The real source of South Africa’s social malaise

As many of South Africa’s disproportionately working poor and unemployed masses continue to inveigh against the post-apartheid state for failing to meet their material expectation of democracy, the only real difference between Mbeki and Zuma’s responses to the protesting voices is that whereas the former has been callous the latter seems more sympathetic. The fact that Mbeki has hardly commiserated with protesting communities during his tenure and obstinately denied that South Africa is experiencing a so-called ‘service delivery’ crisis in 2007, doesn’t mean he will necessarily disagree with Zuma’s recent statement to the Durban Chamber of Commerce and Industry that the concerns of the protestors are genuine and that there are problems with the state’s delivery apparatus.

As a matter of fact, like the ANC-led administration under Zuma, the Mbeki regime also cited lean capacity, poor communication, political infighting and malfeasance as the main reasons for South Africa’s social malaise at the local level. Hence, it’s not wrong to surmise that the main text of the ANC-led government’s response has not much changed since April 2009, but the way it’s being communicated has. Either way, the response is superficial!

It is my contention that the original source of the social malaise is threefold: A disjuncture between legal thought and grassroots expectations of socioeconomic rights, a neoliberal mode of governmentality, which is the sine qua non of the economic rationality of neo-liberal capitalism, and liberal democracy’s limited assumption of politics and by implication political participation, as will become clear below.

THE EMPTINESS OF SOCIOECONOMIC RIGHTS

Who are the protestors? They are predominantly young unemployed men and women who are demanding material entitlement to the socioeconomic rights that have been guaranteed to them and their poor communities by the South African Constitution since 1996, very simply put. They are persons like Nosizwe from Barcelona in Cape Town, who told a journalist during the April 2009 elections: ‘We have many problems in Barcelona. We have no roads, no houses, no water. You can see yourself. We’re living on sand here. We’re living in a swamp. Winter’s arrived, we’re going to swim in flood water. Each year’s the same story.’

The reality is that these rights are conceived as ‘access-rights’ and not concrete entitlements. They offer no guarantee of concrete relief and so have no automatic effect on socioeconomic hardships, which raise questions about their redistributional effects. The court uses a procedural test to measure compliance with the Constitution’s socioeconomic rights framework. As long as state departments can demonstrate that their respective policy programmes guarantee adequate access, but that social demands are not affordable, they’ve passed the compliance test. The legal narrative thus defies the very interests that prompted the inclusion of socioeconomic rights into the South African Constitution.

The effect is that without some element of socioeconomic resources poor people will remain deprived of any substantive experience of these rights, which explains why Ms Irene Grootboom, eight years after the famous Grootboom case, was still waiting for her house and eventually died without it, in 2008. To be sure, I’m not suggesting that socioeconomic rights are not an important political tool in the hands of the working poor and unemployed masses to demand social change. However, the emptiness of the court’s socioeconomic rights jurisprudence, which is grounded in liberal constitutionalism, militates against the potential for these rights to have concrete value in the lives of the beneficiaries.

THE NEOLIBERAL THREAT TO SOCIAL CHANGE

The socioeconomic rights predicament is compounded by the state’s neoliberal political logic. It refers to a mode of governmentality that is suffused with an economic rationality, which gears state practices towards bolstering the health and growth of the economy whilst being less concern with the poverty reduction effect of economic growth. A market rationale is imposed on development planning and policy discourses, which means that decisions regarding the provision of social services are submitted to cost and benefit considerations. The focus is on keeping the cost of delivering a particular service low without necessarily decreasing its quantity and on recovering the cost of unpaid services, like water and electricity. In the context of a highly socially stratified society such as South Africa, submitting social policy to market rationality weakens its ability to confront poverty. It compromises the quality of social services that are being delivered to the working poor and unemployed, who lack the choices enjoyed by those in the middle-to-upper echelons of society, and causes them to go without basic social amenities, like electricity and water, for long periods of time.

