This dissertation by Bongani D. Ngqulunga is accepted in its present form by the Department of Sociology as satisfying the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Date______

Professor P. Heller, Advisor

Recommended to the Graduate Council

Date______

Professor Jose Itzigsohn, Reader

Date______

Professor Paget Henry, Reader

Approved by the Graduate Council

Date______Professor Sheila Bonde, Dean of the Graduate School

Elusive Equity: Democracy and the Politics of Social Reform in South Africa after Apartheid

Bongani Ngqulunga B. Paed, University of Durban-Westville, 1997 B.Ed, University of Durban-Westville, 1998 M. Sc URP, University of Natal (Durban), 2000

A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Sociology at Brown University

Providence, Rhode Island May 2009

iii

Table of Contents

Page Chapter 1: Background to the study 1 Introduction 1 Explanations for the dearth of pro-poor policies 11 The argument 16 Note on methodology 26

Chapter 2: Working class organization in South Africa 29 Introduction 29 Working class organization before 1994 30 Working class organization after 1994 34

Chapter 3: State capacity and its implications for social reform 56 Introduction 56 State bureaucracy inherited from apartheid 58 Reforming the state bureaucracy 63 State capacity after reform 68 Explanation for the government’s approach to reform 72 Conclusion 75

Chapter 4: The neoliberal turn in economic policy 77 Introduction 77 The introduction of the GEAR strategy 77 Explanation for the ANC’s neoliberal turn in economic policy 82 The ANC’s neoliberal reforms in comparative perspective 95 Reasons COSATU’s continued participation in the alliance 96 Conclusion 99

Chapter 5: The tragedy of HIV/AIDS 101 HIV/AIDS prevalence in South Africa 101 The Nelson Mandela administration: the era of benign neglect 105 The Thabo Mbeki administration: the era of denial 115 Conclusion 126

Chapter 6: A glimmer of hope in education 129 Expanding access to education 130 The financing of education 136 Explaining progressive education reforms 144 Conclusion 157

Chapter 7: South Africa in comparative perspective 159 Restating the puzzle and assessing the evidence 159 Labor-populist party alliances in comparative context 169 Theoretical conclusions from the South African case 175

iv Conclusion 177

Tables and figures

Table 1.1: Number of people living on less than $1 dollar/day, 1995-2006 2

Table 1.2: Human Development Index trends of selected developing countries 3

Table 1.3: Unemployment rate by race, 1994-2006 4

Figure1: Illustration of the causal explanation for the dearth of pro-poor policies in South Africa 18

Figure 2: Model of COSATU’s influence over government policy 51

Table 3.1: Total number of civil servants, 1930-1980 61

Table 3.2: Tax collection capacity 69

Table 4.1: Trade unions and membership, 1994-2005 84

Table 4.2: The changing profile of COSATU membership 86

Table 4.3: COSATU members’ attitudes to its alliance with the ANC 97

Table 5.1: Estimated effects of HIV/AIDS on total population, 2000-2008 103

Table 6.1: Enrolment by grade at ordinary public and independent schools 1995 and 2006 132

Table 6.2: Gross Enrolment Rates (GER) and Gender Parity Index (GPI) 135

Table 6.3: Public expenditure on education as a proportion of total government expenditure, 2002/03, in selected countries 136

Table 6.4: Percentage of total provincial spending on education 139

Table 6.5: Implementation of No Fees Schools Policy, 2007 140

Table 6.6: The national school nutrition program, 2005/6 and 2006/7 142

v Acknowledgements

Many people have supported me while working on this dissertation. I wish to express my gratitude to all of them. I am particularly indebted to Patrick Heller (the chair of my dissertation committee) who has been a tremendous source of support and encouragement. He has become more than a professor to me; he is a valued comrade. I am also grateful to Paget

Henry and Jose Itzigsohn, the two other members of the dissertation committee, for their assistance and support.

My experience at Brown University has changed my life in many ways than I could have imagined when I first arrived there. I wish to express my gratitude to the professors (especially in the Department of Sociology), members of staff and students for making Brown such a magical place.

I have also received assistance from a lot of South African friends while doing fieldwork for the dissertation. I am indebted to Zama Khuluse, who served as my host and provided me with shelter, friendship and a lot of delicious (but hot) meals. I also wish to thank Vusi

Gumede for introducing me to a lot of people in government that I needed to talk to for the research. My colleagues at the President’s Office have been very generous and have provided me with all the support I needed for completing my doctoral studies. I wish to thank them all for their generous support.

I also wish to thank the National Research Foundation and Brown University for providing financial support for my doctoral studies.

This dissertation is dedicated to my parents. I particularly dedicate it to my late father for his unwavering belief in the transformative power of education, and to my mother for her countless acts of love and generosity.

vi Chapter 1: Background to the study

Introduction

The purpose of this dissertation is to explain the trajectory of social reform in South

Africa during the first 14 years of democracy, 1994-2008. The principal question that it addresses is why democratic reform in South Africa has not brought about social equity. The focus of the analysis is on the public policies that the ANC government has implemented in three sectors: the economy, health and education. The question I address with respect to these sectors is why the policies that have been implemented have been largely anti-poor (with the exception of education).

Numerous academic studies and reports from reputable institutions often note that more South Africans are getting poorer; more are getting unemployed; and that the general standard of living has been steadily declining since the advent of democracy. For instance, the

United Nations Development Program (UNDP) noted in its 2003 report on South Africa that about 48.5 per cent of the South African population (21.9 million people) in 2003 fell below the national poverty line (UNDP, 2003:5). The report further observed that the level of income inequality has remained high and is in fact deteriorating, which is reflected in the increasing

Gini-coefficient that rose from 0.596 in 1995 to 0.635 in 2001 (ibid).

Other studies also show that the number of poor people in South Africa has increased over the past fourteen years. The South African Institute on Race Relations (SAIRR), for example, shows that the number of people living on less than one dollar a day more than doubled between 1996 and 2005. This increase is clearly demonstrated in Table 1.1 below, which shows that while the number of poor people was less than 2 million in 1996, it had increased to over 4 million by 2005.

1 Table 1.1: Number of people living on less than $1/day, 1996-2005

Year Number 1996 1 899 874 1997 2 243 576 1998 2 604 366 1999 2 931 253 2000 3 205 217 2001 3 653 756 2002 4 451 843 2003 4 374 079 2004 4 296 653 2005 4 228 787 Source: South Africa Survey-2006/7, SAIRR

Social deterioration is also evident in other areas. A look at the UNDP’s Human

Development Reports of the past decade shows that South Africa’s score on the Human

Development Index (HDI) has progressively declined. Table 1.2 below, which compares South

Africa’s performance on the HDI against other similar middle income countries shows that it is the only country (with the exception of Botswana) whose HDI has gotten worse over the period

1995-2004. While it was 0.741 in 1995, it had declined to 0.653 by 2004. The UNDP attributes this deterioration in the standard of living of poor South Africans to what it calls the largely anti-poor socio-economic policies that have been implemented by the ANC government since the first democratic elections in 1994.

2 Table 1.2 Human Development Index Trends of Selected Developing Countries, 1995-2004

Country 1995 2000 2003 2004 Argentina 0.835 0.860 0.863 0.863 Botswana 0.660 0.598 0.565 0.570 Brazil 0.749 0.785 0.792 0.792 Chile 0.818 0.843 0.854 0.859 Egypt 0.613 0.654 0.659 0.702 India 0.548 0.577 0.602 0.611 Malaysia 0.761 0.791 0.796 0.805 Mexico 0.784 0.811 0.814 0.821 South Africa 0.741 0.691 0.658 0.653 Source: UNDP, Human Development Report, 2005, 2006

While the South African government consistently challenges figures that depict declining standards of living such as the UNDP’s quoted above, research by numerous other scholars however overwhelmingly supports this picture of social deterioration as demonstrated by the UNDP Report and the SAIRR Survey. Landman et al (2003:03), for instance, observe that poverty and inequality are two distinct problems that characterize South Africa since the transition to democracy. While they note that different measurements of poverty yield different poverty estimates, their study supports the UNDP Report on one important issue: that the proportion of the population that is poor in South Africa is well over 40 per cent and increasing. Research by Servaas van der Berg and Megan Louw (2003) also estimates poverty to have been affecting 46 per cent of the population in 2000, which translated to 20, 5 million people then.

On social inequality, Haroon Bhorat’s (2003:04) estimate of 0.6 Gini-coefficient in

South Africa is not far off from the UNDP’s estimate of 0.63. The Landman’s study (2003)

3 also shows that social inequality has increased across all the racial groups, with inequality among black households showing a steep incline.

Unemployment has also increased considerably over this period. The survey conducted by the SAIRR shows that the unemployment rate between the years 1994 and 2006 notably increased for all race groups in South Africa. As Table 1.3 below shows, the total growth in the unemployment rate over this period increased by 28%. Looked in the context of deterioration in other areas, what this increase in the number of unemployed South Africans shows is that there is a general decline in the overall standard of living in the country, and the poor are bearing the heaviest brunt of it.

