Africa, people living in South Africa and who by today’s standards would have qualified as South African citizens,
irrespective of race or ethnicity, were subject to common political and administrative institutions. It is hardly
surprising, therefore, that in the first two years of the ANC government’s first term it focused not so much on
‘service delivery’ but on the task of “integration” (Kuye, pp. 294–295) designing new administrative models,
developing policies, incorporating staff, processes and systems. We might only be surprised that by 1995, a mere
29
year after the first democratic election, the government believed it was ready to start with the next stage of
“transformation”. We get a sense of the break-neck speed of change simply by noting Kuye’s periodisation of
public sector reforms after 1994. He proposes that changes happened in five phases, starting with the promulgation
of the Public Service Act, the introduction of the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP), the
transformation of the public service, a phase of service delivery improvement and finally the period of the
Presidential Review Commission. On his terms, the process finished by 1998. That is, five distinct phases of action
in merely four years. Commenting on government’s approach at the time Kuye writes: “The approach followed by
the PRC indicates clearly that extensive reform of a system as inherited by the democratic government in South
Africa in 1994 must be comprehensive. Institutional reform, policy reform, organizational reform, human resource
reform and managerial reform have to be considered simultaneously” (emphasis added) (Kuye, p.301).
What is not conveyed well in government policy documents or policy reviews, however, is the scale of the tasks at
hand, both individually and collectively. Let us consider each one in turn.
7.1.
Integration
Homeland administrations grew quickly between 1965 and 1970. By 1971, 3 581 Black Africans served in the
Transkei civil service, and additional 2000 chiefs in administrative roles. By 1980, the Bophuthatswana public
service had reached 55 000 employees. In 1990 there were 197 455 public servants in the self-governing territories
and another 438 599 personnel in the nominally independent States. By 1992 the civil service in the homeland
areas had swollen to 638 599 people, or 16% of their economically active populations - and an even higher
proportion of their middle classes (Picard, p.301). In contrast, there were only 60 352 officials directly employed in
Apartheid South Africa’s official four provinces (the Transvaal, the Orange Free State, Natal and the Cape) in 1993
and only 349 832 officials in the entire Apartheid-era bureaucracy, including at central, provincial and local
government levels. Collectively, Picard argues, homeland officials were the least qualified and experienced. White
Senior managers, seconded to homeland administrations, were drawn from candidates who were had limited
prospects in other parts of the public service. Other senior and middle-ranking officials were recruited from the
ranks of traditional political system, including Chiefs and Indunas. For the rest, homeland administrations consisted
of tens of thousands of poorly trained workers performing menial labour or basic administrative tasks.
What was to be done with these officials in the democratic period? Who would staff the new post-Apartheid
administrations?
In 1992, a survey of senior public servants in South Africa outside the Homelands showed that 80% of them were
Afrikaans-speaking and 77% supported the National Party. There were only two black people in the senior
management (at the lowest grade) in the Department of Finance. Even the Department of Development Planning,
30
charged, in part, with the provision of public goods to black South Africans, had only six black senior managers, all
of them Indian (Picard, p.302). Understandably, the new government did not trust such persons to lead the project
of transformation and/or to faithfully execute the mandates of the ANC.
During this period the ANC was also revising its earlier position of non-collaboration with homeland officials
(Phillips, p.2). The Patriotic Front, established by the ANC and PAC in 1991 in anticipation of negotiations with
the National Party, also included homeland leaders from of KaNgwane, KwaNdebele, Lebowa and Transkei
(Phillips, p.2). It is this spirit of détente rather than simply concessions to the National Party that likely explains
what happened next. “After 1994,” Picard writes, “affirmative action needs were quickly met through the
integration of homeland administrators into the new provincial system. Testing and the establishment of
qualification criteria defined by the government, which many advocates of civil service reform saw as necessary in
order to address the past limitations of the homeland system, were simply not implemented” (Picard, p. 307). In
other words, homeland officials were not begrudgingly retained in compliance with political agreements about the
fate of old order bureaucrats. They were actively promoted to advance demographic change and ‘transformation’ in
the public service. The Eastern Cape, for example, inherited 15 Director Generals from the old administrations,
many of whom, writes Tim Gibbs, had been promoted in the dying days of apartheid (Gibbs, p. 6). “Yet most of
the excess staff bequeathed to the new government were labourers”, he continues, “who had been employed in the
Bantustan bureaucracies on make-work schemes […]. These labourers accounted for most of the 11,800 personnel
from the Transkei Department of Agriculture who were transferred into the new, 14,000 strong, Eastern Cape
Department of Agriculture and Land Affairs (DALA)” (Ibid, p.6).
What kind of public servants where homeland officials? What kinds of work place cultures might they have
brought with them into Provincial administrations?
We do not know enough about the state and culture of Bantustan administrations. Nonetheless, there are some new,
suggestive studies. Timothy Gibbs recent work on the Department of Agriculture and Land Affairs (DALA) in the
Eastern Cape is instructive in this regard. He finds remarkable continuities between the practices of DALA and the
Department of Agriculture of the former Transkei Bantustan. One of the arguments he makes is that the Transkei
administration was more patrimonial than it was bureaucratic. In other words, projects were launched, sites were
selected and beneficiaries were chosen not on the basis of anonymous plans and according to impersonal rules but
on the basis of personal networks and to the benefit of private interests - of family, friends, clan. He writes:
“influential chiefs, government officials and other notable figures, of all political stripes, positioned themselves as
regional brokers, channelling state resources into their localities. This was because the politics of economic
patronage was the only game in town” (Gibbs, p.3).
31
This state of affairs did not simply reflect the politics of the belly, as Jean-Francois Bayart describes it. It reflected,
rather, the broken or rather unrealised state of Bantustan administrations as administrations. Racist, senior white
officials seconded from the South African public service blocked African advancement even in the Bantustans.
Moreover, training for black staff was negligible. The Transkei had only 11 black university graduates in
agricultural sciences. Gibbs quotes the former Agriculture Minister of the Transkei as saying: “’because of the
acute shortage of essential skills and professions, his department was heavily dependent on seconded and contract
staff’” (cited in Gibbs, p. 3). In this context of skills shortages, high staff turnover, of subordinates refusing to take
orders and where ‘everyone wanted to be boss’, productivity was negligible and a professional and capable class of
public servants could not emerge (Ibid, pp. 3-5).
