The struggle for transformation in South Africa: unrealised dreams, persistent hopes

South Africa offers a remarkable focal point to explore legacies of liberation, because of the enormity of the task of transforming society to address the legacies of apartheid, and because of the substantial legal, institutional and financial resources available to the government to foster significant change. In contrast to other countries in the region, such as Mozambique and Angola, whose early independence period was shaped by civil war and military intervention by the apartheid regime and the superpowers, South Africa’s transition was strongly supported by regional and international actors. Given this backing, the resources available to the government, and the long history of worker and community participation in the country’s mass democratic movement, there were high hopes – and expectations – that the new African National Congress (ANC) government would introduce policies and governing practices that would foster inclusion and address the deep levels of inequality, poverty and violence that characterised society.

This has not happened. The 2014 national election, which marked 20 years of democracy in South Africa, confirmed the limited nature of the transformation. As widely predicted, the ANC was able to brush off political scandals, rampant corruption, sluggish economic growth and public protests to win its fifth successive election victory. However, it has not been able to brush off the many protests that manifest themselves throughout the country, in workplaces and communities where the lack of transformation is most keenly felt. The selection of articles in this special issue, we believe, helps to advance our understanding of the nature and complexities of post-apartheid democracy in South Africa through contemporary struggles for transformation. While much has been written about the country’s transition and the range of problems associated with the ANC’s adoption of neo-liberalism and related policy reforms, local struggles and resistance have generated less attention. The articles here offer rich insights into processes of governance and resistance, and show that social justice cannot easily be engineered through new institutions in the absence of political will.

Apartheid created a society based on inequality and dispossession; little wonder many post-1994 political and community-based struggles have been framed around socio-economic transformation, rights and redress. Demands that basic rights be respected played an important role in the struggle against apartheid, both as a way to critique white minority rule and racial oppression, and as goals for the liberation movement to pursue. Rights have remained one of the most important bases for asserting normative and political claims; labour and social movements have used a rights-based discourse to push for the realisation of socio-economic advancement, women’s groups have fought for gender equality, and new social movements have used equal citizenship rights as the basis to demand land reform and access to basic services, such as water and electricity. In other words, the dreams of a post-apartheid South Africa characterised by economic and racial justice have not died, though in the absence of a national process of socio-economic transformation, they have fractured into thousands of localised struggles.

The ANC had campaigned on a promise to ‘keep moving South Africa forward’ in the 2014 election, based on what it believes is a positive story to tell about its performance during its first 20 years in office. It is true that much has changed since the end of apartheid and the country does represent a democratisation success story in many ways: political power is now in the hands of the majority, human rights have been entrenched in the new constitution and in policy, there is wider access to education and health services, and infrastructure, like household access to water, has been improved. Success is also evident in the equalisation and extension of social welfare. The introduction of the Child Support Grant and expansion of other social grants have allowed growing numbers of poor and vulnerable people to receive social grants, while new labour legislation extended labour rights and employment standards protection to millions of workers previously excluded. After several years of sluggish growth, the economy grew an average of 5% between 2004 and 2007 (OECD 2008, 20–21), cutting unemployment and leading then Minister of Finance, Trevor Manuel, to promise further increases in public spending on social services and infrastructure (Steytler and Powell 2010). The global economic crisis of 2008 reversed these trends, however, causing the economy to plunge into a recession. One million people lost their jobs.

Despite the recession and slow recovery, few would disagree with the ANC’s general claim that ‘South Africa is a better place than it was before 1994’. For many it is; especially for the rising black upper class, many of whom are in government or are business leaders with close associations to the ANC. However, while the government has been relatively successful in extending services and infrastructure to millions, financial mismanagement and corruption alongside the adoption of neo-liberal economic reforms have seriously undermined progress in the realisation of economic and social rights. Poverty continues to be exceptionally high and inequality has increased, especially ‘within group [“racial”] inequality’: national income inequality as measured by the Gini coefficient rose from 0.64 in 1995 to 0.69 in 2005 (du Toit and Neves 2008, 3), and then to .70 in 2008 (Narayan and Mahajan 2013, 1), making South Africa one of the most unequal countries in the world (a Gini coefficient of 0 represents total equality, while a coefficient of 1 would signal all income was earned by one person). And, while unemployment rates fell between 2002 and 2007, South Africa’s labour market remains characterised by the persistence of high rates of long-term unemployment and discouraged job seekers. Further, various forms of precarious employment, such as casual and temporary work, have continued to grow. Most of these workers do not qualify for unemployment assistance or other forms of social support and have been virtually ignored by the trade union movement. Indeed, while the reformed social security system helps sustain the millions of poor South Africans who are eligible for social assistance, it offers no direct support to unemployed and precarious workers. This became especially troubling after 2008, when job losses were concentrated among casual, contract and other precarious workers.