Table 1.3: Unemployment (strict definition) rate by race, 1994-2006 (%)

Year African Colored Indian White Total 1994 24.7 17.6 10.2 3.0 20.0 1997 29.3 16.0 10.2 4.6 22.9 2000 31.6 20.4 19.9 6.8 26.7 2003 37.3 22.4 22.4 6.5 31.2 2006 30.7 18.9 11.2 4.7 25.6 Growth:’94-06 24.3 7.4 9.8 56.7 28.0 Source: Social Survey 2006/07, SAIRR

What all these studies clearly demonstrate is that the standard of living for poor South

Africans in the aftermath of apartheid’s defeat has worsened. All of them are also unanimous that poverty affects certain sections of the society much more severely than others: it is more prevalent among rural dwellers, blacks, and females respectively. They further show that poverty, unemployment and inequality have continuously increased since the advent of democracy more than fourteen years.

These negative social indicators raise important questions, the most important of which

4 of course is why has the advent of democracy in South Africa failed to improve the standard of living of the poor? Answering this question is significant not only because the survival of democracy in South Africa is dependent on improving the standard of living of the majority of citizens. Answers to this question are also important for reasons that transcend the unique case of South Africa.

General explanations for the failure of most developing countries to significantly combat poverty and deprivation focus on the dearth of financial and institutional capacities prevalent in most of these countries. Thus in the case of South Africa the argument is that the failure of government to effectively combat poverty and deprivation is due to financial and other incapacities. However, the South African state does not suffer from any of these problems, as I show in chapter 3. It is not only the largest economy in the whole African continent; it is also one of the 35 largest economies in the world (May and Meth, 2004:3). May and Meth in fact note that South Africa is now ranked one of the 50 wealthiest nations on planet. And yet, they observe, South Africa’s “strikingly poor social indicators” resulted in it being ranked 111th of 175 countries in terms of its HDI in 2001. They also observe that South

Africa is one of a handful of countries that have experienced a decline in the HDI since 1995.

And despite being one of the 35 largest economies in the world, South Africa now has life expectancies among the 30 worst countries, while projections of mortality suggest that these will deteriorate further as deaths from the AIDS epidemic increase. Considering all this wealth it would stretch credulity to argue that all this social deterioration is due to the lack of financial resources. This is particularly so if one considers the fact that the South African government has over this fourteen year period run budget surpluses. As I contend in chapter 3 financial and state incapacity is not the reason for the dearth of pro-poor policies in South Africa.

But if financial and state incapacity is not the reason for the failure to implement pro-

5 poor policies, what it is the cause? As a prelude to answering this important question it is important to note that the conservative social reform trajectory that has been followed by the

ANC government appears to fly in the face of major theories that explain the development of pro-poor social reforms. For instance, the general shift in the balance of power in society in favor of the popular classes that democratization generally brings about is considered propitious for the development of policies that address the interests of these classes. While the academic literature does not postulate a direct causal relationship between democratization on one hand and pro-poor social reforms on the other; there is a general expectation that the shift in the balance of power in favor of the lower classes would impact in the distribution of resources towards those classes (Huber et al, 1997:171-2).

This is not to suggest, as scholars so often caution, that the power of the vote alone determines the shape and trajectory of social reform. For it has to be remembered that the resources of power and influence that the more powerful groups in society possess are often used to circumscribe any significant benefit that the universal suffrage is likely to provide to the less powerful sections of society. Adding to this power imbalance in civil society are other constellations of power such as state-society relations and inequities in the international arena that also tend to have an impact in shaping any trajectory of domestic social reform

(Rueschemeyer et al,1992, Chapter 3 in particular).

These caveats notwithstanding, the significance for social reform of the extension of democratic participation to lower social groups cannot be underestimated. Numerous studies have consistently shown that if well organized, lower classes do not only bring about democratization, they also tend to tilt the scales of social reform towards the poor. One only has to look at the role played by labor unions and other organizations of the lower classes during what Samuel Huntington (1991) called the Third Wave of democratization to appreciate

6 the importance of these groups in shaping major political developments. In the case of South

Africa, it is simply inconceivable to imagine the very advent of democracy in the early 19990s without the role played by the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and social movements under the umbrella body of the United Democratic Front (UDF).

The expectation that the advent of democracy would be followed by pro-poor reforms in South Africa were not therefore unreasonable considering the organizational and mobilizational capacity of the working class and the poor in general in South Africa. The fact that this expectation has not materialized; the fact that the ANC has instead implemented public policies that are considered anti-poor indeed fly in the face not only of the aspirations and expectations of the poor, but go against the grain of major theories that explain the development of progressive social reforms.

Proponents of the power resources theory, for example, argue that the struggle for progressive social reform is—to use Huber and Stephens (2001:17) “a struggle over distribution, and thus the organizational power of those standing to benefit from redistribution, the working and lower middle classes, is crucial”. In other words, proponents of the power resources theory contend that the power resources of important social classes in society and the extent to which such resources are mobilized is crucial for shaping the trajectory of social reform. While the manner in which this class power is translated into favorable social policies varies from country to country depending on its unique circumstances; it is generally held by proponents of the power resources theory that the level of political organization of the working class and poor is crucial for shaping the trajectory of social reform. This is particularly the case if the organizational power of the working class is combined with strong political ties to the left of center ruling party (Huber and Stephens, 2001:20).

Needless to say, the above-mentioned conditions exist in South Africa. The ruling ANC

7 is a left of center political party. It won the 1994 elections by more than 60 per cent of the vote, and it has been progressively increasing its share of the vote during these past fourteen years of democracy. Furthermore, ANC has consistently obtained its largest share of the vote from the massive support it has received from the working class and other poor sections of society. The

ANC is also in a formal alliance with COSATU and the South African Communist Party

(SACP). Additionally, it also enjoys a fair degree of popular support among a majority of civil society organizations. And yet the presence of these conditions has not resulted to the enactment of pro-poor policies in the health and the economy for example.

While political opposition from other political parties and social groups tends to be an impediment to progressive social reforms in other countries; it is simply not a major explanatory factor in South Africa. This is because political party opposition to the ANC is very weak. Taken together, opposition parties hold slightly less than 30 per cent of the seats in parliament. A party which comes close to the ANC in terms of its share of seats in parliament is the Democratic Alliance, which holds about 12% of the total seats in parliament. Moreover, rarely do the opposition parties act collectively to oppose the ANC’s agenda in parliament.

Some scholars have however argued that it is not only the existence of center left ruling parties with strong ties to the working class that is critical for the development of progressive reforms; they contend that there exist other factors that are equally important. Institutionalists in particular posit that the design and structure of political institutions can also facilitate for or hinder the enactment of progressive social policies. They suggest that centralized, cohesive political institutions with fewer veto points tend to make it easier for left ruling parties to enact progressive social reforms. Similarly, they suggest that such institutional designs make it easier for conservative ruling parties to retrench progressive social programs. The converse is true: fragmented political institutions make it difficult either to enact or retrench progressive social

8 programs.

The most influential work in this area is Paul Pierson’s (1994). In explaining the different levels of success of the Thatcher and Reagan administrations in retrenching expansive social programs in their respective countries, Pierson argues that the differences in institutional structures in the two respective countries resulted to their different levels of success with retrenching social programs. He notes that the Thatcher administration was much more successful in retrenching certain programs than was the Reagan’s because British political institutions are relatively centralized and cohesive as compared to those of the United States.

Fragmentation of US institutions offered opponents of retrenchment numerous veto points, which they used to block retrenchment.

Pierson also makes another important point. He suggests that it is quite possible even in conditions in which centralized, cohesive institutions exist for proponents of retrenchment to face obstacles in retrenching certain programs. A typical example of this was the failure of the

Thatcher government to retrench the pension program for the elderly in the United Kingdom.

He attributes its failure to the resistance of the constituency (mainly the pensioners) that was benefiting from the pension program.

Pierson’s argument about the importance of political institutions in shaping social reform is supported by various other scholars. Kurt Weyland (1996), for example, argues that the reason why the advent of democracy in Brazil did not lead to equitable social reform was because of the preponderance of fragmented political institutions in that country. The case of

South Africa is therefore interesting in light of these institutionalist arguments. If centralized cohesive political institutions are propitious for progressive social reform, as Pierson and

Weyland suggest, South Africa could not have asked for a much better political institutional architecture. In the first instance, the organization and structure of the state in South Africa is

9 highly centralized and cohesive. The power and authority for policy making and legislation reside with the national government. The two other spheres of government—provinces and municipalities—largely perform an administrative role of implementing policies already decided by the national government. At a party political level, the ruling party is a considerably centralized political organization that exercises enormous political authority over its provincial, regional and local structures. Between five-yearly congresses, the National Executive

Committee (NEC) of the ANC is vested with the authority to effectively run the organization and take very important decisions without consulting provincial and regional party structures.

Moreover, under the presidency of Thabo Mbeki the locus of power in the ANC has considerably shifted away from the ANC to his office in government. This has allowed the government executive to effectively determine the policy agenda without any hindrance from any political quarter. Yet all this favorable institutional architecture has not led to progressive social reforms.

This leads to one important question: how do we explain the dearth of pro-poor social policies in South African notwithstanding the presence of conditions that favor the development of such policies? The focus of the next section is on answering this question.