Individual officials, politicians and chiefs stepped into the gap, offering to mediate between local populations
desperate for state services and a dysfunctional state administration. They did this, not necessarily out of cynicism
or even out of self-interest, but because the only way of securing goods and services was through personal
networks and patronage. Patrimonialism in the Transkei, therefore, was a consequence of and a response to a
dysfunctional bureaucratic system. Following Francis Fukuyama, the author of The Origins of Political Order, we
could say that patrimonialism flourished because bureaucratic processes and cultures were weak (Fukuyama, p.17,
127).
We can begin to solve a puzzle put to us by Lungisile Ntsebenza. Why were democratically elected, rural local
councils in the Eastern Cape and their Provincial government counterparts ineffective, so much so that local people
quickly became disaffected and re-invested their faith in chiefs and traditional authority? Because they inherited
the living remains of the Bantustan system. The Eastern Cape, for example, was formed from elements of the old
Cape Provincial Administration as well as the administrations of the Transkei and Ciskei. Newly appointed ANC
councillors and Provincial government officials quickly found that they could not discharge their tasks in and
through the offices and channels they inherited. The formal processes were either too broken or non-existent. Like
former Bantustan officials they too resorted to non-official, personal networks. As Provincial governments
allocated money for infrastructure or for health or for education, so resources flowed through these personalised
networks. Sometimes projects delivered positive outcomes. More commonly they did not.
Important new work on ‘service delivery protests’ (Von Holdt, 2011) and ‘local politics’ (Benit-Gbaffou, 2011,
Benit-Gbaffou and Oldfield, 2011, Rubin, 2011) is beginning to show the intricate and complex relationship
between government bodies (municipalities, Provincial Government departments), local political parties, NGO’s
and communities. It suggests that when official processes of accessing services, including housing, water and
electricity, or zoning permissions or building rights and so on, do not work effectively community members draw
on their personal and political relations with politicians and/or government officials in order to get things done.es
32
not done.
This is why explanations of government failure that start and finish with arguments about venality, incompetence
and the corruption of public servants are, at best, descriptive - when they are not an excuse for racism. They
obscure the institutional causes of why things go wrong. In particular, they put the cart before the horse, claiming
that corruption causes institutional failure. Yet corruption, especially when it takes the form of nepotism or
cronyism, is usually an attempt to bypass dysfunctional processes by relying on social capital instead (trust,
friendship, love). We should not be surprised, therefore, that when administrative processes are weak colleagues
often turn out to be family members and/or lovers. We will return to this shortly, when we discuss corruption in
South Africa and how to combat it.
One of the key challenges of professionalising the public service, therefore, is to reduce its patrimonial features.
The tasks of government departments and agencies must be increasingly performed through formal and official
processes and procedures, rather than personal networks. This requires that questions of policy and strategy must
be carefully aligned to operational matters.
1. Careful attention must be paid to designing effective, simple and transparent processes that are easy to
follow and that result in positive outcomes. Provided that processes are logical and rational, this will go a
long way to reduce the unpredictable and apparently unfair way that departments are often perceived to
operate.
2. In the operational chain where key professional competencies are required (engineering, accounting,
managing and so on), it is important that such skills are available. It means thinking skills training in
relationship to operational processes and the chain of activities that such operations require.
3. Managers in the public service need to understand the link between strategic and planning functions and
operations so as to manage the whole implementation chain and not just a part of it.
7.2.
Transformation
The history of the integration of the former Bantustans goes some way to explain the current unevenness in the
performance of the Provincial governments. As a rule of thumb, we can say that those Provinces that had to
integrate former homeland administrations (Eastern Cape, Limpopo, North West, Mpumalanga, Free State) have
tended to perform worse than those that did not (Western Cape and Gauteng). We should not take this to mean that
national administrations and/or those largely untouched by Bantustans were organisationally effective. The picture
at this level is tremendously uneven.
33
We saw earlier that the pace of public sector reform after 1994 was rapid. In many cases the integration of former
parallel and autonomous administrations into a unified system was believed to have been largely finished by 1996.
The phase of transformation was announced with the publication of the White Paper on Affirmative Action in the
Public Service in 1998. As Bentley, Mafunisa and Maphunye suggest this phase of reform was intended to achieve
several goals simultaneously: encourage those who could not be trusted to serve the new government to leave the
public service, bring those who supported government into the public service and to change the culture and
structures of government departments and agencies (Bentley et al., p.28). Demographic change and Affirmative
Action would result in a public service ready to serve a democratically elected government.
There was another reason that the public service needed to be transformed. It was wasteful and inefficient. Poor
performance, rigidity and conservatism as well as wastefulness and inefficiency apparently had a common source.
Bentley et al repeat an argument that was very influential at the time.
“The structures, cultures and managerial styles of the apartheid era public sector (including those in the former
Bantustans) were modelled along the traditional Weberian model of a bureaucratic, rule-bound public
administration, though with a racial slant in the way its administrative and accounting processes were designed
[…]. This largely compromised its legitimacy and public image” (Ibid, p.28).
On-going work by the Public Affairs Research Institute (PARI) has begun to nuance this argument. In the first
place, as we have seen, Bantustan administrations were anything but bureaucratic. They were patrimonial. From
the 1980’s, however, the South African public service as a whole was showing signs of patrimonialism. The
introduction of the National Security Management System under P.W Botha and the influence of the
‘Broederbond’ saw the weakening of the model of public administration. By the end of the Apartheid period, for
example, the Department of Inland Revenue, responsible for tax collection in the Republic, was in such a terrible
state of decay that it had no permanent accountants on its payroll. Conscripts with accounting degrees were
seconded to the department as part of their national service (Chipkin and Meny-Gibert, 2011). This makes the
achievements of the South African Revenue Service in the post-Apartheid all the more remarkable. The agency
was not built from a largely functioning administration.
If this was the case why was public sector reform preoccupied with the ‘problem’ of bureaucracy?
The weakness of state administrations comes strongly to the fore in new work on corruption in the public sector.
Recent research in the South African Revenue Services (Ibid, 2011) and across the public sector as a whole (PARI,
2012) suggest that corruption is as much a problem of individual moral (or immoral) conduct, as it is an
institutional issue.
34
Typically, definitions of corruption identify an act of private abuse or private misuse or private appropriation as
lying at the heart of the phenomenon of corruption. Drawing on J. S. Nye’s formative work, the World Bank, for
example, defines corruption as the “abuse of public office for private gain”. This phraseology carries with it a sense
of misuse of office with violent or injurious intent (think of spousal abuse, abuse of alcohol). Nye’s own
phraseology was more subtle, allowing a broader range of activities to be included in the notion of corruption. He
referred not to “abuse” but to “deviation from the formal duties of public role for private gain” (Nye, 1967, p419).
