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Building a Conservative Welfare State in Botswana

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Building a Conservative Welfare State in Botswana 2 Building a Conservative Welfare State in Botswana Jeremy Seekings 1. Botswana as a Distinctively African Welfare State Overviews of welfare regimes in Africa distinguish typically between the middle-income countries of southern Africa (including Botswana) and the lower-income countries elsewhere on the continent (Garcia and Moore 2012; Niño-Zarazúa et al. 2012). The more expansive welfare states in the southern African countries are said to have been ‘driven by settler elites’ prior to the mid- 1990s, and by a mix of newly democratic politics and ‘sub-regional demonstra- tion effects’ thereafter (Niño-Zarazúa et al. 2012: 165–6). South Africa’swelfare state did indeed originate in the racist politics of the early twentieth century (Seekings 2007), and Namibia’s welfare state reflects its history as a de facto colony of South Africa (Devereux 2007). Settler politics do not explain the origins of the welfare states in either Mauritius or Botswana, however. The Mauritian welfare state resulted from the distinctive political economy of Mauritius, with a large agricultural Indo-Mauritian working class on sugar plantations and a growing Indo-Mauritian middle class (Seekings 2011; Ulriksen 2012). Botswana had neither a significant population of settlers or immigrants nor the class structure of either South Africa or Mauritius, yet it too built a substantial welfare state in the late twentieth century—to the point that the extent of the welfare state generated widespread anxiety among the country’s elite. Botswana’s route to welfare state-building proceeded through the pro- grammes, institutions, and ideology developed in a hitherto agrarian society in response to drought. In this, the case of Botswana prefigures a more general process underlying welfare state-building across much of Africa. Most African welfare states have their origins in the social risks facing peasants as a result of drought together with related changes in agrarian society that undermined the willingness or ability of kin to support the poor. Most African welfare states Jeremy Seekings, Building a Conservative Welfare State in Botswana In: The Politics of Social Protection in Eastern and Southern Africa. Edited by: Sam Hickey, Tom Lavers, Miguel Niño-Zarazúa, and Jeremy Seekings, Oxford University Press (2020). © United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER). DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198850342.003.0002 43 were not a response to the risks facing workers as a result of industrialization and urbanization—as had been the case in the more industrialized countries of Europe (e.g. Esping-Andersen 1990), Latin America (e.g. Huber and Stephens 2012), and even East Asia (e.g. Yang 2017). Its agrarian origins explain why previous studies have provided sharply conflicting assessments of Botswana’s welfare state. One set of scholars has focused on Botswana’s enduring failure to include all of its citizens in the benefits of growth. Bar-On (2001) emphasized the parsimony of the country’s welfare policies and concluded that ‘Botswana’s social assistance scheme fails many of the very poor completely, and those who do benefit from it are receiving steadily less of the nation’s increasing prosperity’ (2001: 264). Ulriksen (2011, 2012) contrasted Botswana with Mauritius. Both were multi- party democracies with open, middle-income economies and competent state institutions. Both invested heavily in public education, as well as public health and housing. But Botswana spent much less on social protection and had no national social security legislation. Hickey (2011) similarly contrasted Botswana unfavourably with South Africa. In contrast, World Bank studies have described Botswana’s social protection system as ‘one of the most extensive ...inthe region’ in terms of both the range and coverage of pro- grammes (Garcia and Moore 2012: 227), and as ‘mature and complex’ (BIDPA and World Bank 2013: x). Devereux also assessed that ‘By African standards, Botswana implements an unusually comprehensive set of social welfare pro- grammes for its poor and vulnerable citizens’ (2007: 554). Botswana’s social assistance programmes reach a large proportion of the population. As much as one half of the population receives food and about 10 per cent of the population receives other social assistance benefits even in non-drought years, with the proportions rising sharply in drought years. Seleka et al. (2007: 33) calculate that government transfers reduced the poverty headcount rate in 2002/3 by 10 percentage points, from about 40 per cent to about 30 per cent. Whilst coverage is widespread, total expenditure is modest. This is primarily because most benefits are