No surprise, then, that the last decade has witnessed struggles linked to employment losses in many sectors, slow land redistribution and housing delivery, privatisation, high user fees and related problems with service delivery. Many of these struggles were led by new social movements formed in the late 1990s, comprised of constituencies whose needs were not being represented by the ANC or its alliance partners, COSATU and the SACP (see Desai 2002). Workplace struggles have also dominated the political landscape, punctuated by a five month mining strike in the platinum belt in 2014 – the longest in South African history – a dramatic recent indicator that the post-apartheid socio-economic dispensation is failing a large and growing percentage of workers. The roots of this strike, like those in many other sectors, lie in contested processes of workplace restructuring, but also in Alliance politics and the insensitivity of the ANC government to widespread poverty and socio-economic inequality.

These issues came to prominence in mid-2012, when police opened fire on striking workers in Marikana, killing 34 and injuring 78. The strike triggered more strikes across the country, including a wave in the agricultural sector in the Western Cape. These strikes were noteworthy for several reasons: notably, they were led by workers who were not affiliated to COSATU, South Africa’s largest and most prominent trade union federation and the ANC’s alliance partner, and they were conducted outside – even in opposition to – the post-1994 industrial relations framework. There have been further splits in the labour movement following these strikes, with 2014’s platinum strike led by a union not affiliated with COSATU: the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU). In late 2014, on-going fighting between COSATU and its biggest affiliate, the National Union of Metal Workers (NUMSA), which probably reflected the alarm in Alliance circles at the union’s refusal to endorse the ANC in the 2014 general election and other divisions within the alliance, led to a split in the labour federation and efforts to launch a new labour federation (currently planned for May of this year), civil society coalition and workers’ party. However, NUMSA and its allies suffer the same weaknesses as COSATU’s remaining affiliates, such as the lack of any new vision about how to organise and represent precarious workers or challenge government policy, raising questions about NUMSA’s ability to re-build working class unity, much less to mount a credible alternative to the ANC in the 2019 national election.

In fact, there is no sign yet when the ANC will face credible competition. Despite the multiple crises of the Zuma government in its first five years in office, the 2014 election reconfirmed the ANC’s overwhelming political dominance. The ANC’s share of the total vote barely fell, and at 62.2%, they still won a substantial majority. The Democratic Alliance (DA) confirmed its status as the main opposition party, with its share of the popular vote growing from 16.6% in 2009 to 22.2% last year, consolidating its hold on the moderate right but failing to make meaningful gains among black voters. The third largest party in the National Assembly, the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), did shake things up. Despite limited resources, the EFF, formed by expelled African National Congress Youth League (ANCYL) President Julius Malema (a previous fervent Zuma supporter) put forward a radical left-wing agenda, mobilised people around the country and brought the policy rhetoric of sweeping economic transformation back into the public sphere with campaign promises to redistribute wealth by expropriating land and nationalising the mines and banks. Perhaps it was not surprising that the party was able to whip up support among unemployed youth and the poor, winning 25 seats. Despite its theatrical performances in the National Assembly since the election, reports of internal dissent and the unscrupulous reputation of its leader provide little hope that the party will return South Africa’s policy agenda and governance practices to the promise of the liberation movement.

COSATU’s collapse and the destabilisation of old alliances and coalitions have opened space for civic engagement, debates and struggles around rights, transformation and justice. From nationwide student protests in late 2015 – the largest student demonstration since the Soweto uprisings in 1976 – to ongoing organising and protest action by the shack-dwellers movement Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM), to activities by new, non-union organisations, such as the Casual Workers Advice Office (CWAO), aimed at supporting casual, contract and workers employed by labour brokers, South Africa continues to be the site of widespread civil resistance to all types of social inequality and injustice.

The government has responded to some of this discontent, and has tried to use post-apartheid legal frameworks and institutions, such the Human Rights Commission and the Commission for Gender Equality, set up by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), to consolidate democracy and pursue redress. However, as these articles indicate, addressing the inherited socio-economic disparities between black and white South Africans has been no easy task. Slow, problematic and even contradictory policy responses reflect competing understandings of social justice and inconsistent priorities. The government’s prioritisation of growth over economic redistribution has not been accepted by the multitude of strikers, demonstrators and protestors who continue to express their dissatisfaction with the failure of the ANC government to make significant progress towards meeting the human rights of all South Africans, including their constitutional socio-economic rights. The articles in this special issue focus on some of the key dimensions of the struggle to achieve rights, transformation and social and economic justice: employment and labour market reform, urban land restitution and rural market gardens, transitional justice and the translation of socio-economic rights into local government policy.