The subtlety is important because it brings into play practices of non-compliance with internal rules and procedures
where malicious intent may be absent. Brooks discussed it in similar terms, the “misperformance or neglect of a
recognised duty, or the unwarranted exercise of power, with the motive of gaining some advantage, more or less
personal” (Brooks, 1910, p46).
In South Africa, the Prevention and Combating of Corrupt Activities Act of 2004, defines corruption as a situation
that arises when “any person directly or indirectly:

Accepts or offers any form of gratification that will either benefit themselves or another person. They
receive this gratification so that they will either act personally or influence another person to act in a
manner that is illegal, dishonest, unauthorised, incomplete or biased.

Takes part in the misuse or selling of information or material that is acquired in the course of their
employment.

Uses their legal obligations in order to carry out their powers, duties or functions that results in the abuse
of their position of authority, a breach of trust or the violation of either a legal duty or a set of rules.

Uses their legal obligations to carry out their powers, duties or functions in order to either achieve an
unjustified result or to accept any other unauthorised or improper incentive to either do or not to do
anything”. (Republic of South Africa, 2004)
In other words, South African legislation is a mixture of these two different measures of corruption: corruption as
moral failure/ criminality and corruption as non-compliance with standing operating procedures. It is worth quoting
in full an extract from a recent National Treasury study on corruption:
“On the basis of research findings and from evidence from government reports this report draws attention to a
driver of corruption that is often neglected in public discourse and in policy circles: non-compliance with
regulations, laws and standard operating procedures.
The most serious area of non-compliance is probably in the area of supply chain management (SCM): Despite the
35
detailed regulation of SCM practices in government and the efforts of various government agencies (Including the
AGSA’s operation Clean Audit launched in 2009), there are serious problems across all spheres of government.
For example, in 2011, almost 70% of all irregular expenditure in provinces (just under R12 billion) was a result of
the circumvention of SCM regulations. This included R3.6bn of payments that were made in excess of the
approved contract price (and R3.3bn of that was in the Eastern Cape) and R2.5bn worth of contracts that were
irregularly renewed/extended in order to get around the requirement of a competitive bidding process.
At a national level, 62 public entities (54%) and 7 constitutional institutions (88%) had findings on instances of
non-compliance with both Public Finance Management Act (PFMA) and Treasury Regulations” (TAU, p.15).
The situation at local government level is especially bad. According to the Auditor-General, in 2010/2011 roughly
half of the municipalities audited either failed to submit their financial statements on time or at all (Ibid, p.15).
Richard Levin, the former Director-General of the Department of Public Service and Administration noted in an
article in 2009 that “departments were not adhering to basic public administration practices, which compromised
the effective implementation of Batho Pele. Soft issues such as training, culture intervention and diversity
management were neglected. Departments’ reports lacked quantitative information and most departments were not
complying with the requirement that they develop Service Delivery Improvement Plans (SDIPs” (Levin, p.950).
There are many units and interventions across the public sector to deal with corruption as criminality. Some of the
major ones are gathered under the umbrella of the Anti-Corruption Task Team (ACTT). Not all non-compliance,
however, is driven by criminally-minded officials.
What is driving non-compliance?
The Public Affairs Research Institute, in a study for the National Treasury, found that non-compliance in the public
sector was caused by poor planning and reporting, organisational weakness and the shortage of relevant skills.
Poor planning and reporting
The way in which planning is done across government (but most particularly at local government level) creates an
environment which undermines oversight and compliance. Planning regulations require the production of a large
number of plans, across a wide range of functional areas. However, the main compliance indicator is that the plan
is actually produced, rather than in the content. At local government level the planning output required is onerous,
and very difficult for many smaller municipalities to comply with. However, there is little or no quality control
over the content of these plans. The main result is vague and fuzzy planning targets, with poor associated
budgeting.
36
In this environment it is often difficult for managers, internal auditors and others charged with oversight to
determine whether or not what is supposed to be happening is actually happening. It is also difficult to build a
performance management and accountability framework onto a planning framework that allows for vague and
unclear objectives. It is not hard to see how this facilitates an environment where there is opportunity for
corruption.
Political-Administrative Interface
As long as senior staff appointments remain the prerogative of the Minister and not the Director-General it is
difficult for staff to know to whom they are accountable and with whose directives they should comply, those of
the Minister or those of the Director-General. More seriously and this is the problem of politicising the public
service generally, it is not clear whether appointees are responsible to the imperatives of the department or of the
political party.
Shortage of relevant skills and capacity
There is little doubt that there is a shortage of skills and capacity in many areas that are key to identifying and
dealing with corruption, particularly at the local government level.
The AGSA found that more than 70% of official in key positions in municipalities did not have the minimum
competencies and skills required. In addition, there is a high level of vacant positions and acting managers in senior
posts. This skills gap is particularly acute in the area of financial management. This in turn is reflected in the
serious gaping hole in the area of internal audit.
7.3.
Service Delivery
The legacy of administrative and operational weakness in government departments was not adequately dealt with
in the post-Apartheid period. Since the late 1990’s, the focus of public sector reform has been on developing a
strong managerial service in the public service. The Senior Management Service has grown from an initial staff
component of about 1500 people to over 10 000 today. Generally, the SMS has struggled in two related areas: to
fill key positions and to retain its staff.
The reliability of figures relating to vacancy rates is notorious. It relates to how information is often captured on
the PERSAL system. Sometimes departments have an idea of what their ideal structure is or should be and then
report on empty positions in terms of this plan as vacancies. Other times departments record as vacancies posts that
are unfilled in terms of the existing human resources plan. Sometimes departments do not update changes in the
structuring or staffing in the organisation on the PERSAL system. Taking these qualifications into account, the
37
average vacancy rate across government departments at national and provincial level is more than 18%. In other
words, almost one in five positions is empty (PERSAL,2012).
The National Treasury calculated 2009 aggregate vacancy rates in the public sector as a whole as:
Number of posts filled and vacant in Public Service as at October 2009
National
Provincial
Total
Percentage
Departments
Departments
Posts filled
300 673
869 371
1 170 044
79%
Posts vacant
45 328
261 037
306 365
21.0
Total
346 001
1 130 408
1 476 409
Percentage
23.4
76.6
100
100
Source: Vulindlela, National Treasury, cited in PSETA Sector Skills Plan 2012 – 2016 Update.
