Tokenism in South African social policy

Abstract

South Africa’s welfare state expansion is said to be one of the leading ‘social democratic’ achievements of the post-apartheid era. However, overwhelmingly tokenistic features – including a neoliberal (fiscally-austere) context, the extension (not transformation) of apartheid’s inheritance, and commercialisation of state services – mean the deeper crises of society and economy are not being addressed effectively by the state. This is evident in the foundational approach to social policy, and in the funding associated with the Child Support Grant, the Older Person’s Grant and various other specific programmes. In contrast, alternative strategies of decommodification are being pursued by civil society activists, although transformative macro-economic policy and a new political coalition – perhaps the ‘United Front’ called by the metalworkers union – are prerequisites for the ‘nonreformist reforms’ needed.

Full text

TRANSFORMATION 86 (2014) ISSN 0258-7696 48
Article
Tokenism in South African social policy1
Patrick Bond
pbond@mail.ngo.za
Abstract
South Africa’s welfare state expansion is said to be one of the leading ‘social
democratic’ achievements of the post-apartheid era. However, overwhelmingly
tokenistic features – including a neoliberal (fiscally-austere) context, the extension
(not transformation) of apartheid’s inheritance, and commercialisation of state
services – mean the deeper crises of society and economy are not being addressed
effectively by the state. This is evident in the foundational approach to social policy,
and in the funding associated with the Child Support Grant, the Older Person’s
Grant and various other specific programmes. In contrast, alternative strategies of
decommodification are being pursued by civil society activists, although
transformative macro-economic policy and a new political coalition – perhaps the
‘United Front’ called by the metalworkers union – are prerequisites for the ‘non-
reformist reforms’ needed.
Introduction
South Africa is the world’s most unequal large country, judging by the Gini
Coefficient, with thousands of protests recorded by police annually. Yet its
political leaders include many who were formidable revolutionaries, trained
in Moscow exile at the Lenin Institute or in the fires of internal struggles
where conflicts over social reproduction were as important as any component
of the freedom struggle. These men and women did service to the cause of
justice in the most liberatory sites of struggle across Africa. Many were anti-
apartheid heroes, jailed and tortured from the 1960s until 1990 when most
prisoners were released. They came to power on the back of one of the
world’s greatest international solidarity movements, which in turn had been
inspired by the near-revolutionary situation in the townships and workplaces
of apartheid South Africa.

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Tokenism in South African social policy
That is why it is so ironic that the policies adopted by the African National
Congress (ANC) leadership, including the extension and tweaking of
apartheid-era social welfare policies, are consistent with the neoliberal
economic regime that came to rule the world at the time they took power in
1994. In addition to the government’s greatly intensified reliance upon cost
recovery – now extending even to the sole megacity’s highways using a
controversial e-tolling system – the state maintained what can be termed
tokenistic welfare policies. Such policies do not entail the delivery of much
higher benefits to recipients than did earlier systems (although the racial
bias of apartheid was removed, naturally). Nor do they dramatically change
the existing system’s paternalistic orientation. The post-apartheid policies
generally cut the depth of the prior system, while extending its breadth, a
project embarked upon under the overall rubric of market-oriented service
delivery policy, including a risky commercialised outsourcing of benefit
payments.
To illustrate, neoliberal ‘cost recovery’ dogma must be reconciled with
state subsidies, and hence a tokenistic approach to policy offers subsidies
based mainly upon capital grants, while insisting upon full payment for the
operating and maintenance costs of a state service. As a result, the ‘Free
Basic Services’ policy adopted in 2001 provides a bare minimum (eg 50
kiloWatt hours of electricity or 6 kiloliters of water per household per month),
and then allows service providers to charge extremely high rates for
subsequent consumption. It represents a strategy for ‘talking left’ while
‘walking right’ – or more precisely, ‘turning the tap right’, disconnecting
those unable to pay.
This article sets out some of the seminal experiences in the extension of
the South African government’s social policy after 1994 – including the oft-
praised social grant to elderly people – and, in the Conclusion, contrasts
these with activist initiatives informed by a more robust decommodification
logic. Struggles over AIDS medicines and water/sanitation services illustrate
stark differences. The latter achieved exceptional success, raising life
expectancy dramatically, and compelling much greater water provision
(including through illegal reconnections) than would otherwise have been
granted. In these cases, it is much more in the spirit of Andre Gorz’s
strategies that we can understand an alternative approach to social policy,
in which (reformist) reformism is rejected in favour of a (non-reformist-
reform) ‘commoning’ strategy, both in policy and grassroots practice.

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Patrick Bond
Poverty and welfare during South Africa’s elite transition
The context is the continuity – not change – in various systems of South
African super-exploitation, from the era of racial apartheid to the post-1994
class-apartheid era (Bond 2005). For example, a core component of apartheid
political economy, migrant labour, has persisted long after 1994. Even
though black male and especially female workers were extremely underpaid
in relation to their white counterparts and global norms in 1994, inequalities
deep within the system were amplified. From 1995 to 2005, University of Cape
Town researchers found, African households lost 1.8 per cent of their overall
income (including wages, salaries, and unearned income), whereas white
households gained 40.5 per cent (Bhorat et al 2009: 8). A 2010 report of the
Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development by a team led by
Murray Leibbrandt concluded that since 1994, ‘poverty incidence barely
changed in rural areas, while it increased in urban areas’ (Leibbrandt et al
2010: 37). If the $43 ‘national poverty line’ is an appropriate guide for monthly
income, the percentage of poor people rose from 45.6 per cent in 1994 to 47
per cent in 2012, according to Haroon Bhorat (2013). Over the same period,
the ratio of surplus in the economy given to labour versus that taken by
business (ie wages to profits) shrunk by 5 per cent (Forslund 2013a). High
increases in fees for consuming basic state services began to kick in by the
late 1990s, and the early 2000s witnessed a merely tokenistic Free Basic
Services programme, in which cities like Durban (allegedly the most generous)
doubled the overall price of water from 1997-2004 while offering a meagre 6
kiloliters a month per household free. The result was higher non-payment
rates, higher disconnection levels and a full third less consumption of water
by Durban’s poorest million people (Bond 2010: 456-7).
Nevertheless, vocal neoliberal critics of the new South Africa sometimes
bemoan a new ‘culture of entitlement’ in which the government is expected
to solve all social ills (Madywabe 2005). Former Black Consciousness
movement revolutionary leader Mamphela Ramphele (a Managing Director
at the World Bank during the early 2000s and later a wealthy venture
capitalist and politician) argued forcefully against the rights-based strategy:
‘The whole approach of the post-apartheid government was to deliver free
housing, free this, free the other. This has created expectations on the part
of citizens, a passive expectation that government will solve problems’
(Green 2009). As for academics, Stephen Devereux considers SA social
protection ‘exceptional not only because of the extensive coverage, relative
generosity and efficient delivery of its social grants, but because these