Explanations for the dearth of pro-poor policies in South Africa

Several scholars of South African politics have provided divergent explanations. These explanations can be grouped into two broad categories. The first category suggests that the leadership of the ANC in government was co-opted by and bought into the dominant paradigm of neoliberalism, and in the process sold out its core constituency of poor people. The second argues that the ANC in government had no alternative but to follow the dominant socio- economic paradigm of a conservative approach to economic and social reforms. This was

10 either because of the power of globalized economic and financial capital which presumably emasculated developing countries such as South Africa of their power to self-determination, or because of the power of international financial institutions (IFIs) such as the International

Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

Patrick Bond (2000), one of the most consistent proponents of the cooptation view, argues that the rightward shift of the ANC’s approach to social and economic reforms can be traced back to very specific processes of the socialization of the ANC elite into the ideology of neoliberalism by the business elites in South Africa and beyond. He specifically singles out the training of senior members of the ANC Department of Economic Planning (DEP) in investment banks in the US and in IFIs—the purpose of which was to prepare them for managing the economy—as having converted them to neoliberal economic thinking. He also claims that big South African corporations such as Anglo-American, Nedcor, Old Mutual and

Sanlam used scenario planning exercises that predicted dire future prospects if neoliberal policies were not followed in order to convince the ANC leadership to pursue a conservative social reform path once in government. For Bond these cooptation mechanisms succeeded to convince the ANC leadership that progressive reform was not sustainable for a future for South

Africa (Bond, p.57).

Hein Marais (1998, 2001), another advocate of the cooptation thesis, does not go as far as to specify the processes through which the ANC elite was co-opted as Bond does. However he claims that in the run-up to the first democratic elections in 1994 the ANC elite was fast abandoning social democratic approaches to social and economic reforms. Like Bond, he blames this rightward shift to what he considers to be the capitulation of the ANC leadership to big capital in South Africa and beyond. He further claims that an influential elite within the

ANC itself was already uncomfortable with radical approaches to social reforms in the first

11 place as it considered such reforms to be detrimental to its material interests (2001:131). All told, both Marais’s and Bond’s explanations for the ruling party’s rightward shift to social reform boils down to accusing its leadership of having been co-opted into accepting the dominant paradigm, and in the process selling out its core constituency of poor people.

An alternative explanation has emerged from those close to or inside the government and the ruling party. Alan Hirsch’s book (2005) is considered the clearest exposition of this view. The book is interesting partly because of the author himself: he currently holds a very senior position in the office of President Thabo Mbeki, and has also held various other senior positions in other government departments. He was also one of a few economists who drafted the Growth, Employment and Redistribution strategy (GEAR), which of course has come to symbolize the rightward shift of the ANC in government. Hirsch explains the shift of the ANC to the right in very pragmatic terms: his contention is that the primary objective for introducing

GEAR was to achieve macro-economic stability. He notes that at the time the South African currency was fast losing its value. He observes that in a short period of time the rand had lost about 8.5% of its value. In addition, the budget deficit was spiraling out of control, which also threatened macro-economic stability.

Faced with this gathering economic storm the ANC government decided to introduce a stabilization program—GEAR. Hirsch notes that there were various elements to GEAR. For example, in order to reduce the budget deficit, the government decided to implement significant cuts on social spending. It also embarked on a program of privatizing state owned enterprises. In short, Hirsch’s contention is that the ANC government had no alternative other than following the neoliberal path considering the likelihood of macro-economic instability, which if allowed to set in, would have exposed the South African economy to significant capital flight thereby worsening an already precarious economic situation. For Hirsch,

12 introducing pro-poor policies at that point would have been counter-productive.

Hirsch’s view shares one important similarity with Bond’s discussed above. Both views suggest that the ANC leadership in government was cowed by big business to follow a conservative economic and social path. For Bond the business elite used ideological indoctrination either in the form of scenario planning exercises or special training in international investment banks and IFIs to persuade the ANC to abandon implementing progressive social reforms. Hein Marais points to the dominance of the Washington Consensus and the collapse of the Soviet bloc as another reason for the ANC’s lurch to the right. Hirsch, on the other hand, raises the specter of capital flight and macroeconomic instability as the cause for the ANC’s turn to neoliberalism.

Both these explanations suffer from one major weakness: they deny the ANC leadership its agency. This goes against evidence which shows that the ANC government actually did have some choices. For instance, when World Bank economists proposed to the

ANC government to “urgently underpin growth with substantial investments in South Africa’s social and physical infrastructure that aimed to redistribute facilities, resources and opportunities” (Hirsch, 2005:75); the government refused to follow this advice. When one of the most influential businessman in the world, Tony O’Reilly, the Irish-born Heinz chair, president and chief executive suggested strongly that the ANC government should borrow heavily to kick-start the economy, the ANC leaders in government baulked at this idea (Hirsch, p.75). Instead, they chose to adopt a very conservative macroeconomic strategy that shunned substantial investments in physical and social infrastructure. They also cut substantially government borrowing. To blame either big business or IFIs solely for leading the ANC towards neoliberalism is at best incredible in the face of publicly available evidence. But it is also to miss another important point.

13 It overlooks the fact that two years before the unveiling of GEAR in 1996, the ANC had been elected on a platform that committed the ANC to a progressive social reform agenda if elected to government. It was on the basis of this electoral platform—called the

Reconstruction and Development Program (RDP)—that millions of the unemployed, the poor and working families overwhelmingly backed the ANC in that historic election in 1994. The question that the explanations discussed above do not address is: what happened to this popular base? Why was it easy for the ANC leadership to easily forsake its promises and follow a completely different path from the one it ran on during the electoral campaign?

Explanations provided by writers such as Hirsch and Bond, to mention but a few, fail to answer these important questions. Explanations that do not account for the contribution of the poor in the social reform agenda that the ANC in government has implemented over the past decade and a half are patently inadequate in my view. Adequate explanations have to look into important organizations that have historically organized the poor such as civic associations

(especially the South African National Civics Organization), COSATU, and other civil society organizations such as the Treatment Action Campaign and many others like it. Such explanations have to analyze their levels of organization, their relationships with the ANC and indeed their influence on state policy during the period under study. Important too would be to look at the structure of political institutions to establish whether it contributed to the dearth of poor policies as institutionalists suggest. To point at what Bond calls the “sell-out” of the ANC leadership or the economic crisis as Hirsch suggests as sole explanations is woefully inadequate in my view.

The argument

In view of these limitations of the dominant explanations for the rightward drift of the

14 ANC’s approach to social and economic reforms, the argument of this dissertation puts the politics of social reforms at the center of explanations for the conservative turn in ANC’s policy directions. Specifically, I argue that three related factors contributed to the failure of the

ANC government to implement pro-poor policies:

• The first was the weak organization of civil society bodies representing the poor. That

weakness predated the democratic transition, but became worse after the elections in

1994. As I will show in the next chapter, civil society organizations that were better

organized such as COSATU in the early days of the democratic transition were more

successful in influencing policy in their favor, while others such as SANCO were

poorly organized had the opposite results.

• The second factor was that the poor lacked access and voice inside the ANC. As will be

demonstrated in chapter 2, this was partly a function of their weak organization (which

also meant political irrelevance). Considering that significant policy matters got

decided in the ANC, a lack of access and voice in the ANC meant that their concerns

and interests were not well represented. This was at the time when other powerful

economic and political interests were beginning to have influence in the ANC.

• Thirdly, the poor were also excluded from accessing the state; from accessing the

networks inside the state that made policy; and therefore from influencing government

policy. The kind of state-society relations that emerged after the democratic transition

favored groups that were better organized and/or more powerful to access state

institutions and policy making networks. As will be shown in chapter 3, the reform of

the state that the ANC government undertook produced hierarchical relations between

the state and citizens, and promoted a notion of the state as a provider of services and

citizens as clients who receive (and purchase) public services from the state. In

15 instances where institutions were established to facilitate interaction between

government and civil society, preference was given to interacting with business groups

and labor unions such as COSATU. The vast majority of the poor, who are basically

outside formal employment, did not have effective institutional platforms for

interacting with government, which undermined their ability to influence policy. They

also did not have access to important policy making networks inside the state. (Figure 1

below illustrates graphically the causal explanation for the dearth of pro-poor policies

in post-apartheid South Africa).

Figure 1: Illustration of the causal explanation for the dearth of pro-poor policies in South Africa

Weak organization of the poor (outside formal employment)

Absence of voice and influence Dearth of pro-poor inside the ANC policies

Exclusion from access to state institutions and influence on government policy

While the three factors identified above collectively led to the dearth of pro-poor policies in

16 South Africa; I will show throughout this dissertation that there are important linkages between them that are crucial to understanding their collective impact on the absence of pro-poor policies in South Africa (see figure 2 in the next chapter for an illustration of a positive relationship between the three factors). For instance, I will show that the weak organization of the poor undercut their political influence in the ANC, which inoculated the ANC from any pressure (however minimal) coming from poor. Additionally, their weakness shifted the balance of power in the ANC away from the poor in favor of elite interests. The dominance of elite interests (and those of other organized sectors in society such as COSATU) became evident in the type of state-society relations that emerged post-apartheid. As I will show in chapter 2 the state-society relations that emerged were characterized by substantive exclusion of the poor from corporatist institutions where some significant policy decisions were discussed and decided. Moreover, the state-society relations that emerged did not also foster an environment in which the poor could be better organized.