That is, the average vacancy rate in national departments is slightly over 15%. Yet in provincial departments the
figure rises to 30%. Taken together, however, high vacancy rates and turnover rates create instability in
departments, especially at the senior management level. Given the responsibility of the SMS for translating
strategies and visions into operational and logistical plans, instability or weakness at this level has far-reaching
consequences for the performance of departments. Hence, when it comes to service delivery or the implementation
of plans and strategies, departments are often found wanting. Often basic operational and administrative processes
are poor, non-existent and/or not well designed in relation to the mandated outcomes, whatever the specific area.
A study of the then Companies and Intellectual Property Registration Office (CIPRO) found, for example, that one
of the difficulties in translating the agency’s ambitious political mandate (to help advance the project of black
economic empowerment by registering black companies in strategic sectors) into a business plan was complicated
by very high vacancy and turnover rates amongst strategic staff, especially senior managers (Chipkin, pp. 14-15).
Recent studies of the turn-around strategy in the Department of Home Affairs, for example, have highlighted how,
historically, instability at the managerial level had made it difficult effectively to operationalize plans (Konstant,
Obery, Setshwaelo, 2010. Recent successes in the turn-around strategy of the department have come through
stabilising the management echelon and, more especially, by paying attention to the administrative and managerial
challenges of service delivery. What drove institutional performance, in other words, was a management cadre
38
focused on operational and administrative details. In order to improve day-to-day operations, for example, the
department produced a pocket handbook, the ‘Office Manager’. This book provided simple standard operating
procedure guidelines for frontline office managers and supervisors for daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual
activities. A Presidency study from 2010 notes: “This most useful document provided one of the first concrete
standardised lists of ‘what we are supposed to do’ for frontline offices” (Ibid.,2010). In a further innovation, Home
Affairs used coaches to work with frontline managers to design, assess and review their practices on a daily basis.
Many of the Home Affairs improvements followed from attention to the design, engineering and management of
frontline processes.
Likewise in the South African Revenue Services there has been significant investment in process design and
engineering. The major achievements of the South African Revenue Service in integrating and consolidating
diverse administrations and then in rolling-out innovative new services, including eFiling, rests on the ability of the
agency to design and engineer processes effectively.
Taken together the recent history of public sector reform and transformation suggests that the capacities of
government departments are uneven. In some places relatively effective administrations are in place and the
performance of these departments is chiefly driven by leadership, policy and organisational culture. In many other
places, however, the machinery of government is weak or has not been properly established. In such cases
performance is contingent on the often tedious work of organisation building: creating organisational stability,
putting in place a reliable and effective administration (record keeping, filing, minute-taking etc.) and linking
strategy and vision to careful and realistic operational plans. In both cases, one of the key drivers of institutional
performance is a management cadre that is operationally inclined, that is, able to translate policy into carefully
designed operational plans and implementation networks.
8. Social Justice in South Africa today
What implications does the analysis above have for a ‘social justice’ agenda? What are the points of leverage from
which to influence the situation in South Africa today? Who is in a position to advance an egalitarian politics
centred on the notion of social justice? In other words, what is to be done?
This paper has discussed several anomalies in the current situation. In the first case, it has considered the way that
efforts to ‘transform’ the economy have focused on ownership and control of private, for-profit companies. In
particular, Black Economic Empowerment policies, including Broad Based Black Economic Empowerment, have
39
tried to shift patterns of ownership of capital and the control of capital (that is, who occupies senior management
and executive board positions in South African corporations) away from mainly white men, to Black South
Africans broadly defined. Testament to the legacy of non-racialism in the African National Congress, the term
‘black’ in these laws and regulations is not simply a racial one. Although the subject of intense political
contestation when it comes to the conclusion of actual business deals or the awarding of tenders, the definition of
the term carries the deep imprimatur of the ANC’s historic understanding of Apartheid as a system of racial, gender
and national domination. ‘Blacks’ thus refer to Africans, Coloured and Indians. There is strong emphasis on
privileging women in economic empowerment. Even white women have been, controversially, included in the
remit of these policies. So have Chinese South Africans. In other words, the term ‘black’ refers to women in
general and all those people historically discriminated against during the Apartheid/colonial period.
We have seen that the focus on changing patterns of ownership and control in South African corporations has
benefitted a small Black elite (Mbeki, Netshitenzhe, Habib), initially comprising individuals that were able to
leverage their political influence to acquire shares and/or senior management positions. Current efforts to broaden
the pool of beneficiaries of ‘economic transformation’, especially in the form of Affirmative Action, have had
some success, though beneficiaries have tended to be white women and Indians (both men and women). The
difficulty lies with black economic empowerment’s organisational rather than institutional focus. It has not done
much to change the ‘rules of the (economic) game’ (North), or rather it has addressed only the demographic rules
of business. It has not resulted in changes to the way business gets done between firms or, more specifically, the
tendency towards centralisation and capital intensity in many economic sectors. Black economic empowerment in
its current form has done nothing to stall these tendencies. Yet it is the low labour absorptivity of the capitalist
sector in South Africa that accounts for very high unemployment, especially amongst young adults. Moreover,
weak market competition and associated commercial procurement practices serve to make food and other basic
household goods expensive for South Africans and especially expensive for the poor.
This report has discussed the institution of traditional authority and customary law. Despite initial efforts to
democratise rural local governments, especially in former Homeland areas, the power of chiefs has not only been
preserved but strengthened – especially in relation to the allocation of land. What this means is that in large parts of
the country, concomitant with the boundaries of former Bantustans, the remit of democratic government, especially
at municipal level, is constrained by the institution of the chief. This situation also represents a severe limit on
women’s’ citizenship, the exercise of which is again mediated in and through a patriarchal institution.
A strategy seeking to advance social justice needs, firstly, to account for the current situation. How do we account
for the reproduction of aspects of the Apartheid economy, the reproduction of the institution of Chieftainship and
the concomitant special continuities of the Apartheid geography, the reproduction of the political-economy of the
40
Bantustans in particular? If we can identify or name these processes or forces then it is possible to move to the next
step: devising tactics to engage them.
Most commonly, the situation is explained in terms of a ‘democratic deficit’ on the South African political scene.