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Tokenism in South African social policy
grants are underpinned by political commitment and legislated rights’
(Devereux 2011: 414). Jeremy Seekings (2005: 50) calls it ‘exceptionally
generous’, but this is all relative, for he and Nicoli Nattrass argue that
tokenism is fine: ‘The best that a labour surplus economy such as SA can
aspire to is an American-style welfare state regime with a very inegalitarian
labour market, where the state provides minimal and stringently means-
tested public welfare’ (Nattrass and Seekings 1997: 476).
Means-testing is typically contrasted with universalism, and the
‘American-style’ regime is the object of scorn in Gosta Esping-Andersen’s
‘three worlds of welfare capitalism’. According to Esping-Andersen (1990),
welfare states are functional insofar as they legitimise capitalism and secure
a stable labour force, while Keynesians also promote the state’s spending
capabilities to mitigate against capitalist crisis tendencies. Three types of
welfare state regimes – social democratic (Scandinavia and some other
northern European countries); corporatist (middle-Europe); and neoliberal
(Anglo-Saxon countries) – reflect some of the institutional characteristics
associated with the nature of the societies in which they arise (eg open/
closed, early/late democracy and nature of state-society bargaining systems).
Class power is usually the determinant factor, and the interests of workers
are to ‘decommodify’ their own labour-power, through assuring benefits
that allow them to leave the job market, and to ‘destratify’ access to welfare
services through universal access. In the process, the workers’ interests are
to insist upon redistribution within contribution systems such as
unemployment insurance, health schemes and pensions. To these ends,
class coalitions are crucial to understanding how a numerically-important
but minority class (workers) can forge alliances with, eg rural people, to
establish social-democratic systems, and conversely why close relations
between capital and the state often lead to more neoliberal welfare systems
that commodify labour and generate less generous, means-tested benefits.
In South Africa during the early 1990s, class divisions suddenly opened
between the mass of poor people and employed working-class members of
trade unions who were formerly resident in the same slums as the poor but
then became geographically mobile after racial restrictions in suburbs were
lifted. The latter forged a formal Alliance with the ANC and Communist Party
during the early 1990s, and then became corporatist insiders whose leaders
were assimilated into the power structure (many labour elites were given the
tasks of state services commercialisation, for example), until in late 2013 a
break was initiated by the largest trade union (the National Union of

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Patrick Bond
Metalworkers of South Africa), in part because of the political contradictions
represented by this malfunctioning class coalition. As a result of the
fracturing of working-class power and growing distinctions within the class
during the 1990s, the post-apartheid state adopted a version of neoliberal
social policy: what we can term tokenistic welfare is provided to the majority
of South Africans, including the 30 per cent or so who receive monthly
grants. Measured in early 2014 exchange rates, most grants are $29/month
for supporting each poor child under age 18, but in addition there is a $125/
month pension for people over 60 years old, whose relative generosity
disguises deeper state commitments to neoliberalism.
Tokenistic social policy in philosophy and practice
A leading researcher in the SA Presidency, Alan Hirsch (2005: 3), argues in
what may be the most substantive, book-length defense of post-apartheid
policies:
[A]t the centre is a social democratic approach to social reform – it is
the state’s job to underwrite the improvement in the quality of life of
the poor and to reduce inequalities, but with a firmly entrenched fear
of the risks of personal dependency on the state and of the emergence
of entitlement attitudes... The ANC’s approach is sometimes summarised
as elements of a northern European approach to social development
combined with elements of Asian approaches to economic growth,
within conservative macroeconomic parameters. This remains the
intellectual paradigm within which the ANC operates.
In fact, the ‘conservative macroeconomic’ policy is quite closely matched
to neoliberal micro-developmental parameters. According to Franco Barchiesi
(2005: 382), the state’s 1997 White Paper ‘reaffirmed the notion of
“developmental social welfare” as geared towards providing citizens with an
“opportunity to play an active role in promoting their own well-being”. The
priority on individual self-activation, under the guise of “empowerment”
discourse, was combined with a view of social security and social services
as “investments which lead to tangible economic gains”’. To illustrate, there
is no question that social spending directed towards low-income people has
a higher economic ‘multiplier’ effect than subsidies given to multinational
corporations (of which there are many), since basic-needs consumption
requirements such as food and municipal services are produced locally
(Samson et al 2004).
However, under this logic, welfare becomes oriented to the economy’s
needs, not the society’s, leaving no rationale for welfare programmes – aside

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Tokenism in South African social policy
from a brief six-month period of unemployment insurance – for the 35 to 40
per cent of the working-age population who cannot find either formal work
or even engage in informal entrepreneurial activity, at any given time. An
official 2002 commission on welfare reform (the Taylor Committee) argued
that social grants should be ‘inducements for productive economic activity,
not as an alternative to depending on the labour market’, leading Barchiesi
(2009) to remark, ‘the South African system of social grants has therefore the
effect of generalising, institutionalising, and perpetuating social
precariousness’. As for an alleged work disincentive associated with state
handouts, Leibbrandt et al (2010: 38), clarify: ‘There is some concern about
negative labour supply effects from these transfers. However, there is little
empirical evidence to support this concern’.
Another alleged behavioral incentive is that the Child Support Grant
encourages teen pregnancies, as poverty-stricken girls seek the $29/month
support. But pregnancy rates were higher than before 1998 when the grant
was introduced and, moreover, only a fifth of teen mothers became grant
beneficiaries, according to a Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) team
(Makiwane et al 2006). As for another grant-related incentive, the $123/
month disability grant to people in advanced stages of AIDS, there are
occasional reports, as Steven Robins (2006: 320) notes, ‘that some poor and
unemployed citizens are consciously infecting themselves, or threatening
to stop treatment, to access the disability grant’ given to citizens and
permanent residents with low CD4 counts, though again, empirical evidence
is not available to know whether this is an urban myth. Still, it is a useful myth
for budget cutters, peddled by no less than then finance minister Manuel,
in a 2005 press conference at the International Monetary Fund (International
Monetary Fund 2005):
We have a peculiar problem in South Africa where people are entitled
to a disability grant while they are receiving medication for tuberculosis.
So when they heal, presumably, their disability grant, it’s about
US$150 a month, ends. So people have no incentive to get well. And so,
they tend to come off treatment.
But three studies conducted at the same time, according to HSRC
researchers, showed
no evidence to suggest that grants, particularly the Disability Grant, act
as a perverse incentive to influence individuals to deliberately neglect
their health in order to access the welfare system. While this research
does not exclude the possibility that such abuses may occur, it highlights