The first two articles, by Nevin T. Aiken and Christiaan Beyers, focus on justice, rights and redress as pursued through the constitutional instruments intended to compensate some of apartheid’s victims. Aiken explores the role of the TRC in advancing interracial reconciliation. In contrast to much of the published work on the TRC, Aiken emphasises the importance of socio-economic justice to its objectives, and critically assesses the adequacy of the TRC’s reparations programmes in addressing apartheid’s legacy of socio-economic inequality. He argues that the TRC process emphasised truth and reconciliation ahead of justice, and the lack of focus on socio-economic justice has limited its overall contribution to reconciliation. Beyers argues that land restitution policy has sought to reconcile redress with redistribution by combining the transformative possibilities of land restitution with housing delivery aimed at low-income groups. In two high profile, much contested case studies, Cato Manor in Durban and District Six in Cape Town, conflicting demands for justice were played out by favouring redistribution over restitution. Through these two cases, the article assesses the significance of urban land restitution for national socio-economic transformation, and analyses its effect on ‘justice’ and on social and political struggles in urban areas.

The next two articles turn to examine the struggle for employment rights and labour market inclusion. Franco Barchiesi investigates social policy discourse with specific regard to the ways interventions aimed at addressing poverty and social inequality have conceptualised welfare, social assistance and social security as a residual category that stigmatises its recipients as lesser citizens than those in paid employment. As a result, the government has eschewed universal, non-paid-work related income redistribution programmes, despite the material reality of spiralling unemployment and the proliferation of precarious and unprotected occupations that have fuelled inequality and social discontent. Bridget Kenny draws our attention to some of the complexities and limitations of rights-based demands for national inclusion. Using a case study of retail workers and drawing on Wendy Brown’s (1995) provocative work on the relationship between freedom and equality, Kenny argues that new labour rights have contributed to new divisions and exclusions in retail sector workplaces because they redefined categories of insiders and outsiders, now based on employment status rather than race.

Elizabeth Vibert examines an unexplored site of resistance that has for the most part, been excluded from the new rights frameworks: a small group of women farmers on a farming cooperative in Limpopo Province. Her research draws attention to how neo-liberal economic policies have shaped rural livelihoods and resistance strategies at the household and community level. Despite numerous challenges and setbacks, this community garden has been successful in reducing poverty and increasing health outcomes for their families and their community while also helping to create more sustainable forms of small-scale farming. Grassroots alternatives like Hleketani Community Garden provide an interesting example of a struggle that is neither a visible site of protest, nor, in fact, overtly political. What it does offer is a lived critique of the kinds of assumptions made by the post-apartheid government about how economic transformation will be achieved.

The next two articles explore social and economic justice in the local government policy arena, struggles that have also been shaped by the shallowness of social and economic inclusion. Dale McKinley discusses township-based neighbourhood movements that formed to protest inadequate and expensive urban services, focusing on Johannesburg’s Anti-Privatisation Forum (APF), one of the leading social movements of the 2000s. As one of the founders, McKinley provides a rare insider’s look at this group, its development and the tensions and setbacks that eventually led to its demise. As this article illustrates, while the APF harnessed resentment and opposition to government policies to force the ANC to focus on municipal service delivery, the movement had limited success shaping government policies. Moreover, the APF faced a number of leadership and organisational challenges, including lack of timely attention to addressing gender inequality within the movement, which contributed to its inability to translate resistance into a broader political project of social inclusion.

Also focusing on the challenge of government policy at the municipal level, Carolyn Bassett explores the prospects for local governance to achieve inclusion and accountability through participatory local budgeting. South Africa’s history of participatory local governance and policy-making, which was reflected to some extent in post-apartheid institutions of local government, seemed to position the country to follow Brazil’s adoption of participatory local budgeting. Despite the possibilities inherent in this policy approach to respond to the needs and demands of the poor and marginalised, the ANC government has favoured a centralised, technocratic approach. Given this tendency and the history of local policy-making in the country, she asks: could the government improve its municipal policy outcomes by embracing participatory local budgeting? As explored in her article, the challenges and barriers are numerous, especially in the current political environment. Yet there are also risks inherent in maintaining the status quo, which may be fatally undermining popular support for the ANC, especially at the local level.