Numerous scholars and activists refer to the absence of the ‘voice of the poor’ in policy processes or in decisionmaking concerning the allocation of economic resources and public funds (Bond, Friedman, Marais). Steven
Friedman, for example, has frequently noted that “the poor and weak in this society are talked about - they do not
speak. And those who talk about them are far more interested in them as an abstract support for pet theories and
political projects than as real human beings. Which is why there is much enthusiasm for talking about the poor but
no eagerness to talk to, or listen to, them” (Busines Day, 2/11/2011). Shamin Meer makes a similar point: “The
overarching framework of the new government,” she writes, “does not place the poor, or the eradication of the
massive inequality within South African society, at the centre of its agenda” (Meer, p.104). This state of affairs
requires explanation. We can approach it from above and from below.
8.1.
The view from above
As we have seen earlier, the African National Congress was brought to power on the back of a highly organised
working-class movement (in the form of trade-unions and COSATU) and in the context of a vast and mobilised
civil-society sector (often operating under the auspices of the then United Democratic Front). Most civic
organisations, youth congresses, women’s leagues and community organisations during this period brought
together poor and working families together in often highly organised formations. In the late 1980’s and early
1990’s the momentum from ‘grassroots’ organisations was thought to be so great that after Apartheid ‘radical
democracy’ or ‘participatory democracy’, instead of its liberal counterpart, was believed to be within reach. In
1986, for example, the United Democratic Front announced that “the building of people’s power is something that
is already beginning to happen in the course of our struggle” (emphasis in original) (cited in Buhlungu, p. 41).
“We are struggling,” the UDF’s journal Isizwe continued, “for a different system where power is no longer in the
hands of the rich and powerful. We are struggling for a government we all vote for. We are struggling for elected
bodies in our schools, factories and communities. We want laws that are widely discussed throughout our country,
street committee by street committee before they are even debate in parliament. We want courts were workers,
peasants and teachers can be elected as magistrates. We want an army that belongs to all, in a country where all
citizens are armed” (emphasis in original) (cited in Buhlungu, p.41).
As early as 2000, a mere six years after the first democratic election, there were scholars and activists reporting that
the transition had gone awry. Patrick Bond, for example, complained that a popular-nationalist anti-apartheid
project had been sold-out to neoliberalism (Bond, p.1). “How,” Bond asks, “did mediocre hucksters of
41
neoliberalism flatter and cajole so many formerly tough-minded working-class leaders and progressive thinkers
into abdicating basic principles?” (Ibid. p.55). The answer lay in the way that the search for an abstract social
contract based on the ‘General Will’ degenerated into a form of “corporatism mixed with elements of populism,
patronage politics and neoliberalism” (Ibid, pp. 55-56). The vehicle for this transformation was the corporate
scenario planning brainstorm. Vishwas Satgar summarises the argument: “Instead of pursuing the dream of a
transformed and non-racial South Africa, the ANC-led national liberation movement relied on neoliberal reforms
with an African voice to bring a ‘better life for all’. […] Thus, post-apartheid South Africa moved in a straight
historical line from apartheid into a market-led development model, sometimes referred to as ‘Afro-neoliberalism’”
(Satgar: 2011). We have to wonder, though, whether in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union the appeal of
market-based solutions reflected the political crisis of traditional left platforms – central planning, nationalisation –
rather than primarily a lack of left-wing fortitude.
Doron Isaacs, a member of the National Executive Committee of Equal Education and its first ‘coordinator’, notes
that there is no “net pro-poor spending” in education (Interview with Doron Isaacs, 13/8/2013). He puts this down
to the changing social base of the ANC, which is rooted less and less in the working class and more in the state
bureaucracy, especially nurses and teachers. This middle class sends their children to private schools or former
model ‘C’ schools and uses private healthcare. As a result there is no pressure on the ANC government, especially
from its core supporters, to improve these services. The situation is made worse by agreements made during South
Africa’s transition from Apartheid that provided for a class of former white, public schools – model ‘C’ schools –
able to determine their own criteria of admission and spending. It has skewed resources again away from the poor.
The growing gulf between formal politics (the space of law-making, parliamentary contestation, policy-making and
government action), civil society and political society (using Chatterjee’s distinction) was deepened by South
Africa’s electoral landscape. Since the first democratic election, the African National Congress has secured
overwhelming electoral majorities. Even after the ANC’s so-called watershed moment11 in 2009, when its electoral
support declined 4 points depriving it a two-thirds majority, it still scored better than the 62,6% of the vote it
secured in 1994 – at the height of democratic euphoria (Friedman, pp. 112- 113). Friedman argues that this is
testament to the strength of identity politics in South Africa. That is, “voters across the spectrum tend to remain
loyal to parties that represent their identity group, defined by a complex mixture of race, language and culture”
(Ibid, p. 114). This assumes, of course, that the ANC is not successful because it is able to project a compelling
vision of society and that most people are more or less satisfied with the record of the ANC in government. Real
gains in service delivery (discussed earlier) suggest that something more than ‘identity politics’ is at work.
11
Steven Friedman argues that with the emergence of COPE the 2009 election marked the first time that there was
serious political competition for ANC voters (Friedman, p.114).
42
Understanding the basis of electoral support for the African National Congress has important consequences for the
organisation going forward, especially in properly diagnosing its vulnerabilities, and the kind of political
contenders that could realistically challenge its existing dominance. It also has important consequences for
advancing a social justice agenda. For the moment, however, the ANC remains dominant and the texture and form
of the current situation is given by that fact. Many authors have drawn the following conclusion: confident in its
electoral majority, the ANC as an organisation has been unresponsive to voters’ needs and unaccountable in
government (Friedman: 2009, Pithouse: 2009, Marais: 2010, Habib: 20123). There is much evidence to
recommend this argument. Despite the unpopularity of Thabo Mbeki’s government’s approach to the HIV/AIDS
pandemic and in the face of massive civil-society opposition it took a rebellion in the ANC itself before policy
shifted to a more medically sound approach to the epidemic. Even then, the Polokwane revolt was only indirectly
about dissatisfaction with HIV/AIDS policy. There have been numerous instances of executive high-handedness,
from the introduction of the Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) strategy, to the dissolution of the
Scorpions to the introduction of toll roads on Gauteng highways (e-Tolls).