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Patrick Bond
the fact cases are rare and should not serve as an argument against the
introduction of a necessary and constitutionally guaranteed social
service. (Makiwane and Hamnca 2010)
For James Ferguson (2013: 223), the ANC’s expressed fear of ‘dependency’
is not simply a ‘lamentable manifestation of a reactionary and retrograde
yearning for paternalism and inequality’, it is instead ‘an entirely contemporary
response to the historically novel emergence of a social world where people,
long understood (under both pre-capitalist and early capitalist social systems)
as scarce and valuable, have instead become seen as lacking value, and in
surplus’. The essential problem is the precarious nature of membership
within a proletariat now in vast surplus in relation to the means of production.
He continues: ‘For more than a century in southern African, labour provided
the most powerful foundation for subaltern social membership (especially
in domains marked as urban and modern). Today, with work decentred and
underemployment a durable and widespread reality, we must rethink both
the grounds for social membership and the meaning of work’.
In this context, social grant provision remains a logical component of a
neoliberal state’s policy repertoire, as Susan Booysen (2011:15) argues,
because it is a part of the ruling party’s ‘political regeneration… the ANC-
in-government is the dispenser, the patron that ensures social grants and
other benefits. This is recognised as the “ANC doing good”’. But more than
patronage, there is also the political importance of appearing to be a
generous social welfare state, especially when tokenistic expansion of
social policies stands in contrast to the deeper, genuinely ‘northern European’
approach based on decommodfication and destratification that Hirsch so
erroneously claims.
In sum, Barchiesi (2009) concludes, South African social policy ‘is
characterised by a high degree of commodification, intended, borrowing
from Esping-Andersen, as the dependence of social provisions and living
standards on individual labour market positions and waged employment,
rather than on subsidisation from either employers or the state’. In describing
‘the art of neoliberalism’ in South Africa, Nicolas Pons-Vignon and Aurelia
Segatti (2013: 507) agree that ‘direct transfers can alleviate poverty, but they
do little to address inequality; furthermore, they act to entrench neoliberalism
if they are associated, as has been the case in South Africa, with encouraging
private provision of services to the poor’. Such private provision regularly
results in scandals, including an apparently corrupt $1 billion outsourcing
of benefits payments, as Jane Duncan (2014) observes:

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Tokenism in South African social policy
the very act of placing public functions in private hands means that
social security inevitably becomes debased by the profit motive. South
Africa’s social security-dependent poor are a massive captive market
for profit-seeking companies. In the name of efficiency, the SA Social
Security Agency has entrusted the administration of millions of South
Africans’ livelihoods to a private sector that appears to be more
concerned about lining its own pockets than serving the poor and
vulnerable.
There are certainly caveats to South African applications of Esping-
Andersen’s three regime types and of his categories of commodification and
stratification (Sampie Terreblanche [2002] offered its most sophisticated
expression so far), not least traditional concerns that important gendered
aspects of social reproduction and service provision are downplayed. Ben
Fine (2011: 112) advocates, instead, focusing ‘on the material culture
attached to welfare across specific programmes and countries’. The culture
of the inherited system of apartheid welfare was racist, patriarchal, paternalist
and entrepreneurial, and as early as 1975, was officially expressed in these
neoliberal terms: ‘The government is opposed to the Republic’s developing
into a welfare state as it is understood and manifested itself in other parts
of the world, but it is committed to a policy which is aimed at the independence
of the individual and of the community’ (cited in Barchiesi 2011: 52).
This legacy meant, according to Barchiesi, that 1980s-era black trade
unions increasingly advocated ‘a national fiscally-funded pension system
to overcome the fragmentation and inadequacies of the existing
Unemployment Insurance Fund and old age state pensions’. In this conflict,
Barchiesi continues (based on an ANC policy document approved in 1992),
The ANC warned that generalised social provisions could degenerate
into a ‘hand-out approach’ to be countered by the ‘importance of the
family as it is understood within the social and cultural norms.’
Universalism and decommodification were, finally, overtly downplayed
as social provisions were stratified according to employment. Wage
earning and related benefits would therefore cater to the needs of the
employed, while state-funded safety nets would cover only the deserving
poor, whose ‘ability . . . to contribute to society through work or other
ways is beyond their control.’ (2011: 69)
Even Mandela warned at the opening of parliament in early 1995, ‘The
government literally does not have the money to meet the demands that are
being advanced’ – although he did authorise $6 billion for an arms deal that
corrupted his party beyond recognition. He continued, ‘We must rid ourselves

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Patrick Bond
of the culture of entitlement which leads to the expectation that the government
must promptly deliver whatever it is that we demand’ (cited in Bond and
Ruiters 1996: 4). Minimalist approaches to social democracy characterised
Mandela’s public policies, since so many of the concrete strategies were
suffused with neoliberal market-oriented characteristics, or were simple
extensions of inherited apartheid policies (Bond 2005).
To illustrate, the 1996 Constitution locked in the principle of the means
test: ‘Everyone has the right to have access to social security including, if
they are unable to support themselves and their dependents, appropriate
social assistance’ (emphasis added). As Jimi Adesina (2007: 21) complained,
by 2004 the Child Support Grant had left out 42 per cent of those who were
deserving of the grant: ‘The onerous procedure for accessing the grant
(documentation, forms to fill and means-testing) by applicants in mostly
rural provinces, and for those who are less able to navigate the bureaucracy,
is without doubt the primary source of the low take-up rate’.
The critical question for post-apartheid policy-makers was, could a new
South African government be more generous to a larger pool of citizens, in
providing higher grant levels and universal access backed by higher taxes,
eg a generous Basic Income Grant? The budget tells part of the story, but
as with the 2001 commitment to Free Basic Services, the devils are in the
detail. For example, it is true that after 1994, there was a rise in national
funding made available for capital expenditures on basic services, including
a World Bank-designed capital grant for a small house (often half as big as
those provided under apartheid), as well as limited hook-ups to the water and
electricity grids in most (though not all) settings. However, in the initial post-
apartheid period, this occurred alongside a dramatic decline (85 per cent in
real terms from 1991-97) in operating and maintenance grants for municipalities,
as measured by the Financial and Fiscal Commission (1997: 18).
Here we find reflected the tokenistic approach to social policy, in which
decentralisation of state services also translated into ‘unfunded mandates,’
ie the central government’s command that municipalities do more things with
fewer resources. The inability of many municipalities to spend capital grants
in a timely way, meant ‘roll-overs’ of funding were typical, yet at the same
time the vital operating subsidies needed to assure that residents could
afford basic services were insufficient. The overpriced or badly supplied
water, sanitation, electricity and other municipal services that resulted from
this arrangement were continuing catalysts behind many a service delivery
protest.