For example, a 2008 report on housing delivery by the Centre on Housing Rights & Evictions (CORE) reveals staggering details about the quality of the houses that are being built under the eThekwini Municipality’s low-cost housing scheme. According to the report, many of the houses that were visited by the CORE researchers had large cracks, no ceiling or waterproofing under the roof tiles. All of the houses were one room with a secluded toilet, which thrust enormous social stresses on larger size families, especially their women folk. Most of those who cannot afford to fix up their houses indicated that they were better off in their shacks. In Nelson Mandela Bay Metropolitan, protesting communities rejected the government’s RDP houses. They argued that the houses were built on clay soil and lacked privacy: the cracks in some of the houses are so huge that neighbours can see each other’s every movement.

In the case of electricity, despite cross-subsidisation, Eskom’s full cost recovery policy has led to consistent increases in electricity tariffs, which have fuelled massive disconnections since the mid-90s. Over the years, many poor households with electricity access have been either disconnected by the state or decided to disconnect themselves, in the case of prepaid meters, because electricity prices have been out of kilter with their means. David McDonald has calculated that there were two million disconnections by 2002. This figure makes nonsense of the Department of Mineral and Energy and Eskom’s celebrated claim that a total of almost three million homes have been electrified since 1991, and reports that South Africa’s electricity is the cheapest in the world.

Meanwhile, data by Earthlife Africa shows that industry accounts for about two thirds of electricity consumption in South Africa: (68 per cent according to the 2002 Energy outlook) commerce 10 per cent and domestic consumers about 17 per cent. Yet poorer customers are charged higher electricity rates than business and affluent consumers. According to the latest figures, prepaid users are paying over 50c/kWh whilst the domestic average is 44c/kWh. The evidence reveals that it has been business and affluent consumers that have disproportionately benefited from Eskom’s so-called low-cost electricity supply.

More harrowing, the state declared a national electricity emergency in 2008 when companies experienced blackouts. Yet many poor communities have and continue to be without electricity since the dawn of our democracy. Poor people are regularly maimed and killed by fires in shack settlements because the state refuses to electrify their shacks. Curiously, the state signed a long-term deal with Alcan in 2006, a Canadian aluminium corporation, to allow it to build a smelter at Coega. It is mindboggling why the government would want to sell electricity to a foreign company when it complains about shortages here at home! The cost of the power to Alcan has been kept secret, but energy activists have pointed out that the amount of energy that Alcan will purchase is said to be equal to half of the consumption of the City of Cape Town and more than the current consumption of nearby Port Elizabeth. This is a clear illustration of how the state with a 90 per cent stake in Eskom is using its political power, entities and the law to support market interests whilst the social needs of the working poor and unemployed are being submitted to budget calculations.

THE TYRANNY OF PARTICIPATION

Finally, although the Constitution guarantees public participation in municipal affairs, South Africa’s liberal democratic framework, like anywhere else, creates an incestuous relationship between the political elite and their electors. It’s preposterously assumed that an electoral victory for the ruling party means that every policy decision of the political elite correlates with the wishes of electors who are not part of the decision-making process. Moreover, most ward councillors are not living within the communities whose needs they are suppose to resolve and therefore are not in touch with their everyday life social experiences. They are nominated and elected by members of their respective political parties and so tend to use ward committees as adjuncts of the local party branch, ostracising the voices of non-party activists. It’s inconceivable that party activists can speak for the whole of society.

Meanwhile, participation in local formal channels for citizenship participation is often used as a stratagem to legitimise preordained decisions and to contain mass resistance against the socioeconomic status quo. Those who reject this kind of farcical participation are being criminalised. The awkward truth is that when people are not directly involved in the decision-making process, discontent is inevitable. What is required is a popular democratic effort by the working class and the poor to reduce the centralised bureaucratic control of the state over social transformation, on the one hand, and to increase the political power of the masses over public policy, on the other.

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* Ibrahim Steyn is a political science researcher at the Democracy Development Programme and a PhD student in the School of Government at the University of the Western Cape. He writes in his personal capacity.
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