We conclude this special issue with an interview with John S. Saul, whose lifetime work and retirement inspired this collection, conducted by David McDonald. John S. Saul was one of the most knowledgeable, sympathetic and prolific chroniclers of the anti-colonial struggle as it unfolded between the 1960s and 1990s in Southern Africa, highlighting problems that plagued many of the region’s liberation movements once they gained political power. His early work centred on Tanzania, where he lived for many years, and later on Mozambique, where he observed first-hand the challenges and difficulties of transitioning from the type of military leadership that accompanied armed liberation movements fighting against colonial rule to the type of political leadership needed for post-independence rule.

Saul’s work has also focused on the southern African region as a whole, and on the quest for social and economic justice in post-liberation Southern African societies where neo-liberal globalisation has set the contours for economic ‘reform’ such that extreme poverty and inequality continue to characterise the post-independence period. Saul has referred to the process by which African leaders win formal independence while conceding to continuing economic and cultural domination as ‘false decolonisation’ and the reversal of previously hard-won gains as ‘recolonisation’, viewing the two processes together as the most pressing challenge faced by the region today (Saul 1990, 2005). In other writings, he characterised the democracy that resulted from recolonisation and the concomitant adoption of a neo-liberal economic framework under International Monetary Fund tutelage as ‘thin’; counterposing it to a ‘strong’, radical, popular democracy (Saul 1997).

Often drawing on comparative examples from the Southern African region, Saul’s recent work has explored these issues with specific reference to South Africa, and critically assessed the country’s transition to democracy under the ANC, and the challenges and complexities of ‘real transformation’ in the context of global neo-liberalism and other changes. A starting point in this work, similar to his previous work on the southern African region, are questions about the nature and legacy of the country’s liberation movement and the global context in which such change is taking place: the dialectics of leadership accountability and grassroots participation; local struggles and participatory processes of social change; and the role of global capital as a ‘neo-colonial’ force.

Saul considers and discusses many of these issues in his interview with David McDonald. In addition, Saul reflects upon his intellectual and activist history, highlighting the paradoxes of governance for Southern Africa’s liberation movements, whose authoritarian tendencies quickly outshone their democratic promise. In line with his disillusion with the region’s post-liberation governments, Saul raised concerns even before the 1994 election that the ANC leadership would follow in the authoritarian footsteps of governments in Zambia, Tanzania, Zimbabwe and elsewhere in the region, jeopardising the prospects for genuine liberation in South Africa under majority rule.

The selection of articles in this special issue, we believe, helps to advance our understanding into the nature and complexities of post-apartheid democracy in South Africa. Similar to a previous special issue of this Journal we co-edited (Legacies of Liberation: Post-colonial struggles for a democratic Southern Africa, Journal of Contemporary African Studies 32:3, 2014), the topics explored here engage with some of the broader themes that have been the focus of Saul’s scholarship on Southern Africa (see, e.g. Saul 1990, 1997, 2001, 2005, 2009), specifically the challenge of fostering bottom-up, genuinely participatory processes of social change. While the previous issue focused on post-liberation struggles in the Southern African region, this issue specifically addresses the problems of post-‘liberation’ governance in South Africa, showing once again that overthrowing authoritarian regimes is but a first step to genuine liberation, democratisation and freedom. As has been the case with other post-liberation governments in the region, A Luta Continua: the struggle continues in South Africa itself, under perhaps the most promising yet disappointing conditions.

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank the authors of this special issue for their ongoing support in pulling this issue together. A special thanks is extended to the external reviewer for their excellent comments on each of the articles during the review process, and to Janice Dowson, who meticulously read and helped edit several contributions in this special issue.

Notes on contributors

Marlea Clarke is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Victoria, and is a research associate with the Labour and Enterprise Research Project (LEP) at the University of Cape Town. Marlea’s work has focused on health and precarious employment in Canada, and labour market restructuring in post-apartheid South Africa. Her work has been published in journals including the Canadian Journal of African Studies and Work, Organisation, Labour and Globalisation, and she is co-author of Working Without Commitments (with Wayne Lewchuk and Alice de Wolff) and co-editor (with Carolyn Bassett) of a previous special issue of the Journal of Contemporary African Studies, Legacies of Liberation: Postcolonial Struggles for a Democratic Southern Africa (32.3, 2014). She can be contacted at: [email protected]

Carolyn Bassett is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and Director of the International Development Studies Program at the University of New Brunswick. Her research on socio-economic policy in South Africa and the policy role of the labour movement has been published in journals including Review of African Political Economy, Third World Quarterly, and Studies in Political Economy. She can be contacted at: [email protected]