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Tokenism in South African social policy
The first programme along these lines was Operation Masakhane, ‘Let’s
Build Together,’ a 1994 campaign that Pretoria developed in order to reward
residents’ payment of rent/service bills with improved state services, although
the initial allocation was only a relatively petty $200 million. Notwithstanding
advertisements by Archbishop Desmond Tutu and former radical trade
unionist Moses Mayekiso, its failure coincided with rapid increases in water
and electricity prices that were required because of the devastating central-
to-local state operating subsidy cuts. These funding cuts left many
municipalities effectively bankrupt, just at the stage they were taking on
responsibility for vast numbers of new residents. Moreover, when in 2000
the municipal demarcation exercise reduced the numbers of local authorities
from 843 to 284 – which had the effect of increasing the geographical
requirements for service delivery in bantustans and other poor areas, and
also resulted in untenable distances (often scores of kilometers) between
municipal elites and the governed – this also further cut back on the
possibility of meaningful local democracy (Bond 2006).
By 2002, the result of these unfunded mandates meant that service
charges on water and electricity were raised to cross-subsidise other
municipal functions, although by then such charges consumed 30 per cent
of the income of those households earning less than $70 per month. As
unemployment rose during the late 1990s, an upsurge of disconnections
resulted, with an estimated 10 million people losing service from 1994-2001
(McDonald and Pape 2002: 22). Of these, 60 per cent were not reconnected
within six weeks, according to ‘Project Viability’ reports during the late 1990s
(Bond 2000: 359), indicating that poverty was primarily to blame and not the
so-called ‘culture of nonpayment’ that those now in power alleged as a
negative legacy from the days of effective anti-apartheid activism (Bond
2002). The worst disconnection rate was for fixed telephone lines, where, of
13 million people connected for the first time, 10 million were cut by 2000, as
prices per call soared. This was due to the partial privatisation of state phone
company Telkom that resulted in the demise of internal cross-subsidies, as
the new Texan and Malaysian investors attempted to maximise profits at the
expense of poor-customer retention, during the late 1990s (Bond 2005: 264).
As another reflection of commercialisation and commodification processes,
the 1998 national electricity policy called for the parastatal agency Eskom to
apply ‘cost-reflective’ pricing policies, which meant much higher charges
for poor people, especially those who during the 1980s and early 1990s had
fought successfully for a nominal township service fee: then a $3 ‘fixed

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Patrick Bond
charge’. But the fee rose drastically by the early 2010s when much higher
prices and volumetric metering applied (Bond 2012: 188). In contrast,
recognising how vital it was to provide cheap electricity and water, the 1994
Reconstruction and Development Programme (the ANC’s campaign platform)
had endorsed the progressive principle of cross-subsidisation, which
imposed a block tariff that was meant to increase substantially for higher-
volume consumers. This redistributive approach would have consciously
distorted the relationship of cost to price and hence sent economically
‘inefficient’ pricing signals to consumers. Such signals should have meant
that poor people could consume more essential services (for the sake of
gender equity, health and economic side benefits), while rich people and big
businesses would embrace conservation (and hence environmental
protection) by cutting back on their hedonistic consumption levels, thanks
to much higher prices.
The neoliberal critics of progressive block tariffs insisted that such
distortions of market logic would introduce a disincentive to supply low-
volume users; their assumption is that the whole point of public utility
supply is to make profits or at least to break even in narrow cost-recovery
terms. In advocating against the proposal for a free lifeline and a rising block
tariff, a leading World Bank expert (Roome 1995: 51) advised the first
democratic water minister, Kader Asmal, that privatisation contracts ‘would
be much harder to establish’ if poor consumers had the expectation of
getting something for nothing. If consumers weren’t paying, the advisor
argued, South African authorities required a ‘credible threat of cutting
service’. New technologies for disciplining poor people also emerged in this
period, for as Greg Ruiters (2007: 195) found, ‘The prepaid system in
telephones, electricity and increasingly water has clearly become a state
“civilising” tool for the marketised political “management” of the
ungovernable poor’.
These approaches foiled a genuinely redistributive strategy. Not even
the next water minister, the vocal communist revolutionary Ronnie Kasrils,
could fulfill his (heartfelt) commitment to finally implement a free basic water
policy. Indeed Kasrils’ high-profile promise in early 2000 led the authors of
the World Bank’s (2000: Annex 2, 3) Sourcebook on Community Driven
Development in the Africa Region to quickly lay out a typical neoliberal
policy for pricing water: ‘Work is still needed with political leaders in some
national governments to move away from the concept of free water for all.’
In 1999, the Bank had claimed that the water advisor’s 1995 pricing

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Tokenism in South African social policy
recommendations were ‘instrumental in facilitating a radical revision in
South Africa’s approach to bulk water management’ (World Bank 1999:
Annex C, 5) – and also to Asmal’s revision away from the 1994 Reconstruction
and Development Programme mandate for a lifeline supply Free Basic Water
(Bond and Khosa 1999).
By the time that mandate was finally honoured by Kasrils, the
commercialisation instinct was already thoroughly accepted by municipalities.
As a result, the right to water ended up either being sabotaged or delivered
in a tokenistic way, free for merely the first 6 kiloliters/household/month (kl/
hh/m). To illustrate, in Durban – the main site of Free Basic Water pilot-
exploration starting in 1998 – the overall cost of water ended up doubling for
poor households because of a huge price increase in the second block (the
city soon had the second-highest price amongst its South African peers for
6-10 kl/hh/m). For poor people, this led to consumption cuts by a third in the
subsequent six years, from 22 kl/hh/m to 15 (Bond 2010: 456). Matters were
even worse in rural areas, where extremely serious problems arose in the
community water supply projects, and the main reasons for unsustainability
of a water system invariably included genuine affordability constraints
(Hemson 2003).
One reason these sorts of devils-in-the-detail arguments are critical is the
hype that invariably accompanies discussion of ANC delivery. Just prior to
the 2004 election, for example, the government’s communications director,
Joel Netshitenzhe (2004), claimed in the leading Sunday newspaper ‘10
million people connected to water [from 1994-2004] cannot by any stretch of
the imagination be compared with the few households occasionally cut off’
(emphasis added). Yet a few months later, in the Mail & Guardian, the
government’s chief water official conceded that in 2003, ‘275,000 of all
households attributed interruptions to cut-offs for non-payment,’ which
extrapolates to in excess of 1.5 million people affected that year alone (Muller
2004). Notwithstanding this extent of continuing Free Basic Water policy
negation in practice, the SA Institute of Race Relations – self-described as
‘South Africa’s Leading Research and Policy Organisation’ – argued in 2012,
A myth has taken hold in South Africa that service delivery was a failure.
However research we have published over the past several years
suggests that this is not the case… The number of households with
access to piped water increased from 7.2 million to 12.7 million or by
76.6 percent [between 1996 and 2010]. The proportion with access to
piped water increased from 80 percent to 89 percent. Increases of a