Friedman’s argument, however, is not that ANC politicians and officials are not accountable at all. Insulated from
citizens they are, nonetheless, accountable to internal party structures and processes. In conversational refrain,
ANC politicians are said to be more accountable to party bosses than to citizens. This situation points to what
Etienne Balibar once called in another context the ‘other stage’ of politics (Balibar, 2000). In our case, the ‘other’
political stage is what happens inside the African National Congress itself; what traditions are remembered and
invoked, what structures operate and according to which processes decisions are made. Historically, suggests
Steven Friedman, the political culture of the ANC deterred internal competition. Leaders were, for the most part,
chosen by conclaves of party elders (Friedman, p. 109). As a result they tended to be unaccountable and
unresponsive to their followers. This style of politics was evident in Thabo Mbeki’s administration. It relied on
“centralized decision making that placed a premium on technical expertise rather than the concerns of the
electorate”. Moreover, it placed such expertise above the concerns of the electorate (Ibid, p.109). On these terms
the National Conference in Polokwane in 2008 initiated a rapid and unexpected ‘democratic turn’ in the
organisation. “Within a few months of the Mbeki camps losing control, the ANC was transformed from a party in
which contested elections were seen as a symptom of indiscipline to one in which all posts were hotly contested”
(Ibid, 110).
Much of this work on the ANC succumbs to what Philip Bonner has called the “grand narrative” of the ANC
(Bonner, p.2): the idea of a unified organisation engaged in a ‘history of struggle’. It is this myth that makes the
current state of contestation seem not so much as ‘business as usual’ but as a state of crisis and dissolution. More
likely, however, is that from the perspective of the ANC’s own history, the ‘discipline and consensus’ achieved for
43
a short period during the 1990’s was an anomaly. More usual has been the kind of contestation visible today. It was
precisely the inability of the ANC in exile to impose such discipline that brought ‘democracy’ (radical,
participatory) to the front of the Anti-Apartheid agenda, at least amongst organisations working within South
Africa in the 1980’s. That is, the United Democratic Front, while claiming the mantle and, therefore, authority of
the ANC, gave to historic ANC terms and manifestos a specifically democratic emphasis. It is likely that UDF
platforms would have been different if Lusaka had been able to impose ‘discipline and consensus’. The Freedom
Charter, for example, was reinvented as a specifically democratic and non-racial vision for South Africa. In the
hands of the ANC Youth League under President Julius Malema, the Freedom Charter was invoked to defend a
more Africanist political agenda and a more radical economic policy, including the nationalisation of the mines – a
decidedly different reading of the document.
Furthermore, the image of a gulf or breach between the political elite and citizens, especially poor South Africans,
might not be a good one, however. Karl Von Holdt and Claire Benit-Gbaffou, (discussed above) are beginning to
show how electoral politics is in embedded in local strategies and contestation for wealth and income. Under these
conditions ‘blacks’ don’t simply vote for the ANC because it is a ‘black’ party, but because their livelihoods are
caught up in the electoral fortunes of the organisation. In other words, the relationship between the poor and the
ANC political elite is more entangled than it is distant. If this is correct then it follows that the ANC will tend to be
strong in those places where access to resources and livelihoods is dependent directly on the State and, in
particular, on one’s ability to negotiate such access in and through the networks of the ruling party. Where the
ANC is not the ‘only game in town’, the situation may be more unpredictable. Is this why in the relatively more
prosperous urban centres, the ANC is electorally weaker than it is in the rural areas? New research conducted by
this author in the generically ‘middle class’ townhouse complexes of Western Johannesburg has found no evidence
of ANC political life there, despite the large, youthful Black population. Across the road (literally) in Zandspruit, a
large informal settlement accommodating more than 80 000 people, social and economic life is mediated in,
through and across multiple organisations all, in one way or another, linked to ANC and ANC-Alliance structures
(Chipkin: 2012).
Three consequences follow from this analysis:

The electoral dominance of the ANC at national level does not, necessarily, insulate it from citizens’
demands, because

Much of South Africa’s political competition happens, not so much in the formal, Constitutional places of
power (parliaments, legislatures, councils), but on the ‘other stage’ – that is, within the ANC, and
44

Divisions and political contestation within the ANC manifest differently across the hundreds of local
governments where the ANC is the ruling party, in the 8 provincial legislatures where it is the government
and at national level. In other words, the responsiveness of the ANC to citizen demands will vary across
these locations depending on the configuration of contenders in local political battles and the resources
(material and ideological) that they use.
This suggests that there are opportunities too – though they are uneven and unpredictable. So-called ‘service
delivery’ protests are not so much rebellions of the unemployed (Alexander, 13/04/2012) as protests arising from
disputes within the ANC at municipal level. In 2009 there were almost 20 protests a month (Karamoko, p.10).
Factions within the ruling party competing for access to local government office (and the resources and
possibilities for patronage that it offers) often mobilise local residents either to displace incumbents or to defend
their incumbency. Either way, these dynamics create opportunities for genuine grievances to be raised. Even
formal (invited spaces) may sometimes provide opportunities for meaningful engagement. Jackie Dugard, the joint
founder of the Socio-Economic Rights Institute (SERI) makes the point that activists and scholars should not prejudge the futility of ward committees or of opportunities for participation available in and through the Integrated
Development Planning process (Interview with Jackie Dugard, 16/08/2013). Under the right conditions they could
be platforms for popular engagement.
What distinguishes the current situation from the pre-democratic period is that political struggles within the ANC
are starting to have an effect on ANC support and electoral support more importantly. This is especially true at
municipal level. The City of Cape Town and the Western Cape Provincial Government are well-known cases. The
ANC progressively lost power in both the city and in the Province between 2004 and 2009. These situations are
arguably sui generis in that they speak of the ANC’s recent Africanist drift and its failure to retain the majority
Coloured population in the fold of its ‘non-racial’ alliance. The recent case of Tlokwe (Potchefstroom) may be
indicative of broader trends, however. Following a rebellion by its own councillors against an incumbent ANC
mayor, by-elections were held in several wards. Consistent with an organisation rock-sure of its invincibility at the
polls, the local ANC branch in ward 9 started celebrating its victory even before voting had begun. As it turned out,
the ANC carried the election, though with a massively reduced majority. The ANC had won the ward with more
than 90% of the vote in 2011. In 2013 it managed a narrow majority of 50,62% (IEC: 2013). In addition the voterturnout was lower than in 2011, suggesting potential disaffection with the vote itself. Comparative election results
do suggest that in certain regions and Provinces an element of unpredictability is entering electoral politics. This is
especially true in the Western Cape where majorities are often thin and where support fluctuates. Recent byelections in Bergrivier, Hermanus, George, Oudtshoorn and Plettenberg Bay show DA candidates winning with
smaller majorities in 2013 than in 2011 and ANC candidates winning with larger ones (IEC: 2013). In some cases
45
the difference between them is only a few percent.
