Special blog by Angelique Retief on South Africa's Freedom Day
Today South Africa celebrates Freedom Day – an annual celebration of South Africa's first non-racial democratic elections on the 27th April 1994 which marks the end of centuries of colonialism, segregation and white minority rule. Freedom should mean emancipation from poverty, unemployment, racism and any other forms of discrimination, but 26 years into the new democracy and these issues are still rife. These issues are only compounded by the current health crisis whereby a large number of deaths of BAME people due to the coronavirus has quickly disproved the claim that the pandemic is a ‘great equaliser’, and has instead brought to the fore the many social ills in society.
Bloubosrand/Kya Sands. Credit: Johnny Miller/https://unequalscenes.com/south-africa
Racial disparities have a history. In South Africa, the 1924 pact government enforced that wages for white people be set at a level, “recognised as tolerable from the European standpoint”, while for black people should be set to a level, “appropriate for persons whose aim is restricted to the bare requirements of the necessities of life as understood among barbarous and undeveloped people” (Quoted in Davenport, 1977:362). The product of centuries of colonialism, apartheid and racial exclusion, South Africa’s welfare system has struggled to provide the freedoms promised in 1994. While the formal use of race as a criterion for access to privilege has been addressed, access is dependent on income which still lies with the minority. It has been 26 years since South Africa’s first democratic election, and it is still one of the world's most unequal societies. With unemployment levels at a decade high of 30% (reaching 40% in some areas), poor levels of basic service provision, over 2 million AIDS orphans, and the highest level of people afflicted with HIV of any country at 19% (UNAIDS, 2018), the impacts of Covid-19 will be acutely felt in this part of the world (StatsSA, 2018).
While significant policy achievements and large gains have been made in many socio-economic areas such as education, welfare services are notoriously underfunded; and high levels of unemployment make many essential services such as water and electricity unaffordable unless subsidised. Inequality in cities could be further exacerbated by the impacts of the current health crisis. South Africa (SA) has reported the most coronavirus cases in sub-Saharan Africa, and public health experts are worried that the virus could overwhelm the health system if infection rates continue to rise. The Western Cape province is currently dealing with over 1,000 coronavirus cases and many residents are too poor to weather the associated economic fallout and lack the funds to stock up on adequate food. Already mired in recession caused mostly by power cuts at its dysfunctional state-run utility, Eskom; poorer South Africans are vulnerable to the virus with a lack of resources to protect themselves in this uncertain time. While SA has one of the highest expenditures on social assistance in the world, economic conditions have led to a worsening poverty status with nearly 60% of the population and nearly 70% of children under the poverty line. Many are heavily reliant of cash transfers, the period from 1997 – 2009 for example, saw and increase in beneficiaries from 2,889,443 to 13,314,033 (Seekings, 2011). (StatsSA, 2018).
A failure to tackle the unequal distribution of land and property has created distortions in which the SA’s welfare system has an urban and racial bias. The impact of years of apartheid spatial planning that set to physically divide the country's different races still lingers (worldbank.org). Limited progress has been made in reversing these spatial inequalities reinforced by the post-1994 policies which placed low-income housing developments on the peripheries of cities - generally reproducing the old-style dormitory townships. As most determinants of health are socially created, it logically follows then that the fact that socioeconomic deprivation disproportionately affects BAME people will be a precursor to the impact of the virus on those communities. The coronavirus will therefore not be felt equally and - compounded by the already profound challenges to wellbeing in non-OECD countries - will only serve to further entrench existing racial and economic disparities.
In SA’s townships, thousands of families live in very close proximity to one another, some have as many as 7 to 10 people living together, making social distancing difficult. The townships offer a rich breeding ground for the coronavirus as many households still don’t have access to water, sanitation and share one block of communal toilets between hundreds of residents (StatsSA, 2018). Nyanga, a township in Cape Town, is known as the murder capital of SA and is one of the world’s most dangerous areas. Masiphumelele has around 40% of its 16,000-population infected with HIV and/or TB. Imizamo Yethu has a population over 15,000 with minimal water supply, not many toilets, no sewerage, and the Disa River which runs through it has the highest level of e-coli ever recorded in SA. South Africa’s largest township, Khayelitsha, is one of the top five largest slums in the world and 40% of its residents are under 9 years old. As Khayelitsha confirmed its first COVID-19 infection a couple of weeks ago, townships present extraordinary environmental, political and social concerns (Goebel, 2007); concerns which are only intensified by the virus.