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Patrick Bond
similar magnitude are true for all 15 service delivery indicators tracked
by the Institute. (Cronje 2012a)
I asked the institute’s main research official, Frans Cronje, ‘do you have
data on service delivery not just in terms of the capital investment and
services installation, but also service standards (e.g. flush toilet in contrast
to pit latrine) and the operations and maintenance of services, e.g. pricing,
breakdowns, disconnections and other service disruptions?’ The reply: ‘All
good questions. Truth is few answers exist in SA. Would have to do the field
work to establish the answer’ (Cronje 2012b). His institute never did, and
instead, drawing on these statistics, the neoliberal newspaper Business Day
(2012) quickly applauded the government, as did a Communist leader within
the government, higher education minister Blade Nzimande (2012). As a
result, South Africa’s oft-heralded household water supply is a good
example of a tokenistic social policy which satisfies those with power,
wealth and strong status quo orientations (no matter their declared ideology).
Unevenly ungenerous welfare and the evacuation of fiscal space
The same pressures existed for social grants, and dating to 1994, the
equivalent version of disconnections – ie the biggest single decline in
benefits – was to children (of any race) who had formerly received a State
Maintenance Grant during the apartheid era. The mother or caregiver had to
first show they were ‘deserving’ poor, either by applying for financial
support from her partner or the father of her children in a magistrate’s court,
or being widowed or deserted. In August 1996, the Lund Committee led by
progressive social policy expert Francis Lund overturned this grant, partly
on grounds it retained strong racial biases, and also that it was rooted in
nuclear-family structures insensitive to apartheid’s destruction of families.
Instead, however, the Committee justified a new, much broader-based
Child Support Grant by cutting the existing payment ($38/month at the end
of apartheid) by 44 per cent (which after church-led protests was changed
to a 26 per cent cut, to $28). Eligibility was changed so that grants were given
to the caregivers of only children under age 9, on grounds that to achieve
equality would cost up to $5 billion annually, considered too great a burden
on the budget at the time. Eventually the age level was raised to 18, but by
early 2014 the monthly grant per child was still $29. The Lund Committee
(1997: 3) complained that ‘fiscal discipline imposed by the government’s
macroeconomic growth strategy makes it impossible to reach all poor
children’ so in order ‘to distribute more money to rural, African women and

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Tokenism in South African social policy
their families who are most seriously disadvantaged under the existing
system [and] achieve greater equity with limited resources, some current
recipients will lose out’.
Fiscal discipline was the overarching constraint, as the 1996-2000 macro-
economic strategy imposed often draconian cuts in state services. In relative
terms, Pretoria’s capacity to serve its citizenry steadily shrunk in comparison
to the size of the economy, for across the terrain of social and public policy,
government’s ‘general services’ role in GDP rose from 16.2 per cent in 1994
to 17.3 per cent in 1998, but fell back to 15.8 per cent by 2002 and 13.7 per cent
in 2012. Reflecting the cost-recovery approach to service delivery and hence
the inability of the state to properly roll out and maintain these functions,
the category of GDP components termed ‘electricity, gas and water’ fell
steadily from 3.5 per cent to 2.4 per cent to 1.8 per cent of GDP from 1994 to
2002 to 2012. The cutbacks were not due to the elimination of fraud and
waste; instead, the state was underspending in general, compared to peers.
The 2010 internal gross public debt of South Africa was less than 40 percent
of GDP, well below high-performance countries Malaysia, Brazil, Argentina
and Thailand, and was rising relatively slowly (Figure 1).
So on the one hand, were there political will (not the cynical stinginess
of a succession of finance ministers), state fiscal support for the social wage
was not terribly difficult to raise in absolute and relative terms. This was
partially attempted, but in a tokenistic way, by broadening the inherited,
formerly racially-delineated social programmes like the child grant and
pension, to include all South Africans. The expansion entailed a fiscal
commitment that was actually quite limited, with state social spending never
exceeding a 3 per cent increase in GDP beyond 1994 levels. As the Financial
and Fiscal Commission (2011) reported, even dating to 1983, social transfers
rose from just 1.8 to 4.5 per cent of GDP through 2007, and as a result, ‘Post-
1994 expansion of the grants system has not threatened fiscal sustainability’.
From an inherited budget deficit of -7.3 per cent in 1993, the Treasury shrunk
the deficit and even achieved a primary budget surplus of more than 1 per
cent by 2008, before the subsequent economic meltdown forced a renewal
of (moderate) deficit spending. However, the sum of state social spending
by the South African government was so limited that in relation to GDP, only
four out of the world’s forty largest economies had a lower ratio (South
Korea, Mexico, China and India – all of which had much lower Gini coefficients)
(Figure 2).

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Patrick Bond
Figure 1: South Africa’s annual public deficit and public debt in comparative
terms, 2011
Source: Barclays Capital 2012.

63
Tokenism in South African social policy
Figure 2: Public social expenditure in the world’s largest economies (in the
closest year to 2011)
Source: Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development
2011.

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Patrick Bond
What happens within state expenditures is also critical, for social grants
spending was, over time, less progressive – ie less directed to the poorest
South Africans – in 2006 than in 1995, by quite substantial amounts,
according to Servaas van der Berg’s modeling. Using a -1 value as the most
progressive outcome in which all spending benefits the poorest, and +1 the
most regressive, van der Berg found a progressivity shift for social grants
worsening from -0.371 in 2000 to -0.359 in 2006 (Van der Berg 2009: 12).
Even though the internal progressivity of the grants declined, van der
Berg (2009: 20) claimed that these and other budgetary shifts were profound:
‘The Gini Coefficient for pre-transfer income was 0.69, but it dropped to 0.52
for income plus benefits and to 0.47 after taxes had also been subtracted’.
This claim is often repeated in defense of the South African welfare state’s
generosity. Indeed, as this article went to press, a major World Bank (2014:
v) study strongly praised South Africa’s ‘sizable reduction in poverty and
inequality through its fiscal tools,’ yet it ignored all evidence that ‘Free Basic
Services’ can be designed with a regressive overall price impact (if convexity
is built into the tariff curve, as happened in Johannesburg and Durban with
water [Bond 2010]). The Bank is also compelled to confess a few data and
methodological ‘limitations’ that render their optimistic conclusion highly
suspect:
• the analysis does not take into account the quality of services delivered
by the government;
• the analysis excludes some important taxes and spending such as
corporate income, international trade, and property taxes, and spending
such as infrastructure investments due to the lack of an established
methodology for assigning these outlays across households;
• it does not capture the growing debate on how asset accumulation and
returns to capital affect income inequality;
• turning to the data used in the analysis… there are questions about the
ability of a survey of this type to collect adequate information on
households at the top of the distribution. (World Bank 2014: 26)
Neither the World Bank nor van der Berg (a regular consultant to the
Treasury Department) made any effort to calculate state subsidies to capital
(‘corporate welfare’). Such subsidies were enormous because most of the
economic infrastructure created through taxation – roads and other transport,
industrial districts, the world’s cheapest electricity during most of the post-
apartheid era, R&D subsidies – overwhelmingly benefits capital and its