Dustin Kramer, deputy Secretary-General of the Social Justice Coalition (SJC) notes how this is creating openings
for community activism. It is worth dwelling, briefly, on the experience of the SJC. Established in 2008 to provide
humanitarian relief to communities scarred by xenophobic violence, the coalition began by organising around
apparently related national issues: xenophobia, corruption and attacks on the constitutional court. Originally,
explains Kramer, the coalition focuses on ‘high-level accountability’ (Interview with Dustin Kramer, 2/8/2013).
The first meetings of the movement were called to protest against corruption in the arms deal, for example. In 2009
there was an important strategic shift. The campaign started to change its focus, away from national, political
issues to local community concerns. Attention to issues of local safety quickly morphed into activism around
sanitation. Local activists and community members started monitoring and evaluating the state and service of
stand-alone toilets provided by the municipality to local residents through a private service provider. The findings
were damning. Nearly a third of the toilets that the contract specified were missing, two thirds had not been cleaned
as per the service agreement and half were unusable. The response to the community audit is noteworthy.
According to Kramer, the city responded positively. A sanitorial service for communal flush toilets in informal
areas was implemented and there was a noticeable improvement in the condition of toilets. The maintenance of
toilets remains ad hoc and there is still no coherent sanitation programme to speak of. Nonetheless, local activism
has demonstrated that spaces of engagement can be created and that political elites are sometimes responsive to
popular pressure. Indeed, there may be more opportunities at local level than at National and Provincial level.
SJC’s campaign on policing in Khayelitsha is again instructive. Policing is primarily a national competence. To the
extent that there has been any movement on this issue it is because the Western Cape Provincial Government took
up the SJC campaign for a commission of enquiry. It is, nonetheless, being fiercely resisted by the Minister of
Safety and Security.
This experience goes some way to nuance a recent argument made by Mark Heywood of Section 27. It may be true
that relative to other periods, Constitutional democracy, especially in South Africa, provides unprecedented
opportunities from civic engagement (Heywood: 2013). The analysis above suggests that activism needs to be
strategic, coupled by a realistic assessment of what sites to tackle, how and on the basis of what issues. It requires
combining activism with research and analysis.
8.2.
The View from Below:
The democratic transition did not only see the emergence of a particular political stage (or political stages). It also
had important consequences for civil-society broadly speaking. In the 1990’s many of the popular organisations
that had arisen to oppose the Apartheid government either dissolved or were absorbed into ANC structures (Marais,
p. 434; Pithouse, p.144). Mostly, suggests Marais, this process happened consensually, even ‘naturally’, as those
46
with political and career ambitions gravitated to the ANC. It did seem appropriate. The ANC had achieved near
mythological status and seemed best placed to advance the project of social and economic transformation. It is not
difficult to make the argument that had South Africa’s mass, organised society remained in-tact, concessions made
to neoliberalism during the early days of the transition would have been reversed or, at least, moderated under
popular pressure. That they were not and that that the office of the Reconstruction and Development Programme
(RDP) was dissolved merely two years after its establishment is evidence of the changed political terrain after
1996.
Organised social movements suffered a further set-back when international donors shifted their funding strategies
in the democratic period. Rather than support activist or community organisations directly, many donors shifted to
supporting the new government through bi-lateral agreements (Habib, p.149). Coco Cachalia recalls that shortly
after 1994, funding for the Kagiso Trust, historically a significant beneficiary of international aid, dried up
(Interview with Coco Cachalia, 28/8/2013). Hence as the ANC came to power so community-based organisations
(CBOs) began to weaken. Many disappeared altogether for a lack of funding. Testament to the changed socialpolitical landscape after 1994, the Centre for Civil Society at the University of KwaZulu-Natal found that there was
little continuity between pre and post-Apartheid civil society organisations (cited in Habib, p. 154). Apart from
some important exceptions, including the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), many of the civilsociety organisations that exist today started after 1994.
This situation has important consequences for a social justice strategy. The RAITH Foundation’s theory of change
places a premium on civic engagement from below. Somewhat telescoped it argues that with the right kind of
support, especially financial support, social justice organisations can do research to identify systemic failures,
educate, communicate and build awareness to mobilise citizens. In turn, a mobilised citizenry will demand a more
just society (that is, deepens the vision and values of the constitution) through advocacy and litigation work, by
demanding their rights and through engagements with government.
Are there social movements or community groups in a position to enter existing spaces to advance a social justice
agenda?
Adam Habib distinguishes between three categories of civil-society organisations: Non-Governmental
Organisations (NGOs), Social Movements and Survivalist organisations (Habib, Op Cit., pp. 147 – 152). NGOs
tend to work collaboratively with government and are often contracted by the state to assist with policy
development and service delivery. In this sense they operate as adjuncts to South African government departments
(Ibid, p. 150). Social movements are what Habib calls “formalised community-based structures” that have the
“support of a middle-class activist base”. They focus on “changing the values and structures of the society within
47
which they located” and “represent a fundamental challenge to the political status quo and its prevailing socioeconomic dispensation” (Ibid, p. 153). The overwhelming majority of civil-society organisations are what he calls
survivalist community-based organisations, networks and associations. Of the more than 98 000 such bodies that
existed in 1998, more than half were found to be survivalist agencies (Swilling and Ally cited in Habib, p. 153).
“Care must be taken,” Habib warns, “not to fall into the trap of much of the writing on the informal economy, and
to celebrate these associations as representing the energy and vibrancy of South African society. Indeed, they must
be recognised for what they are: a survivalist response of poor and marginalised people who have no alternatives in
the face of a retreating state that has refused to meet its socio-economic obligations to its citizens” (Ibid, p.152).
The Congress of South African Trade Unions is one of the few civil-society bodies that has survived the transition
and that plays a key role in the contemporary politics. It too is undergoing important changes that may prove to be
fundamental. Eddie Webster once described COSATU as engaged in social-movement unionism, by which he
meant it articulated struggles at the shop-floor to wider political struggles (Webster: 1988). In particular it was and
still is a member of the Tri-Partite Alliance with the African National Congress (ANC) and the South African
Communist Party (SACP). In this mode of unionism COSATU has often taken the lead in mobilising workers and
other South Africans around diverse political platforms, including against electoral violence in the 2009
Zimbabwean elections, for democracy in Swaziland, in opposition to e-Tolling and against privatisation and for
decent jobs. COSATU, that is, has often been a leading social justice campaigner. This model of unionism is under
grave threat. Not only has in-fighting in the ANC begun to take its toll in the Alliance generally and within
COSATU in particular, but in key sectors, including mining, support for COSATU-affiliated unions is declining. In
the Platinum belt the National Union of Mineworkers has lost ground to new, upstart unions. Often COSATU
unions are accused of having lost touch with the shop-floor.