In chapter 2 I will also explain in detail how poor people in South Africa—a section of the population with a long history of political activism—came to be so weakly organized after the transition to democracy. What is important to point out here is that their poor organization had adverse consequences both for influencing decision-making inside the ANC and in the kind of state-society relations that emerged after apartheid.

What is common between the argument I am putting forward here to explain the dearth of pro-poor policies in South Africa on one hand and the arguments of the power resources theory on the other is the centrality and focus on the organization and power resources of the poor in influencing social reforms. Evelyne Huber and John Stephens (2001:17) articulate the power resources theory well when they suggest that “The struggle over welfare states is a struggle over distribution, and thus the organizational power of those standing to benefit from

17 redistribution, the working and lower middle classes, is crucial”. They further argue that “It matters, of course, how this organizational power is politically articulated, and political parties perform the crucial mediating role”. Following from these observations by Huber and

Stephens, my argument is that (1) the organization of the poor was very weak, and (2) their influence in the ANC (which largely reflected their organizational political weaknesses) was largely non-existent, and (3) the access and influence of the poor in the state and on state policy was almost absent.

There is also a slight difference between the argument that Huber and Stephens (and other advocates of the power resources theory) make and the argument I am putting forth in this dissertation. While they speak of the working class in general, I make a conscious distinction between the sections of the working class employed in the formal labor market (in other words members of COSATU) and those either working in the informal sector or completely unemployed. This distinction is quite crucial. I will show in this dissertation that the poor are predominantly drawn from either the unemployed or those employed in the informal sector.

More importantly, I will show that the corporatist arrangements that emerged after the defeat of apartheid excluded those outside the formal labor market from access to the policy making process, and therefore, from influencing public policy in their favor. While it is true that the working class as a whole has lost out from the neoliberal trajectory followed by the ANC in government, I will show that those outside the formal labor market have been the worst affected.

This distinction between those in formal employment (and therefore belonging to unions in

South Africa) and those either unemployed or employed in the informal sector (and largely unorganized) has been made by other scholars such as Nattrass and Seekings (1996, 1997 and

2001). Seekings (2004), for instance, has argued that while the unionized workers in South

18 Africa have raised issues of interest to the poor, weak organization of the poor has been detrimental to their cause. It also has to be mentioned that while organized workers are well represented in corporatist institutions such as National Economic, Development and Labour

Advisory Council (NEDLAC) and the Presidential Working Group on Labour; the poor are generally weakly represented or not represented at all in these institutions. The overall impact of all this, I contend, has been at best their minimal influence on policy making.

In short, while I agree with the general thrust of the power resources theory, which emphasizes the organization of the working class, I make a distinction between those formally employed (and therefore organized) and those outside the formal labor market (and therefore unorganized). This distinction, I argue, has had significant consequences for the development of social policy in South Africa.

By extension, the relationship between the working class organizations and the ruling left of center party (in the South African case, the relationship between COSATU and the ANC) does not necessarily mean the existence of a relationship between the poor and the political party they vote for and support. While there is evidence that shows that COSATU was largely sidelined by the ANC on some important policy decisions such as GEAR; there also exists evidence that shows that organized labor was consulted on other decisions. The same cannot be said about the poor: evidence shows that there was minimal consultation, if at all, of the poor either in policy discussions inside the ANC or in the state. And this is very important: advocates of the power resources theory tend to assume that if there exist corporatist institutions that bring together labor, business and the state, the working class is represented. I will show that in the case of South Africa corporatism took a form that substantively excluded those sectors of society that are outside the formal economy.

The argument that I have advanced above underemphasizes other factors such as the

19 ANC’s electoral dominance. The low significance I put on the ANC’s electoral dominance goes against arguments by scholars such as Adam Habib (2005), who contend that in a competitive political environment the ANC elite would have found it electorally costly to follow a conservative social reform path. Had there existed a credible political alternative, they argue, the ANC leadership would have found it electorally costly to implement neoliberal reforms. This argument seems to find support from experiences from other countries where the development of social welfare regimes can be traced to competition for votes by competing political parties. For instance, the German Christian welfare model was one major attempt by

Bismark to undercut the Social Democrats’ inroads into the working class (Esping-Andersen,

1990; Huber and Stephens, 2001).

The argument by Habib and others is difficult to either prove or disprove. One can only speculate about how the ANC would have governed had there existed a competitive political environment. It is perhaps important to remind ourselves that not all countries with competitive electoral environments have produced generous social welfare regimes. Moreover the three policy areas—the economy, education and health—that I have selected for closer analysis in this dissertation seem to suggest that the general electoral environment has not been decisive in the South African case in shaping the social policy trajectory followed by the ANC government. As will be seen in chapter 6, which deals with education the policy path followed by the ANC government in the education sector has been very pro-poor, while its approach to health has been regressive. My argument for explaining the different approaches to the sectors is that they reflected the state of political organization of poor people in those sectors and their access or exclusion from important policy making institutions.

An equally implausible argument would be to suggest that the difference in approach to the education, health and economic sectors is due to differences in the structure of political

20 institutions. The political institutional architecture in South Africa is similar for all policy areas. Moreover, it would be difficult to support an argument that the structure of institutions has affected the overall policy direction that the ANC has followed. While organizations such as COSATU and the SACP often lament what they consider to be the centralization of power in the office of President Mbeki, centralization per se cannot plausibly be cited as the cause for moving the ANC to the right.

It also has to be mentioned that the argument I have laid out above to explain the reasons for the conservative path the ANC has followed is not intended to be an alternative to arguments about the power of foreign capital and globalization in general, for such arguments are important. However, as I will show in the concluding chapter the power of global capital is often mediated by domestic politics. In the case of South Africa, it is inconceivable to imagine the ANC government implementing an anti-poor reform agenda without the poor organization of the poor, the shifting balance of power inside the ANC, and state-society relations that disfavored the poor. The influence of global capital was largely made possible by these domestic political factors.

As a way of concluding this section it is perhaps useful to reflect briefly (see chapter 7 for an extended discussion) on the implications of the argument I have outlined here for the academic debate on the development of pro-poor social reforms. As mentioned in the earlier section above, there are two dominant schools of thought that explain the development (and retrenchment) of social welfare regimes. The first posits that the development of pro-poor policies is a product of organization and resources of the less privileged sections of society.

Proponents of this view contend that the existence of a well organized working class in concert with a ruling left of center government is generally propitious for pro-poor social reforms.

The other school of thought puts emphasis not on the power resources of classes, but on

21 the structure of institutions. Proponents of this view suggest that political institutions, especially the manner in which they are structured, influence not only the chances of enacting pro-poor reforms, but sometimes their content too. The general view is that it is highly unlikely in instances in which the structure of institutions provides for the existence of “veto points” for pro-poor reforms to be enacted. It is expected by proponents of this view for the chances of pro-poor reforms to be diminished in decentralized, federal and fragmented institutional arrangements as opposed to centralized, cohesive arrangements.

The argument I have put forth to explain the trajectory of social reforms in South Africa broadly supports the power resources view. As I have argued in this chapter and will further demonstrate in the following chapters, the organization and resources of the poor proved critical in shaping the social reform trajectory followed. Not only did their weak organization undermine their influence inside the ANC; it also contributed to their weak representation in critical institutions in the state where other groups such as labor unions and organized business influenced policy. The overall result of all of these factors, I argue, was the development of socio-economic policies that were labeled by the UNDP as anti-poor. To be clear, the argument

I am making is not that the structure of institutions does not matter. Rather, the South African case suggests that the organization, power and influence of the poor are more crucial and primary in shaping the trajectory of social reform than the structure of political institutions alone.

In the chapters to follow I will discuss in detail the arguments just introduced in this chapter. In chapter 2 the discussion will focus on the state of working class organizations in

South Africa during the period leading to the first democratic elections in 1994 and more than a decade after that. I will focus on the state of organization of working class organizations especially the South African Civics Organization (SANCO) and COSATU. My analysis will be

22 on how their organization and relationship with the ANC and the ANC government has shaped the direction of public policy. I will show that better organized bodies such as COSATU have tended to have better access and influence in the ANC and in government than poorly organized bodies such as SANCO. As a result, COSATU’s influence on public policy was much greater than SANCO’s.

I will shift the focus of the analysis in chapter 3 to a discussion of the capacity of the

South African state. The reason for discussing this matter is largely because one of the main arguments that have advanced by the South African government is that its failure to combat poverty and deprivation is due to state incapacity. I will show that contrary to government’s claims of incapacity, the South African state does not suffer from any serious incapacity. It neither lacks human nor financial resources. In fact, as compared to other similar developing countries, the South African state possesses much better capacity.