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Tokenism in South African social policy
shareholders, as do many tax loopholes. The Presidential Infrastructure
Coordinating Commission’s main Strategic Investment Projects give priority
to the largest projects in Africa (aside from the potential Inga Hydropower
Project on the Congo River): Transnet’s rail line extension to Limpopo,
Mpumalanga and KwaZulu-Natal coal fields and expansion of the Richards
Bay coal export terminal, in spite of waning coal prices and declining Chinese
demand; and the South Durban port-petrochemical expansion (with container
throughput anticipated to expand by a factor of eight) (Bond 2014a). Such
mega-projects come in the form of highly-subsidised grants whose benefits
mainly go to construction companies and subsequent corporate users (i.e.,
not in the form of direct ongoing income transfers), which is in turn reflected
in increased implicit wealth (eg geographical locational advantage of assets
compared to similar sites lacking such infrastructure). Like many such
subjective valuation estimates (eg education and healthcare investment), if
the Bank and van der Berg wanted, such corporate-biased infrastructure
could be valorized, conceptually, as a contribution to corporate wealth – not
as explicit income but as implicit contributions to ‘produced capital’ (as
education and health investments are for ‘human capital’) – for those who
hold shares in such corporations.
Likewise, the South African government’s deregulatory attitude to
transnational corporate profit expatriation has, since 1995, allowed a great
deal of implicit income to flow to the firms’ overseas financial headquarters,
much more than is officially recorded in corporate and national accounts.
There are two primary ways that vast amounts of implicit income are
redistributed from what could have been the national fiscus, to corporations
(and then their wealthy shareholders). First, illicit financial flows are
substantial and the Southern African Customs Union (dominated by South
Africa) was conservatively estimated by the UN Economic Commission for
Africa to have lost $130 billion from 2001-10 (a full third of all Africa’s illicit
financial flows) (Mevel et al 2013: 7). Capital flight includes both licit
financial flows (increasing thanks to ever relaxing exchange controls) and
illicit financial flows, which are made up of proceeds from corruption and
criminal activities as well as from commercial tax evasion. The latter entails
transfer pricing and trade mispricing, which in turn is composed of both
export under-invoicing and import over-invoicing) (Mevel et al 2013: 3-4). In
an assessment using national accounting errors and omissions data, capital
flight from South Africa was estimated to run as high as 23 per cent of GDP
in one year (2007) (Ashman et al 2010). In other words, this extent of tax laxity

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Patrick Bond
– turning a blind eye to creative accounting by multinational corporations
– is one of the most important redistributive aspects of fiscal policy, but gets
no mention.
Second, as another reflection of the Bank Pretoria staff’s biased
methodology, there is another factor which could have been incorporated
to assess whether state fiscal policy favours the wealthy as opposed to the
(long-term) interests of the vast poor population of South Africa: natural
capital accounting. Although still at an early stage, other Bank (2011) staff
have done what is probably the most sophisticated analysis of non-
renewable resource depletion associated with corporate extraction of South
African minerals. This accounting shows that in a sample year (2005), the
impact of the country’s natural capital shrinkage on gross national income
was negative 9 percent (Bank 2011: 193) and the overall net resulting
shrinkage of wealth was $245 per person. This extent of redistribution can
also be said to be an implicit decision of South African fiscal policy: not to
tax minerals wealth (e.g. in a sovereign wealth fund such as exists in
Norway, Alaska and other places) and instead to allow the proceeds of non-
renewable resource depletion to go to wealthier shareholders. In short, these
are ways that fiscal space could be said to exist in principal, but was
evacuated by Treasury officials, who were then loudly applauded by the
World Bank. The increased amount that Pretoria spent on social welfare in
2014 compared to 1994 was therefore tokenistic in view of potentially great
fiscal redistributive capacity, vast social need and rising inequality.
Nevertheless the numbers of recipients soared from three million to 16
million, nearly a third of the entire population, mainly due to child-support
grant recipients whose eligibility age doubled (Figure 3).

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Tokenism in South African social policy
Figure 3: Numbers of social assistance beneficiaries, 1994-2010 (millions)
Source: Seekings and Matisonn 2010.

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Patrick Bond
Tokenism in the Older Person’s Grant
The Older Person’s Grant (OPG) fuses two tendencies: being both relatively
generous in terms of recipient income (around 150 per cent of the median
income for that age range) as a result of apartheid’s legacy of support to
elderly whites, and tokenistic. The rise of OPG beneficiaries in recent years,
from 1.8 million in 2001 to 2.2 million in 2010, reflects higher life expectancy
as AIDS medicines finally became available, along with the equalisation of
the beneficiary age at 60 (previously men qualified only at age 65). The racial
implications are critical because more than 20 per cent of older persons are
white, which is more than double their proportion in the society, as a result
of much higher life expectancy (about 15 years greater than Africans’ life
expectancy).
There is no doubt that in comparative terms, the OPG pension is a
relatively generous transfer system, yet the pre-liberation era defined the
post-1994 system’s scope and scale. The deracialised extension of the
scheme to the broader society – a task mainly accomplished by 1994 – was
the least that one would expect. The state retirement pension scheme began
in 1928 and was initially limited to white and coloured people, though from
the mid-1940s some Indians and Africans also qualified, with urban white
pensioners getting around 10 times the monthly amount that rural Africans
received by the late 1960s. Given the extreme character of apartheid’s migrant
labour system and the forced removal of those who were not of a working
age to rural (‘foreign’) bantustan homelands, the big challenge would be to
reach the vast numbers of black Africans in rural areas, many of whom had
been shut out of the system before 1994.
Still, according to the SA Social Security Administration (2009), after the
ANC took power, the coverage rate of the OPG declined steadily, from 72.2
per cent of the target population in 1995 to a low of 66.5 per cent in 2007 before
a slight uptick resumed. One reason for diminishing services to those
ostensibly covered by the OPG was the persistence of the means-testing;
in 2014, eligibility was only for those citizens or permanent residents with
lower than a $400 monthly income and assets less than $80,425 (or double
those figures in the case of married recipients). Eligibility also excluded
recipients who received any other grant, as well as those cared for in state
institutions.
The OPG was means-tested from the outset, in contrast to most other
systems being developed at the time as universal. The latter systems were
able to generate much more widespread support. In the neoliberal United

