The Undeserving Poor: Poverty and the Politics of Service Delivery in the Poorest Nodes of South Africa

Abstract

The paper tries to explain how, 14 years into democracy, the poor have moved from being central to post-apartheid reconstruction to being depicted by political leaders as lacking moral fibre and depending on ‘handouts’—from deserving to undeserving poor. This has occurred within the ruling African National Congress, even though sympathy for the poor remains constant outside of government. To do so, the paper starts in mid- and late-nineteenth-century England, where Victorian intellectuals and policy-makers grappled with the challenge of a growing urban proletariat and the emergence of what Disraeli described as ‘two nations’—a recurrent theme of the ANC government under President Mbeki—and the two newly democratising countries grappled with the ‘revolutionary threat and humanitarian disgrace’ of poverty. The paper then analyses recent ANC discourse around the poor and anti-poverty interventions. The unresolved tensions within the ANC-led tripartite alliance, it is argued, are directly implicated in its failure adequately to conceptualise poverty, and 14 years into democracy, South Africa lacks an anti-poverty strategy, targets, or target groups. The paper ends by suggesting a method for identifying the ‘ultra-poor’, which is critical in place of the ‘spray and pray’ approach currently in use if poverty is substantially to be rolled back.

Notes

²The poverty index is explained at Appendix A.

Paper prepared for the 11th Conference of Africanists, Institute for African Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, May 2008. My thanks to Ross Jennings for his statistical and programming mastery, to Karuti Kanyinga, Matthew Smith and Hein Marais for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper; and to participants at the Africanist conference for their comments.

This paper was written after the ANC's Polokwane conference but before the recall of President Thabo Mbeki and subsequent resignations by Ministers and Deputy Ministers, defections to the newly formed Congress of the People (COPE) party, and so on.

Targeting is a critical function of any programmatic intervention, and is used in that sense, rather than with the ideological overtones analysed in Mkandawire (nd) ‘Targeting and universalism in developing countries’ (United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, mimeo).

The Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust makes grants to civil society organisations working for the poor in South Africa.

See Keating: Social explorers, op. cit., pp. 20–22.

The tripartite alliance comprised the ANC, the South African Communist Party, and the Congress of South African trade Unions.

This group is described below.

See for example the on-going Meth/van den Berg et al. stand-off (as summarized by Meth) in Meth, C. (2008), ‘The (Lame) Duck Unchained Tries to Count the Poor’, School of Development Studies, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Working Paper 49, mimeo; also van den Berg, S., Burger, R., Rulof, B., Louw, M. and Yu, D. (2006), ‘Trends in Poverty and Inequality since the Political Transition’, Development Policy Research Unit Working Paper.

See Everatt, D., Smith, M. and Solanki, G. (2006), ‘Baseline Survey of the 21 ISRDP and URP Nodes’ (Strategy & Tactics, Department of Social Development, mimeo); and Meth, C. (2006), ‘Half Measures Revisited: The ANC's Unemployment and Poverty Reduction Goals’, in: H. Bhorat and R. Kanbur (eds), Poverty and Policy in Post-apartheid South Africa, pp.366–458 (Pretoria: Human Sciences Research Council).

See Everatt, D. (2001), ‘The Politics of Poverty’, in: D. Everatt and V. Maphai (eds), The (Real) State of the Nation: South Africa since 1994 (Johannesburg: Interfund); see also Seekings, J. (2007), ‘Deserving Individuals and Groups: Justifying the Shape of South Africa's Welfare State’ (CSSR Working Paper 193), p. 20.

See for example Marais, H. (2007), ‘Getting Back to Basics’, in: O. Edigheji (ed.), Rethinking South Africa's Development Path: Reflections on the ANC's Policy Conference Discussion Documents. Special edition of Policy: Issues and Actors, 20(10), pp. 99–106; see also Meth, C. (2004), ‘Ideology and Social Policy: “Handouts” and the Spectre of “Dependency”’, Transformation, 56; and Meth, C. (2008), ‘Lame Duck’, op cit.

See Everatt, D. and Solanki, G. (2008), ‘A Nation of Givers? Results from a National Survey of Social Giving’, in: A. Habib and B. Maharaj (eds.), Giving and Solidarity: Resource Flows for Poverty Alleviation and Development in South Africa, pp. 57–59 (Pretoria: Human Sciences Research Council).

An ANC election poster of 1994.

See for example the ISRDP/URP baseline survey as well as the Social Giving survey, cited earlier.

In some of the URP nodes (marked with ∗), demarcation made extracting data for the node particularly complex and the data should be treated with circumspection for 1996; the 2001 figures are accurate. Inanda, for example, is an extremely poor urban node; but extracting locale-specific data from Census 1996 proved very challenging; and thus the per cent change in poverty levels in Inanda should be treated with caution.

These poverty scores are discussed in detail in Everatt, D. (forthcoming), ‘Counting Them Out, Counting Them in Again: Reporting from the “War on Poverty” in South Africa's Poorest Nodes, 1996–2006’, in: A. McLennan and B. Munslow (eds.), The State and the Politics of Delivery in South Africa (Wits P&DM Governance Series, Wits University Press).

See Everatt et al. (2006), ‘Baseline Survey’, op. cit. (can be downloaded from www.sarpn.org.za).

A term also used by the ANC in its documentation, though without definition.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

David Everatt

∗ Director, Strategy & Tactics, Visiting Research Fellow, School of Public & Development Management, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.