In chapters 4, 5, and 6 the focus will change from these broad contextual issues into a close scrutiny of three important policy areas: the economy, health and education. The discussion in chapter 4 will be on the macro-economic strategy that the ANC government introduced in 1996 primarily, according to official government claims, to bring about economic growth, create jobs and redistribute wealth. Reflective of these goals the macro- economic strategy was named the Growth, Employment and Redistribution—GEAR in short. I will show that contrary to its stated intentions GEAR is acknowledged to have achieved the opposite. Critically for my purposes in this dissertation, I will show that the poor lost out badly as a result of its implementation. The purpose of chapter 4 will be to use the explanatory framework I have introduced in this chapter to explain the introduction of GEAR.

In chapter 5 I will change the focus from the economy to health concentrating on the

ANC government’s policy on HIV/AIDS. As will be shown in the chapter the HIV/AIDS

23 pandemic is ravaging South Africa, leaving behind thousands of dead people and scores of orphaned children. Poor people have carried the heaviest burden of the epidemic. Again using the arguments introduced in this chapter I will explain why government’s policy in this area has been so dismal.

The discussion in chapter 6 will focus on the reform of school education. The focus on education policy, I will explain in the next section of this chapter, is informed by pro-poor policy changes that the ANC in government has undertaken since the democratic transition. I will explain why the policies introduced for the education sector have been more pro-poor than those introduced in health and the economy.

Chapter 7 will be the conclusion. I will return to the central arguments that I have introduced in this chapter. I will focus in particular on assessing the extent to which my arguments will have measured up against the evidence of the chapters that follow this one. I will also compare the South African case against other similar cases especially those from the developing world of Latin America and Asia.

A note on methodology and case selection

The methodology I have followed in conducting this study is a combination of three basic approaches. First, I interviewed well over 50 people from trade unions, civil society organizations, political analysts and observers of the South African policy and political scenes, from the business sector, members of parliament, and bureaucrats from government. Second, I used a fair amount of government policy documents, and major position papers of critical organizations such as COSATU, SANCO, ANC, SACP, the UNDP, and other international institutions. Third, I also used secondary data such as academic studies and papers written about South Africa or similar cases, or those that deal with matters similar to the one I am

24 dealing with here. This use of mixed methods was deliberate; it was a way of ensuring that there is some corroboration of the information used to support the arguments I am making.

The focus on economy, health (especially HIV/AIDS) and education deserves some explanation. In the first instance, the approach of the ANC government to social reform has been largely conservative. For instance, Pape and McDonald (2002) have shown how the marketization of basic services such as water, electricity and sewage removal undermined the

ANC government’s own attempt to provide those services to the poor. In the case of water, they note that the government has been focused on recovering cost of providing water services, which has resulted in millions of poor people without clean and safe water. The same market approach to land reform has also undermined the government’s own goals with respect to redistributing land to the poor. While 30% of the land was targeted for redistribution, only 4% was redistributed between 1994 and 2004 (Centre for Development and Enterprise, 2008). The government itself admits that land reform has been slow and that the pace would have to increase considerably if it is to redistribute 30% of the land by 2014 (The Presidency,

2008:29).

The government’s macroeconomic strategy, GEAR, has been the linchpin of its neoliberal approach to social reform, and has also set the tone for the approach taken to reforming other sectors such as education, basic social services such as water, and health (to mention a few). Considering the influence that economic policy has had on other public policies, it seemed sensible that the economy be one of the sectors that I focus on. Otherwise the study of social reform in South Africa that excluded economic policy would have proven inadequate. There is also logic to the selection of HIV/AIDS and education as the other focus areas. The policies of the ANC government on HIV/AIDS are widely considered to have been the most detrimental to the poor. As will be seen in chapter 5, millions of people (mostly the

25 poor) have died from AIDS related illnesses and thousands of children have been left as orphans. The government’s policies on education on the other hand are considered the most pro-poor and progressive. It is this difference in how the ANC government has dealt with

AIDS and education which led to their selection as additional case studies. Using the explanatory framework introduced in this chapter, I will explain how it came about that the same government implemented anti-poor policies in the economy and HIV/AIDS while it implemented the most pro-poor ones in education.

Chapter 2: Working class organization in South Africa

Introduction

The analysis in this chapter focuses on two issues: 1) the state of working class organizations (especially those that organize the poor outside the formal labor market), and 2) the relationship of these organizations with the ANC and the governments it has led for almost

15 years since 1994. The focus on the two issues is important for two reasons. The first is that

26 the central argument of this dissertation for explaining the dearth of pro-poor policies in post- apartheid South Africa is that weak organization of working class (particularly the poor employed in the informal sector or simply unemployed) in combination with the shifting balance of power in the ANC in favor of elite interests, as well as exclusive state-society relations that emerged after apartheid collectively contributed to the dearth of pro-poor policies.

The second reason for focusing on the two issues is to explain what appears to be an inexplicable theoretical paradox. Advocates of the power resources theory posit that pro-poor policies are likely to be enacted in circumstances in which strong working class organizations are in political alliance with a left of center ruling party. As mentioned in chapter 1, that condition exists in South Africa and yet policies that have been implemented have been called anti-poor by various reputable organizations. So the purpose of this chapter is to explain this apparent paradox.

Following the distinction that I made in chapter 1 between sections of the working class that are employed in the formal labor market and those that are either unemployed or employed in the informal sector, I discuss the implications of this distinction. I show that those sections of the working class employed in the formal labor market in South Africa tend to be generally well organized as opposed to those elements either in the informal sector or unemployed.

Considering the emphasis I have put on organization as one of the explanatory variables for the dearth of pro-poor policies in South Africa, it is important that this distinction be clearly made.

For this reason, my analysis of the state of organization of the working class will put emphasis on the implications of this organizational difference for public policy.

Working Class Organization prior to the 1994 Democratic Elections

27 Following the political ban imposed on organizations fighting for political liberation in

South Africa such as the ANC and the PAC in the early 1960s, overt political organization of any kind in the black community disappeared for a decade. It was only with the workers’ strike that took place in the Durban docks in 1973 that signs of re-organization of the black working class in particular emerged. While the 1973 labor strike was significant, it was however the

Soweto students’ revolt in 1976 that marked the first serious challenge to apartheid rule in almost two decades (see Chapter 6 for an extensive discussion of the Soweto students uprising). Organizations of various kinds emerged all over South Africa principally to oppose apartheid. It was during this period that students formed their organizations; that civic associations were formed in black townships across South Africa; and it was also during this period that scores of independent trade unions were formed in all the industrial centers of

South Africa.

If the 1970s marked the revival of active opposition to apartheid, the decade of the

1980s is generally considered to have been the moment in which the insurgency against apartheid reached its tipping point. The organization of the working class in general and the poor in particular was indisputably at its highest. Reflecting on the political events of that decade the Community Agency for Social Enquiry (CASE) (undated) notes that in urban areas the insurgents used strikes; rent and consumer boycotts; disruption of classes in schools and universities; marches; occupation of buildings and offices; petitions and rallies to fight one aspect or the other of apartheid rule. No corner of South Africa was untouched by the political insurgency; even “independent homelands” in rural South Africa were affected by it. Patrick

Bond (2004:16) estimates that by 1990 80 civic associations had been established in black townships in the Gauteng province alone. The organization of the poor in black townships was so advanced that they began establishing structures of self-governance parallel to or in place of

28 the apartheid regime’s supported local authorities (I discuss the manifestation of this phenomenon in the field of education in Chapter 6).

At the national level the opposition to apartheid was led by two principal organizations: the United Democratic Front (UDF) and the Congress of South African Trade Unions

(COSATU). The two organizations were formed in the early 1980s although the circumstances leading to their formation were slightly different. When it was formed in August 1983 the UDF had a very limited mandate. It was meant to coordinate opposition to the apartheid government’s political reforms, which proposed co-opting Coloureds and Indians into the state’s political arrangement of creating two additional chambers in parliament in which they would be represented. The proposed scheme still excluded the black section of the population

(Seekings, 2000:2). The much broader role that the UDF came to play throughout the 1980s and early 1990s was actually imposed by escalating political opposition to apartheid rule, which required a national body for better coordination and organization. The UDF found itself coordinating and leading political activities of more than 500 community based organizations across South Africa which had decided to affiliate to it.

Working alongside the UDF was COSATU. When COSATU was formed in 1985 two years after the UDF, it boasted a total membership of approximately 460 000 workers. In the first 18 months of its existence that membership had grown to almost 800 000 (Habib and

Valodia, 2006:230). A few years later its membership was almost 2 million. Unlike the UDF which was loosely organized, COSATU had strong and tight organization built on a strong foundation of shop floor, regional and provincial structures. The tight organization allowed

COSATU to effectively mobilize its members to participate in its political programs. Crucially,

COSATU used its organization at the shop floor to link up its political campaigns with struggles taking place outside the workplace in the communities where its members lived

29 (Baskin, 1991).

This linking and weaving of workplace struggles with broader community struggles created a level of organization and mobilization of the working class and the poor that many observers consider to have been unprecedented in the history of South Africa. A look at one typical example demonstrates how effective such coordinated struggles were. In November

1984 COSATU called a two-day workers strike in which close to a million workers did not go to work. Crucially, that COSATU organized strike was joined by half a million students who stayed away from class in solidarity with the striking workers. In black townships the same workers’ strike was supported by consumer and rent boycotts in which the poor in black townships boycotted buying from businesses that were considered sympathetic to the apartheid government. By 1986 it was estimated that thousands of households in 54 black townships were withholding paying house rent to the authorities (Botha, 1992:63). The resultant loss of income crippled the local authorities and contributed to their total collapse.