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Tokenism in South African social policy
States, for example, it has taken several decades of unremitting presidential
hostility to welfare, dating to the Reagan Administration, to begin the
process of Social Security pension cutbacks. The universal old-age state
pension there is referred to – using a subway metaphor – as the ‘Third Rail’
of US politics, meaning, if you touch it, you are electrocuted. The system’s
widespread support stems from universal contributions and payments. In
2013, a promise was made by finance minister Pravin Gordhan to end the
means test, but this seems to be on hold. (A similar concern applies to
Gordhan’s apparent abandonment of National Health Insurance policy,
approved by the ANC after extensive lobbying but essentially unfunded in
recent budgets [Forslund 2013b]).
Another feature of the South African OPG is its ‘non-contributory’
character, which puts more of the burden on present (than past) tax-payers:
it doesn’t matter how long, or whether, a recipient formally worked. In
contrast, in many countries, the opportunity to tax workers on a contributory
basis is also the basis for more redistribution when higher-paid workers carry
a higher tax rate, in some settings (eg 20 out of 28 OECD countries during
the 2000s) (Steenekamp 2012: 6). South Africa’s overall tax progressivity
declined substantially just before and after the end of apartheid, thanks
mainly to deep corporate tax cuts and growing loopholes, as well as fast-
rising Value Added Tax. During the period of most intense neoliberalism,
from 1997-2000, there were steep declines of progressivity within the
personal income tax as well, and although these were slightly reversed in the
2000s as tax reform was applied – and once corporate profits (and hence
taxes) recovered strongly in the 1999-2008 mini-boom – the personal income
tax was still less progressive in 2009 than in 1997 (Nyamongo and Schoeman
2007; Steenekamp 2012). In 2008, StatsSA (2008: 33) remarked, including
taxation in a revised Gini coefficient ‘reveals no statistically significant
impact on inequality’; in other words, South African tax progressivity is, in
reality, tokenistic.
Moreover, without a contributory mandate that – like a private pension
scheme – would ensure enforced savings and a rising payout level (assuming
sensible investment of the earlier revenue), the OPG becomes vulnerable to
suffering real (post-inflation) diminution: annual increases are sometimes
outstripped by inflation, depending upon the ability of OPG advocates to
lobby the finance minister. Under Manuel, OPG inflation-caused shrinkage
occurred annually from 1997-2003, before a more healthy revenue inflow
allowed a cumulative above-inflation increase of 20 per cent from 2003-06.

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Patrick Bond
Inflation-caused OPG shrinkage has again became a problem since 2007,
leaving a much smaller real level by 2014, approximately equal to 1994 values.
In 2013, for example, the grant’s increase was 1.5 per cent below the average
inflation rate. However, the average inflation rate is biased, and if compared
to much higher inflation rate on a low-income consumption basket, the OPG
declines were even greater. Arden Finn et al (2013) show that ‘inflation over
the latter half of the 2000s has been anti-poor… some of the increase in the
expenditures of the poor over the period does not signal an increase in
consumption (and therefore real wellbeing), but rather an increase in the cost
of the same consumption bundle’.
In sum, the OPG is a continuation of the apartheid system, but with lower
inflation-adjusted payouts than in 1994 and lower coverage, and lower tax
progressivity. Its expansion was not substantive, not nearly what one would
expect from a genuine, non-racial welfare state after 1994. The OPG and most
other grants are best considered tokenistic.
Conclusion: commoning not tokenism
South Africa’s welfare state is terribly unsatisfactory, given the society’s
wealth, world-leading inequality and record of social mobilisation against
injustice. The repeated claim that South African welfare grants lift people
from poverty needs to be considered critically. Barchiesi (2009) rebuts,
‘More useful would be rather to see social grants as a specific biopolitical
intervention. Taken individually, they are in fact so meagre that even
receiving more than one in a single household is no guarantee of a life out
of poverty’. Overall, the size and orientation of social grants is inadequate,
and a summary more than a decade ago by Nina Hunter et al (2003: 21) still
applies: ‘The grants do not provide comprehensive coverage for those in
need. Unless they are able to access the disability grant, [pre-retiree] adults
are largely excluded from this framework of assistance’. Other problems were
legion: means-testing was utilised with the inevitable stigmatisation that
comes with a state demanding proof of poor people’s income; cost-recovery
strategies were still being imposed, by stealth, on recipients of state
services; the state’s potentially vast job-creating capacity was never utilised
aside from a few short-term public works activities; and land and housing
were not delivered at appropriate rates. State housing, for instance, is
tokenistic because it is supplied:
• in forms usually half as large, built with flimsier materials than during
apartheid;

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Tokenism in South African social policy
• typically with over-priced water and electricity via self-disconnecting
meters;
• with lower-grade state services including rare rubbish collection, inhumane
sanitation, dirt roads, no street lights, no sidewalks and inadequate
storm-water drainage; and
• even away further from jobs and amenities than under apartheid. (Bond
2000, 2005)
The idea that South Africa is an aspirant social democracy with an
‘extremely generous’ welfare state supported by the populace also conflicts
with testimony by police minister Nathi Mthethwa (2013): ‘During 2012/13
alone police managed 12 399 public incidents. Of these, 10 517 were peaceful
and 1 882 were violent public protests… Over the past 4 years, a total of 46
180 incidents were attended to and all were successfully stabilised with 14
843 arrests effected’ (although these statistics include the 2012 Marikana
mineworkers protest whose ‘stabilisation’ occurred through a premeditated
police massacre). The 2014 World Economic Forum’s (2014: 484) Global
Competitiveness Report rated South African workers as the most militant
amongst 144 countries, for the third year in a row.
What can we conclude about the ANC government’s commitment to
South Africa’s increasingly angry poor and working-class majority? While
Barchiesi (2011) makes a compelling, detailed case to link state policy and
practices to the changing nature of the labour market using the phrase
‘precarious liberation’ (emphasising as he does the imperative of wage
labour for the majority of people), I prefer tokenistic to describe how
neoliberal nationalism treats its poorer constituencies, who in 2014 voted for
the same party whose policies and practices drive them to what is quite
possibly the world’s highest per capita rate of social protest. The share of
eligible voters who supported the ANC, however, fell from 53 per cent in 1994
to 42 per cent in 1999 to 39 per cent in 2004 and 2009, to 36 per cent in 2014,
what with the steady rise in stay-away voters (McKinley 2014).
It may take quite a while before that figure falls to the point that leftist
electoral alternatives can become a threat, including the Economic Freedom
Fighters (who campaigned to double the size of grants and won more than
6 per cent of the vote in 2014) or a new workers’ party led by the metalworkers
union likely to be launched in 2015. The practical alternative to tokenistic
welfare in South Africa is a policy based on commoning of social resources,
funded by more progressively applied state tax and fee revenues, and won