If the vast majority of civil-society organisations are ‘survivalist associations’, many do not have the resources to
use the instruments made available by constitutional democracy to have their voices heard (see Pithouse: 2009).
The strategy is at risk of the donors dilemma: that the organisations presupposed by the strategy do not already
exist and that they have to be created in the first place. Elsewhere, similar strategies have sometimes earned the
resultant organisations the reputation, not of pursuing democracy or social justice, but of advancing Western
interests in the name of democracy or social justice. “Are NGO’s agenda’s dominated by Western Assumptions?”
asked Laurent Durand in 2012.
“The NGO leaders,” fumes James Petra, “are a new class not based on property ownership or government
resources but derived from imperial funding and their capacity to control significant popular groups. The NGO
leaders can be conceived of as a kind of neo-comprador group that doesn't produce any useful commodity but does
48
function to produce services for the donor countries - mainly trading in domestic poverty for individual perks”
(Petras, p. 419).
In South Africa this inherent danger is compounded by South Africa’s racial politics. Social justice organisations
in South Africa (see RAITH survey) tend to be urban based and are often founded by or with white activists. In
January this year Andile Mngxitima warned: “One of the things to watch this year is the return of white liberals.
Steve Biko cautioned about how they meddle in black affairs. Today, the white liberal starts with an empty apology
for apartheid and then castigates other whites for not being nice to blacks. The effect of it is white domination of
public discourse, which doesn't end racism, but instead preserves white power” (Mngxitima, Sowetan, 8/1/2013).
Malaika Wa Azanai followed. “If we are to deal with our post-traumatic slavery disorder and the on-going state of
soporification in which we find ourselves, we must reject with utmost contempt white liberals who use us as tokens
to get European donors to fund their non-governmental organisations. We must reject white liberals who toyi-toyi
for service delivery, only to return to the vulgar comforts of their homes in the most affluent of suburbs (Azanai,
18/1/2013)”.
These are still marginal voices, though one has to wonder if such sentiments will become stronger as social justice
organisations become more successful and/or if the ruling party’s electoral support begins weakening significantly.
We have seen that since the 1990’s the African National Congress styles itself more and more as a party for
Africans than one advancing non-racialism. This author has written extensively about African nationalism and, in,
particular, the way that it tends to conflate the will of the people with the will of the national liberation movement
(Chipkin: 2007). Will the growth of movements working or seen to be working against or in opposition to the
ANC, irrespective of their own political values, be construed as anti-African? Is this not what happened in
Zimbabwe after 2000, especially when the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) became a realistic challenger
to ZANU-PF?
A social justice strategy, therefore, needs to cognisant of these political risks. Is there a way of promoting social
justice without it seeming like an issue pursued by ‘whites’ to protect ‘white’ interests. This is precisely how
certain kinds of legal activism appear. Current legal efforts by Paul Hoffman against the Chief Justice of the
Constitutional Court fall into that category. “I don’t call myself a human rights lawyer anymore,” Richard Moultrie
observes (Interview with Richard Moultrie, 30/8/2013). For him the term has become too closely associated with a
“glory boy” approach to litigation. There are limits to what litigation can achieve, Moultrie continues. Public
interest litigation might, in certain cases, improve accountability, though it cannot do anything about inequality.
A social justice agenda must not itself become a victim of the ‘myth of the ANC’. As this paper has discussed, not
all the constraints on social justice are problems of political will, political culture and accountability with the ANC
49
itself. The weakness of the South African State and the constraints of working effectively in the fields of education
and health, for example, need to be properly understood. It is appropriate sometimes for social justice activism to
take an oppositional and confrontational approach to government. Yet there are also opportunities to widen the
spectrum of social justice activism to include working to build the organisational effectiveness of government
administrations, whether at local, provincial and national level.
Preoccupation with the ANC and government has also created blind spots. Social Justice organisations tend to
direct their energies at government and the public sector. We have seen, however, that the poor quality of
government services is not the only cause of on-going social injustice. Unemployment remains the principle driver
of inequality in South Africa. Unemployment is, in turn, a consequence of the capital intensity of business
processes in South Africa. This situation is aggravated by only rudimentary market competition in many sectors
that, in turn, drives high prices for consumer goods (food retail, telecoms, electricity). South Africa, in other
words, has a capitalist economy with a weak market economy. One does not have to be a socialist to agree that this
arrangement is unsustainable. It is not simply that ‘white’ ownership and control in the private sector remains high.
The structure of the economy itself distributes benefits to a small multiracial elite while condemning the vast
majority of South Africans to a life of dependency (on social grants and often poor public services). One of the
glaring gaps in the social justice sector consists of social movements agitating in favour of a just economy.
This report has argued that consumer activism is an especially propitious and yet neglected field of action. In the
first place, high consumer prices and poor services unduly affect poor South Africans. Food prices are especially
high. Most poor families survive on a diet that excludes dairy products and only occasionally includes meat. High
prices, moreover, are often a consequence of weak or poorly performing markets. Consumer activism, that is,
opens a hitherto unexplored route to reforming or even transforming aspects of the South African economy.
Let me conclude with some final remarks about the social justice agenda itself. Earlier work on the ‘social justice
sector’ revealed that the vast majority of social justice organisations were involved in some form of advocacy,
usually to advance the socio-economic rights of various groups. Often this work takes the form of litigation to force
government departments to make available the services they are constitutionally obliged to provide (HIV/Aids
treatment, school text books, shelter, basic services and so on) (see Chipkin and Meny-Gibert: 2013).
The social justice agenda could be further advanced by:

Addressing social injustices arising from the way that the South African economy works to drive
up prices of basic goods (like food and energy). In this regard there is scope for initiatives around
consumer rights, for example.

Engaging more fully with the reasons why government fails or is seen to fail in changing the way
50
private and public goods are distributed. In this regard, the sector would be assisted by ongoing
research in relevant sectors, including on patterns of social stratification in South Africa and social
change, on the character of the South African economy, on the form of the State, on the dominant
political and intellectual traditions in South Africa.

Expanding the strategies and tactics social justice organisations use to pursue social justice. This
report has shown, for example, that understanding the limits of what government does in terms of
political will or in terms of accountability misses as much as it explains. There are opportunities
where partnerships with government departments/ agencies/ officials may be as valuable a form of
engagement as opposition and litigation.
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