The organization of the poor and their ability to render the entire country almost ungovernable forced the apartheid state to seek ways to co-govern with them. The government of former President F.W. de Klerk went on to establish transformation fora through which organizations of the poor co-governed with government authorities in the period leading up to the first democratic elections. In greater Johannesburg, for example, the government established the Transitional Metropolitan Council (TMC) in which organizations representing the poor such as the Soweto People’s Delegation (SPD) negotiated with the white

Johannesburg Council and the Transvaal Provincial Administration to establish an inclusive, equitable and democratic local governance regime (Schuster, 1995; Botha, 1992). At a much broader scale the South African National Civics Organization (SANCO), a successor to the

UDF established in March 1992, was a leading player in the Local Government Negotiating

30 Forum where major decisions were taken about the future of local government, including the drafting of the Local Government Transition Act, a law intended to usher democratic local government. COSATU on the other hand was participating in other fora such as the National

Economic Forum where major decisions about the future economic policies for a democratic

South Africa were also being taken (Seekings, 1997). Perhaps most importantly, both

COSATU and SANCO were behind the formulation of the RDP and its adoption by the ANC as its manifesto for the 1994 democratic elections. And both organizations mobilized their members intensely to vote for the ANC at the elections in 1994.

The participation of the organizations of the poor and the working class in structures established to shape the direction of a future South Africa reflected their level of organization and political influence. Looking back at the contribution made by the UDF, for instance,

Jeremy Seekings (2000:3), a noted historian of the UDF, observes that the “UDF inspired and mobilized people across South Africa to resist the state’s institutions and policies; it helped to build an unprecedented organizational structure from the local to the national levels; it coordinated diverse protests and campaigns…”. The same should be said of COSATU,

SANCO, the South African Council of Churches (SACC) and many other organizations of the poor. It is somewhat startling therefore that a few years after this level of organization and influence, most of these organizations couldn’t prevent the ANC government from enacting policies that were considered anti-poor. To understand that turn of events requires understanding the state of working class organizations after the democratic transition and their relationship with the ruling ANC.

Working class organization after the transition to democracy and the relationship with the ANC

31 The case of SANCO The democratic elections in South Africa that took place in April 1994 had a significant impact on the organizations of the working class and the poor. Having dedicated their resources and energies mobilizing their members to defeat apartheid rule and help the ANC win the elections; the advent of democracy meant that they had to redefine their mission and political agendas. This change was acutely articulated by Mlungisi Hlongwane, the president of

SANCO, when he declared:

We [SANCO] are no longer an organisation of boycotters. We cannot allow active local authorities to crumble…SANCO will offer no help to residents who do receive services, can afford to pay for services rendered, yet hide behind the unemployed to continue the boycott of services and bonds (quoted in Seekings, 1997:13)

The statement by Hlongwana is notable because SANCO had dedicated itself since its founding to mobilizing black communities to boycott paying rates and rent. The statement is also reflective of the problems that organizations of the poor such as SANCO faced in redefining their roles after the democratic transition. Many observers, for instance, remarked on significant organizational decline that SANCO experienced after the advent of democracy.

Jeremy Seekings (1997), for example, noted that SANCO’s resources were in a mess and that it had failed to mobilize its members since the advent of democracy. SANCO leaders admitted as much at their national conference held in April 1997. They revealed that their organization faced a crisis the most important symptoms of which were the chaotic state of its finances and the decline of membership. Important also were political aspects of SANCO’s crisis, which were largely reflected in it being increasingly ignored by the ANC (Ntlonti, quoted in

Seekings, 1997:3).

SANCO’s increasing political irrelevance was of course directly linked to its organizational decline. Seekings (1997:12) observes that SANCO’s weak organization undermined its participation and influence in important fora where it was represented such as

32 the Development Chamber of the National Economic Development and Labour Council

(NEDLAC); the Transitional Development Trust, which administered funding to non- governmental organizations; the Steering Committee of the Working for Water (an important program mandated to provide work opportunities to the poor in the area of water provision to poor areas); and the National Electricity Forum and the Telecommunications Forum. The poor participation of SANCO in those important fora was obviously costly in terms of it influencing and shaping government policy in favor of the poor.

Nowhere was SANCO’s exclusion from involvement in policy making more and devastating than in the area of housing. Housing, it should be remembered, was a signature issue for SANCO and its members considering the scarcity of housing in South Africa’s urban areas. Reflecting on their exclusion, the leadership of SANCO noted that their relationship with the Department of Housing, an agency of government responsible for providing houses, could best be described “as lukewarm”. Mr. Ntlonti, SANCO’s secretary, stated that the housing department (under the ANC’s authority) has a “perception that SANCO does not understanding [sic] the complexities and nature of housing delivery, we [SANCO] are still lost in Uhuru [Swahili for freedom] politics and are negative, that SANCO is not the only true representative of the community” (quoted in Seekings, 1997:13).

The disdain with which the ANC government treated SANCO also reflected the ANC’s general attitude to civil society as a whole. Since the ANC’s re-entry to South African politics in 1990, its relationship with civil society organizations fighting for democracy had proven uneasy. At the core of the uneasiness was the question of who had the mandate to lead the liberation movement. This was no idle question for it has to be remembered that the ANC had been absent from South Africa for three decades during which the struggle was led by organizations such as COSATU and the UDF. While COSATU’s role was somewhat clear

33 given its primary responsibility as a federation of trade unions organizing workers (see the next section in this chapter about the relationship between COSATU and the ANC); the relationship between the ANC and the UDF (and many civil society organizations affiliated to it and those not) was ambiguous, and its clarification urgent (Seekings, 2000). The reason for the ambiguity was that the UDF was formed primarily to protest against and defeat apartheid rule, which was the same mandate and mission that the ANC defined for itself. The answer to the question of which organization between the ANC and the UDF was to be a leader of the broad democratic movement was therefore important.

For reasons including the organizational weaknesses of the UDF and the legitimacy inherent to the ANC for its historical role as the most internationally known liberation movement in South Africa, a decision was taken to disband the UDF. The disbandment of the

UDF left many civil society organizations without a strong national ally who could contest the

ANC’s claim to be a sole torch bearer of liberation aspirations. The decision by civil society organizations to form SANCO to play the same role that the UDF had played could not have come as welcome news to the ANC. The hostility to SANCO and other civil society organizations demonstrated by the ANC government should be partly located in this historical context.

SANCO’s formation sparked a vigorous debate in the democratic movement about the role of civic organizations and civil society generally in post-apartheid South Africa (Glaser,

1997:05). Contributing to the spark of the debate was increasing divergence of opinions and strategies between the ANC and the civic movement. For instance in 1992 SANCO called for country-wide boycotts of municipal services and businesses in support of the ANC’s decision to break-off negotiations with the government of F.W. de Klerk. Thabo Mbeki, then a senior leader of the ANC, met with a top government official, Hernus Kriel, and declared that rent

34 and consumer boycotts were not the policy of the ANC and chastised SANCO for calling for such a boycott. That public rebuke from such a senior ANC leader exposed cleavages inside the broad democratic movement and sharply raised the question of SANCO’s (and civil society’s) right to embark on independent political activity (Bond, 2004:19).

The ANC had other reasons for wanting SANCO to disappear. One of them is that it wanted to establish its presence at the local level through establishing its branches in the same political space dominated by SANCO. A common sense response to the ANC’s desire to establish branches in areas dominated by civic associations should have been that of co- existence. But the ANC wanted none of that; it wanted civic associations to relinquish that political space and to be replaced by ANC local branches and ANC councilors.

The ANC’s attitude towards the civic associations reflected its attitude towards civil society as a whole. ANC intellectuals at the time such as Blade Nzimande and Mpumi

Sikhosana (1992; 1992) argued strongly against a greater role for civil society and civic associations in post-apartheid South Africa. They argued for their subordination to the wishes and imperatives of the democratic government (basically the ANC government). This view was also echoed by David Makhura (1999), who also argued for a subordinate role for civil society in its relationship with the ANC government. This led political observers and scholars such as

Steven Friedman (1992) to claim that the ANC did not want civil society to occupy a public sphere independent of political society, especially the ANC. Instead, Friedman suggested that the ANC wanted to colonize civil society as part of its hegemonic project to control all spheres of public life. While ANC allies disputed claims of subordinating civil society (see Swilling,

1992), what couldn’t be denied were the rising tensions between the ANC and the civic associations after the democratic transition. These tensions were publicly acknowledged by both the ANC and SANCO at a summit convened in 1997 to repair their relationship. SANCO

35 reported to the summit that “there is a looming break down of political linkages between

SANCO and the ANC at various levels of our organizations” (quoted in Seekings, 1997:16). It was also reported that in some parts of the country the ANC was suspending SANCO members from ANC membership; in other areas it was closing down SANCO offices without justifiable cause or consultation with SANCO. These reports of discord conveyed to the summit were also echoed by other knowledgeable sources such as Mzwanele Mayekiso, the former secretary of

SANCO, who observed that conflicts had arisen between the ANC and SANCO over

“organizational political hegemony” (Mayekiso, 1997).