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Patrick Bond
through bottom-up struggle in which policy is shaped by activists. To
conclude, two examples are illustrative: AIDS medicines and water. The first
relates to the world’s most important breakthrough in commoning activism:
knowledge production, especially the various facets of the internet that
decommodify and destratify information. The most vital gain to South
African society came thanks to a specific attack on Intellectual Property in
the period 1999-2004 by the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), made up
mainly of black HIV+ South Africans.
An individual’s access to AIDS medicines – ‘anti-retrovirals’ (ARVs) –
cost $15,000 per year in the early 2000s, restricting the ability to buy decades
worth of longer life to a tiny, wealthy (and mainly white) minority. As a result
of strong lobbying by progressive new bureaucrats and the courage of
health minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, the South African government’s
1997 Medicines Act made provision for compulsory licensing of patented
drugs, especially ARVs for the country’s five million HIV+ population. That
law was immediately confronted by the US State Department’s ‘full court
press’ (the formal description given to the US Congress), in large part to
protect intellectual property rights generally, and specifically to prevent the
emergence of a parallel inexpensive supply of AIDS medicines that would
undermine lucrative Western markets (Bond 1999, Nattrass 2003).
US Vice President Al Gore directly intervened with SA government
leaders in 1998-99, to revoke the law’s implementation. But in July 1999, Gore
launched his 2000 presidential election bid, a campaign generously funded
by big pharmaceutical corporations (which in a prior election cycle provided
$2.3 million to the Democratic Party) and as an explicit counterweight, the
TAC’s allies in the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACTUP) began to
protest at his campaign events. The protests ultimately threatened to cost
Gore far more in adverse publicity than he was raising in Big Pharma
contributions, so he withdrew opposition to the Medicines Act, as did Bill
Clinton a few weeks later at the World Trade Organisation’s aborted Seattle
summit. By late 2001, the Doha Agenda of the World Trade Organisation
adopted explicit language permitting violation of Trade Related Intellectual
Property Rights for medical emergencies (Bond 2003).
The South African government remained reluctant to provide medicines,
however, for a variety of dubious reasons in part related to Mbeki’s
‘denialism’ that HIV causes AIDS (Geffen 2010). As a result, the TAC was
compelled to file a Constitutional Court case which succeeded in at least
gaining access to Nevirapine for pregnant, HIV+ women in public hospitals.

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Tokenism in South African social policy
The TAC then won a ferocious battle within the ANC government, and by
late 2003 managed to have the ANC policy reversed by the party’s National
Executive Committee. Local medicines manufacturers Aspen and Adcock
Ingram then managed to lower costs substantially through voluntary
licensing of the major AIDS drugs. It is in this sense that not only
decommodification, but also deglobalisation of capital was considered
vital to expanding access, as was likewise the globalisation of solidarity a
critical factor in weakening global capital’s power. The resulting gain in
South African average life expectancy was from 52 in 2004 to 60 by 2012, as
two million people were brought into state ARV treatment, people who would
not before have had a chance.
A similar programme of decommodification occurred in grassroots social
movements and amongst sophisticated community groups which learned
how to illegally reconnect water piping and electricity wiring in the anti-
apartheid struggle era, and applied the skills with more anti-capitalist
sentiment during the era of water commercialisation, from the 1990s through
the present. Initially, some were inspired by the 1996 South African
Constitution’s promises that ‘Everyone has the right to have access to
sufficient food and water… [and] to an environment that is not harmful to
their health or well-being.’ Water activists insisted upon a social entitlement
to an acceptable supply of clean water, amounting to at least 50 litres each
day, delivered via a metering system based on credit, not ‘prepayment.’ As
noted in the pages above, the system chosen was tokenistic, with just 25
lcd and via prepayment meters, with water provided by the Paris company
Suez which had commercialised Johannesburg’s supply.
The Soweto activists took their case to court, but also engaged in popular
resistance tactics: informal, illegal reconnections to official water supplies
and destruction of prepayment meters in public protests. These represent
grassroots commoning, as teams of electricians and plumbers fanned out
regularly from groups like the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee to not only
vigorously protest services commodification, but to act concretely to solve
the problem. And their orientation was not just of a practical day-to-day
nature, but also firmly ideological, aiming towards a community-empowered
socialism that, in its finest hours, delivers the basic necessities of life to
residents free, using their popular mobilising capacities (Bond and Ngwane
2010).
The Soweto activists’ Constitutional Court challenge to water services
failed in late 2009, but in the process, a broader conception of rights emerged

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Patrick Bond
that entailed making water primarily an eco-social, rather than a commercial,
good (Bond 2013a). Including eco-systemic processes in discussions of
water rights potentially links consumption processes (including over-
consumption by firms, golf courses, commercial agriculture and wealthy
households) to environmental sustainability; in other words, the broader
hydropolitical systems in which water extraction, production, distribution,
financing, consumption and disposal occurs. This necessarily leads to a
vision of commoning, far different and more expansive than welfarist politics
generally allow.
All too briefly we have seen how South Africa’s progressive forces
established the difference between ‘reformist reforms’ and reforms that
advanced a ‘non-reformist’ agenda, to borrow the terminology of Gorz
(1967). The latter attempts were to win gains that did not strengthen the
internal logic of the system, but that instead empowered the system’s
opponents. Hence, unlike reformist reforms, non-reformist reforms would
not have a co-optive character. Neither would they lessen the momentum of
reformers (as did many successful reformist reforms). Rather, they heightened
the level of meaningful confrontation by opening up new terrains of struggle.
For accessing AIDS medicines and water – and many other decommodification
agendas – the South African commoning cases are both inspiring and useful.
Finally, there is a raft of complementary macro-economic policies which
should be considered for adoption. These would reverse the tendency of the
post-apartheid government to adopt policies generally favourable to financial
institutions and the Minerals Energy Complex (Bond 2013b). Such alternative
policies would in turn make financing a generous welfare state feasible:
• reimpose exchange controls, lower interest rates, audit SA’s ‘Odious
Debt’, control illicit capital flows and trade;
• adopt industrial policy aimed at import substitution, sectoral re-balancing,
social needs, eco-sustainability;
• increase state social spending, paid for by higher corporate taxes, cross-
subsidisation and more domestic borrowing (and loose-money
‘Quantitative Easing’, too, if necessary);
• reorient infrastructure finance away high-carbon export-oriented mega-
projects to instead meet unmet basic needs, and expand/maintain/improve
energy grid, sanitation, public transport, clinics, schools, recreational
facilities and the internet; and
• adopt ‘Million Climate Jobs’ strategies to generate employment for a
genuinely green ‘Just Transition’.

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Tokenism in South African social policy
The ‘United Front’ of labour, community, women, youth, the elderly,
environmentalists, the gay rights movement and other progressives required
to adopt such policies, as initiated by the National Union of Metalworkers
of South Africa (Bond 2014b), was under construction at the time of writing.
Such a ‘movement toward socialism’ will require a political party of workers
to emerge, to bring demands to fruition in state policy. In combination with
the other non-reformist reform initiatives underway, this configuration
would ensure South Africa in future avoids the kind of tokenistic welfare
policies that to date might have a distracting rights-talk empowerment
disguise, but that do not take forward the broader liberatory politics so
urgently needed in so many spheres of social policy.
Note
1. This article was prepared in conjunction with work at the Gyeongsang National
University Institute for Social Science on alternatives to neoliberalism, and
presented there in August 2014, supported by the National Research Foundation
of Korea Grant funded by the Korean Government (NRF-2013-S1A5B8A-
01055117).
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