set at parsimonious levels. ‘Min- imum assistance’ is provided to ‘genuine destitute persons’, as the government itself puts it (Botswana 2002: 2). The old-age pension introduced in 1996 was set at just one quarter of the value of its equivalent in neighbouring South Africa, and workfare ‘wages’ are similarly low. As a result, poverty might be reduced but is certainly not eliminated. The conservative character of the welfare state is evident also in the preference for workfare and for the provision of benefits in kind (and more recently food coupons). Furthermore, programmes assume and respect the centrality of the family: workfare is designed to enable 44 a working-age adult breadwinner to support his or her familial dependents; a ‘destitutes’ programme is intended to support households where there is no able-bodied, working-age adult; pensions and orphan support became neces- sary when individuals fell outside families, in the case of the elderly because of shrinkage in the ‘extended’ family. None of the social assistance programmes are statutory, i.e. none are based in legislation, and there is no dedicated ministry for social welfare. The governing party also developed a distinctively conservative welfare doc- trine to justify its interventions. The state sought to strengthen the social order built around the family and the community, and to limit interventions in markets. Botswana’s welfare state was not built on universalist, egalitarian, or highly redistributive principles. It thus resembled the conservative welfare regimes of continental Europe, which perpetuated stratification of households by class and status as well as gendered inequalities within households, rather than the social democratic welfare states in the Nordic countries (van Kersbergen 2003).¹ Botswana was an early example of a distinctively African welfare state, characterized by a distinctively conservative approach to precisely who is decommodified, how, to what extent, and with what legitimating ideology. The value of examining the history of welfare state-building in Botswana in the late twentieth century is precisely because it prefigured subsequent processes and patterns of welfare state-building elsewhere in east and central Africa. This chapter examines how and why a conservative welfare state was built in Botswana. Sections 2 and 3 examine the origins of welfare programmes in drought relief in the 1960s and 1970s and their institutionalization and consoli- dation in the 1980s and 1990s. Section 4 focuses on how the particular form of the welfare state in Botswana was shaped by social, economic, and cultural factors, whilst section 5 examines the impetus to reform provided by political competi- tion. Whilst spectacular economic growth from the 1970s facilitated the con- struction of a welfare state in Botswana, political dynamics explain the incentives facing the Botswana Democratic Party (BDP). The conclusion reflects further on how the case of Botswana fits into the broader landscape of welfare state-building. 2. Drought and the Foundations of the Welfare State Welfare policies in Botswana have long revolvedaroundthreemajorcomponents: food or cash-for-work, i.e. workfare, for able-bodied adults; ‘supplementary’ ¹ This comparison was suggested by Tlou, Parsons, and Henderson (1995). 45 feeding programmes for designated ‘vulnerable groups’, i.e. children, pregnant women, and lactating mothers; and additional support for selected categor- ies of people, initially along the lines of poor relief for ‘destitutes’ who could not support themselves and were not being supported adequately by kin, and later through universal old-age pensions and support for orphans. In contrast to neighbouring South Africa, Botswana has never introduced a general child support grant paying benefits to poor mothers or other caregivers. All three major components of public welfare provision date back to independence (from colonial rule) in the mid-1960s. At the time Botswana was a sparsely populated, arid country with a small population of about half a million. It was one of the poorest countries in the world, with GDP per capita about one half of its northern neighbour Zambia and one tenth of its southern neighbour South Africa. The new country had little infrastructure and few public services. Whilst the country had never had many settlers, it was highly stratified, with a wealthy cattle-owning Tswana elite, a large population of small Tswana farmers with few or no cattle, and a non-Tswana underclass. The country was chronically vulnerable to drought. Independence coincided with terrible drought and famine. The government negotiated with the newly established World Food Programme (WFP) over food aid for, at one point, more than half of the population, as well as stock feed for cattle. Massive support from the WFP and elsewhere—with an
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