The hostility towards SANCO displayed by the ANC was also shown to other organizations1. The difference however was that SANCO’s organizational declined made it easier for the ANC to sideline it politically and to exclude it from government policy making bodies. The overall impact of SANCO’s exclusion was the absence of the voice of the poor in policy discussions. While COSATU faced similar problems its organizational strength ensured its access to important policy making bodies, which in turn benefited its members, as will be seen in the next section.

The relationship between the ANC and COSATU

Similar to SANCO and other organizations of the poor, the political relationship between the ANC and COSATU was formally sealed after the ANC’s re-entry into the South

African political stage in 1990. Like similar alliances between labor unions and populist parties in other parts of the world such as Latin America, COSATU brought to its alliance with the

ANC its two million strong members and the resources and votes such a huge following

1 Interview with Trevor Ngwane, the leading figure of the new social movements in South Africa including the Anti-Privatization Forum and the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee (2.23.2005).

36 entailed. In return, COSATU expected the ANC government to implement policies that would favor its members’ interests.

Unlike SANCO and its predecessor, the UDF, COSATU entered into a political relationship with the ANC with certain strengths. In the first instance, COSATU was much better organized than SANCO and UDF ever were. The nucleus of its organization was in shop floors across South Africa where COSATU members were employed. Again in contrast to

SANCO and the UDF which adopted more federal organizational models, COSATU’s tight organizational model enabled it to quickly mobilize its members to face political and other challenges before it. Crucially, as a condition for membership in COSATU a membership fee had to be paid. The membership fees provided COSATU financial resources that were important for getting better organization and to conduct its campaigns. Furthermore, COSATU boasted a membership of well over a million, represented in every major economic center in

South Africa. Moreover, COSATU’s brand of “social movement unionism” meant its presence and influence stretched beyond the factory floor. As a result, COSATU was probably the most well organized political organization (and probably still is) in South Africa at the dawn of democracy in 1994. Additionally, since its founding in 1985, COSATU had been involved and led every major political event aimed at defeating apartheid rule. It was present in both formal townships and in shanty-towns (Baskin, 1991). The ANC on the other hand had been absent from South Africa for three decades. It had no organizational presence on the ground; had led no major struggles; and its leadership simply did not know the South Africa they returned to

(Cronin, 1992).

With all these organizational advantages, the expectation would have been that

COSATU would fare better in its engagement with the ANC than both the UDF and SANCO did. However, the balance of power seemed to drift away from COSATU towards the ANC. A

37 few major events seemed to tilt political power away from COSATU in favor of the ANC. Two events in particular lied behind this unexpected turn of events. The first was the decision to disband the UDF. That proved crucial because unlike COSATU whose primary mandate was to organize workers (although it often acted beyond the shop floor); the UDF’s role was primarily political. Its disbandment left the internal wing of the liberation movement—for which COSATU and the UDF were major parts—significantly weakened. The beneficiary of a weaker internal wing was of course the exile faction of the ANC which was fast taking control of the ANC and asserting its authority over different fragments of the liberation movement2.

The second momentous event that shaped the relationship between the ANC and

COSATU was actually the onset of negotiations between the government of F.W. de Klerk and the ANC. COSATU argued for its independent representation at the negotiating table (and perhaps justifiably so considering all its strengths I have mentioned above). The FW de Klerk administration however opposed COSATU’s independent representation in the negotiations, contending that the presence of the ANC in the negotiations’ table also meant that COSATU was represented3. While this argument made strategic sense for President de Klerk, for it meant that there would be fewer liberation voices on the table; it was the weak opposition by the

ANC leadership to de Klerk’s proposal which drew COSATU’s ire. All told, COSATU was excluded from independent representation in the negotiations. And the political consequences of COSATU’s exclusion were significant4.

In the first place, its exclusion meant that the ANC assumed the mantle of being the sole representative of the aspirations and political claims of the oppressed majority. The importance of that should not be under-estimated, after all the ANC had been completely

2 Interview with Langa Zita, ANC Member of Parliament (4.23.2007) 3 Interviews with Langa Zita, (4.23.2007) and Eddie Webster (2.22.2005) 4 Interview with Adam Habib (1.18.2005)

38 absent from the South African political scene for three decades. The struggles which had led to the very negotiations from which COSATU was being excluded had been led principally by

COSATU and the UDF. Secondly, as the only major political player representing the forces of liberation, the ANC determined the strategy of how to advance these claims inside and outside of the negotiations forum. That meant that the concerns and issues that organizations such as

COSATU cared about could only be articulated by and bargained for principally by the ANC.

Disagreements between the two organizations over the substance and strategy of negotiations soon emerged. One such disagreement arose over the question of staging mass protests during the negotiation process. According to Jeremy Cronin (1992) three views emerged over this question. First, some leaders of the ANC argued strongly against any form of mass political mobilization during the negotiations. They argued that such mobilization could rock the boat and lead to the collapse of negotiations. In effect, their view was that negotiations should be restricted to the elite drawn from the forces of apartheid and the liberation movement. This view was held mainly by former exiles in the ANC clustered around

President Thabo Mbeki. Another view was held by leaders such as Nelson Mandela, who argued that mass protests should be used only at moments when the ANC leadership felt they would influence the negotiations process in favor of the liberation forces. The last view was held mainly by the internal wing of the liberation movement, principally COSATU, which argued that it was critical to involve the people throughout the negotiations process. Their view was that the mobilized people were the force upon which the negotiators should draw their mandate and strength for the negotiations. Advocates of this view saw the negotiations and mass mobilization as two parallel and yet complimentary processes. What ultimately triumphed was the strategy of selective mass mobilization at critical moments in order to shift the negotiations process in favor of the ANC when it felt it was losing to the de Klerk’s

39 administration (Cronin, 1992). As the exile faction consolidated its control of the ANC, even this instrumentalist use of mass mobilization evaporated.

The disagreements between COSATU and the ANC over the negotiations were not only confined to matters of strategy and tactics. Increasingly, COSATU voiced its dissent about the substance of the negotiated settlement itself. There was a strong sentiment even then that the ANC was making significant concessions at the negotiating table with the apartheid government, which would constrain a democratically elected government (most likely ANC led) from implementing a radical program of social reform5. One issue that became the focus of dissent was the property clause in what became the interim constitution, which effectively guaranteed the protection of private property rights. The view from the left, particularly

COSATU, was that these constitutional protections of private property effectively meant that government could not, for instance, engage in any fundamental land redistribution program in a society with extreme inequalities in terms of land ownership6. Another bone of contention was another provision in the interim constitution, which guaranteed civil servants (drawn almost exclusively from the ranks of the apartheid government) their jobs for a minimum of at least five years. For organizations such as COSATU that had invested so much hope on fundamentally changing the face of the public service as a critical step in transforming state- society relations, this constitutionally-enshrined protection of the jobs of civil servants came as a painful slap in the face. And yet the senior leadership of the ANC argued that this guarantee of jobs for civil servants was crucial for averting resistance to democratic reforms that a potential loss of jobs would likely bring about7.

5 Interview with Langa Zita, an ANC Member of Parliament 6 Interview with Gwede Mantashe, Secretary General of the National Union of Mineworkers and current Secretary General of the ANC (1.3.2007) 7 Interview with Vishnu Padayachee, Senior Professor of Development Studies, University of KwaZulu-Natal, and an ANC advisor during the negotiations (2.10.2005)

40 None of COSATU’s objections over any of the issues mentioned above was heeded by the ANC leadership. These setbacks seem to have taught COSATU that it could not rely on the

ANC as the sole representative of the liberation claims. Leading up to the elections in 1994

COSATU took a decision to bind the ANC on a radical program of social and economic reform as a condition for support in the upcoming elections in 19948. That program became known as the Reconstruction and Development Program, and it this RDP which became the ANC’s manifesto for the 1994 elections. Additionally COSATU and the SACP decided to enter into a formal political alliance with the ANC with the RDP as the central political program that bound them together.

The two developments—forcing the ANC into a formal political alliance and binding it into campaigning on the RDP as a condition of support—suggest that COSATU realized that it had been completely outmaneuvered by the exile faction of the ANC. In just about four years since its return to South Africa this faction had thrust itself into leading the liberation movement, which was no small achievement considering that this faction had been in exile for three decades. It had also made the ANC the sole major representative of the disenfranchised in negotiations with the apartheid government. Significantly, it was on the verge of leading the

ANC into the first democratic elections, which in all likelihood the ANC would win with a significant majority.

COSATU on the other hand had squandered all its advantages in just a matter of a few years. Since its founding it had been at the forefront of struggles for a democratic South Africa.

It boasted almost two million strong registered members and many more that were not registered—a following that the ANC itself could only dream about. Its leaders were household names in South Africa and enjoyed the respect and admiration of working class families

8 Interview with Dinga Siqwebu, Deputy Secretary General of the National Union of Metal and Steel Workers of South Africa (NUMSA) (6.28.2006).