Hout bay/Imizamo Yethu (pictured above); Lwandle/Strand (pictured below). Credit: Johnny Miller/ https://unequalscenes.com/south-africa
The post-apartheid neoliberal development, driven largely by international organisations such as the IMF and WB has only sought to increase inequality as those without access to assets and wealth are excluded from the economy. Influenced largely by the successes of the Marshall plan which assisted post-war countries in Europe, neoliberalism has taken a different turn in the low-income countries in which it has been adopted since. Unlike post-communist or post-war countries in which (arguably) most people were rebuilding from similar economic levels, South Africa was rebuilt from a level of tremendous inequality. To then base its policies of development on a system in which only those who already have assets and wealth will benefit has led to the continued skewed development of the new SA. What we then saw following the millennium was talk of sustainability most notably represented by the sustainable development goals. Bond (2008) however argues that what we have seen is neoliberalism disguised by the rhetoric of sustainable development which has only served to reproduce spatial inequalities.
Historically, these development policies have focused on: foreign investment (much to the detriment of community capacity), capital, and job creation, but it is completely unsustainable for development to be dependent on external resources. Moreover, to base development on full employment in a country with historically unequal investments in education, ignores what will only serve to deepen any existing inequalities. This growing inequality has exacerbated racial tensions (Bond, 2008) and led to what Pieterse (2018) refers to as a paradoxical poverty trap in which, “the further South Africa pursues redistributive social policies which reduce material poverty, the worse spatial inequalities are, which reinforces economic and cultural marginalisation”. This highlights the failures of the market-centred model of development and the potential role for alternative responses to sustainable development, particularly as public sector responses are limited due to an increasingly low tax base.
Sustainable development is a test of power and need (Bond, 2008) and what is therefore required for development is a redistribution of power and thus of capability. SA’s National Development Plan, which aims to eliminate poverty by 2030, places inclusivity and an active citizenry at its core. It draws extensively on Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach which conceptualises wellbeing in terms of an individual’s capacity to achieve certain capabilities in areas, such as health or education. The capabilities approach emphasises freedom and the multi-layered nature of welfare provision. Sen’s approach, however, lacks an analysis of those capabilities which are socially oriented or indeed on the impact of such an individualised approach to development in the context of a society already so damaged by division.
Loosely translating to ‘interconnectivity’, an ubuntu philosophy places relationships at the centre of wellbeing by seeing a key role for relations in achieving capabilities – such as inheritance for example. Sen’s conception of freedom suggests an independence from others while the ubuntu ethic suggests an interdependence. This provides a theoretical grounding on which to suggest that capabilities are inherently relational. This approach also allows for the distinction between a social actor’s inability versus their reluctance to enable individual capabilities, in other words, a distinction between the active or passive dispossession of someone’s capabilities to improve one’s own capabilities.
What is required therefore, is not only for the preservation and further investment of South Africa’s social protection programmes, but for additional responses in core sectors. Social enterprise provides an alternative response to development in its ability to focus on its dual social and economic purpose of satisfying the needs of local communities’, while being economically sustainable. There is increasing interest in the potential for social enterprise to address many of South Africa’s challenges as it focuses on areas specifically not supplied or under-supplied by the public and private sectors. If reconstruction and development are about the changing lives of ordinary South Africans, then ubuntu should be central to the policies and practices surrounding it, and this can be operationalised through social enterprises. As a key social determinant of health, employment, stability, and agency, a focus on the role of social enterprise in the provision of community-led housing to tackling systemic inequalities and addressing real structural change in SA is crucial. In fact, Covid-19 has illustrated the centrality of this very wobbly pillar of housing under South Africa’s welfare system. After all, social distancing cannot be practiced in over-crowded communities.
In this current era of accelerated change in which social, economic, cultural and health problems transcend borders, SA faces a number of wicked issues with regard to sustainable development. Sustainable development is about capital (financial, human or natural), but access is central to equity and thus sustainable development. Development in this approach sees co-creation underpinned by a philosophy of Ubuntu as central to sustainability. While Covid-19 could force swift action to spatially transform the dormitory-style apartheid design of neighbourhoods and townships, a theory of development through social enterprise, which underpins individual freedoms with an ethical philosophy of ubuntu, operationalises individual capabilities through communal activities and is thus a potential answer to sustainable development in South Africa. In the words of Nelson Mandela on the first commemoration of the holiday:
“As dawn ushered in this day, the 27th of April 1994, few of us could suppress the welling of emotion, as we were reminded of the terrible past from which we come as a nation; the great possibilities that we now have; and the bright future that beckons us. And so, we assemble here today, and in other parts of the country, to mark a historic day in the life of our nation. Wherever South Africans are across the globe, our hearts beat as one, as we renew our common loyalty to our country and our commitment to its future.”
Angelique Retief is a PhD student at the University of Bristol carrying out her doctoral research into the role of social enterprise in sustainable development in South Africa. Underpinned by an ubuntu-based capabilities approach, she is looking specifically at social enterprise approaches to housing in addressing the spatial inequalities of Cape Town’s townships.