41 country wide. And yet, it had been excluded from the negotiations that it and the UDF had brought about in the first place. Its concerns about the ANC’s negotiations with the apartheid government had been ignored by the ANC. The only silver lining was the adoption of the RDP by the ANC as its elections manifesto9. The important question that faced COSATU in the lead-up to the elections in 1994 was whether it could use the RDP and its formal alliance with the ANC to influence the manner in which the ANC would govern.

The relationship between the ANC and COSATU after the 1994 elections

The first democratic elections in 1994, which the ANC won by 64% was a watershed moment not only for South Africa as a whole, but also for the relationship between COSATU and the ANC. Members of COSATU and millions of poor South Africans had voted for the

ANC not just as a form of gratitude for many years of struggle against apartheid. They entrusted their hopes and aspirations in what it promised to do once in government. They expected the ANC to implement the RDP, which promised a very ambitious program of progressive social reform. The beginning of the ANC’s term looked promising for COSATU and many people who shared its vision. Not only did the ANC government confirm the RDP as the central program of government; President Nelson Mandela also appointed key leaders of

COSATU and the SACP to important positions in his cabinet. For instance, Jay Naidoo, the founding general secretary of COSATU and one of the most popular leaders of the trade union movement in South Africa, was appointed the minister responsible for the implementation of the RDP. As if to demonstrate the seriousness with which the RDP was taken, the RDP ministry was located in the office of President Mandela. Many more leaders of the SACP and

COSATU were appointed to other important positions in government, and were also leading

9 Adam Habib argues that the adoption of the RDP by the ANC was the only time COSATU has only been influential in its relationship with the ANC. Interview with Adam Habib (1.18.2005).

42 members in parliament.

COSATU also sought to extend its influence in the ANC government by agitating for the establishment of a corporatist institution where labor (COSATU), government (the ANC government) and organized business would discuss and take decisions on economic and social policies. In the first six months of the ANC becoming government such an institution, named the National Economic Development and Labour Council (NEDLAC), was established. The objective of NEDLAC was to reach consensus and conclude agreements on economic and social policies before they were debated in parliament (Webster, 1998:53). By 1997 Maree

(quoted in Southall and Wood, 1999:73) notes that 21 such agreements had been reached at

NEDLAC. In instances in which COSATU was not satisfied with the direction discussions at

NEDLAC was following, it used its organizational capacity to mobilize its members to protest and strike. This happened in 1995 over the Labour Relations Bill, some aspects of which

COSATU was unhappy about. The same thing happened in 1997 over the Basic Conditions of

Employment Bill (Southall and Wood, 1999:74). COSATU won both battles.

In addition to its participation at NEDLAC and having its leaders serving in Cabinet,

COSATU also established an office in the South African Parliament. The objective of establishing that office was to lobby members of parliament to pass laws that were supportive of COSATU’s interests. Southall and Woods, (1999:73) observe that while the impact of the parliamentary office was uneven, it was however judged to have achieved “a number of strategic gains for workers, including the entrenchment of workers’ rights in the new constitution, as well as having made a host of submissions to parliamentary committees on different issues”.

The huge influence that COSATU exercised in the early days of the ANC government is significant not only for how it was attained, but also for differences in fortunes between

43 COSATU and other working class organizations such as SANCO. COSATU used three avenues adeptly. It used its organizational resources, including its massive membership, to influence policy in a variety of ways. The massive membership (around two million at the time) allowed COSATU to establish a policy research institute (called Naledi) that supported its engagement with the ANC government and organized business by formulating policies that were sympathetic to labor. It also used its financial resources to establish important offices such as the parliamentary office, and also for mobilizing its members for mass protests when they were deemed necessary. The other avenue that COSATU used was its access to the ANC.

Together with the SACP COSATU had established a formal political alliance with the ANC.

That allowed COSATU access to important power brokers inside the ANC, in addition to its former leaders who were members of Mandela’s cabinet. The third avenue that COSATU used was its access to state institutions. One avenue of access was of course its leaders who were members of Cabinet. The most important however was its participation at NEDLAC. The parliamentary office also helped.

Contrast the organizational strength and political access that COSATU enjoyed with

SANCO’s organization and access, it becomes clear why COSATU was more successful than

SANCO and other organizations of the poor. For instance, while SANCO had endorsed the

ANC for the elections in 1994, it was not a formal member of the political alliance, which

COSATU and the SACP were. As shown when discussing SANCO’s relationship with the

ANC and the ANC government, it was also excluded from participating in state structures that shaped and made policy. The result for SANCO in this case and importantly for the poor was a social reform project that was simply against them.

These differences in fortune between COSATU and SANCO lie at the heart of the argument I am making in this dissertation. And they point to some different ways in which

44 scholars should think about the development of social welfare regimes. COSATU’s success in the early years of the ANC government suggests that for the poor to shape policy in their favor they need to:

• Be organized (in the sense of having strong organizations that are well resourced and independent of outside political interests); • Be connected to a ruling party (and be afforded space to influence and shape policy positions inside the ruling party); and; • Have access to state institutions that make policy and be connected to policy makers inside the state.

The poor in South Africa lacked in all of the conditions mentioned above. Which brings me to the theoretical blind spot of the power resources theory: proponents of this view treat the working class as a monolithic social category. That might well have been the case in Western

Europe and other developed countries five decades ago. But the differentiation between those who are in formal employment (and therefore easy to organize by unions) and those who are outside is consequential. It has been proven to be more difficult to organize the poor who are either unemployed or engaged in survivalist activities in the informal sector. It also cannot be assumed that organizations that represent workers in the formal sector share similar interests with the poor outside the formal sector. There is no better illustration of these divergent interests than COSATU’s hostility to some organizations that have emerged in post-apartheid

South Africa to organize the poor outside the formal sector. At its 8th National Conference in

2003 COSATU passed a resolution concerning these new organizations. COSATU declared in its resolution that the emergence of social movements “hostile to the Alliance [its alliance with the SACP and the ANC] … necessitates the immediate strengthening and consolidation of the political centre [a euphemism for the Alliance], with a view to lead the masses on the issues that have given rise to these single issue based movements” (quoted in Lehulere, 2005).

45 COSATU vowed to “lead and mobilize mass campaigns to avoid opportunism and undermining of Alliance organizations” (quoted in Lehulere, 2005:3).

Considering the size of the informal sector in developing countries and the vast numbers of poor people who are unemployed, it would seem sensible to differentiate this group from those who are employed. The success of COSATU in shaping government’s policy to serve the interests of its members and the failure of organizations like SANCO to achieve the same success suggests that it is indeed worthwhile to make this distinction for the purpose of analysis.

COSATU’s successes and SANCO’s failures also point to an issue that the literature on the development of social welfare regimes often neglects to bring to the fore. And that is how the following factors that shape the development of social welfare regimes are related: working class organization, the relationship with a ruling left of center party, and access to the state.

There is a tendency to overlook their relationship to one another and how this relationship affects the development of social policy. The experiences of COSATU and SANCO suggest that strong working class organization is the foundation upon which beneficial ties with the ruling political party are built. The absence of strong working class organization often leads to an emergence of clientelist relations between the leaders of the poor and the party bosses. This is what seems to have happened in the case of SANCO where its national leadership has nurtured a relationship with ANC politicians that is beneficial to itself, sometimes at the expense of the poor whom it claims to represent (Seekings, 1997; Mayekiso, 1996).

COSATU’s experience suggests that a strong working class organization with accountable leadership is a precondition for securing a strong voice and influence with the political party ally. COSATU’s strong organization and influence in the ANC enabled it to shape policy decisions even before they were discussed in government. Crucially COSASTU used its strong

46 presence in the ANC to open access to the state, which it then used to shape policy. Access to the state came in the form of institutions such as NEDLAC where COSATU was strongly represented. It also came in the form of close ties COSATU had with its former leaders who were members of Cabinet. It also used its parliamentary office to lobby ANC politicians in parliament to support its position. The access to the state and the benefits of that access in turn strengthened COSATU organizationally since its victories and access to state resources attracted new members to it and increased its influence in society and among ANC politicians.

There developed therefore a virtuous relationship between these factors (see the Figure 1 below for the illustration of this relationship). The opposite was of course true for SANCO.

Figure 2: Model of COSATU’s influence over government policy

Strong organization Strong voice and influence inside the ANC

Access to the state and influence over government policy

The other way to make sense of COSATU’s successes in the early days of the ANC government is to think about it in terms of what social network scholars might call power networks. COSATU used its organizational resources and political strength to penetrate and influence important power and policy networks, which enabled it to shape public policy in its favor. The most important networks it accessed were in the ANC and in the state. The access to power and policy networks allowed COSATU to influence important pieces of legislation such

47 as the Labour Relations Act and many other policies that have proven beneficial to its constituency, and have in turn improved COSATU’s ability to organize better and recruit new members. Put differently, the influence inside the state enjoyed by COSATU increased its political stature and enabled it to accumulate more organizational resources.

Because SANCO and other organizations of the poor were simply weakly organized, the ANC leadership had no incentive to allow them space and influence in the ANC. The absence of influence in the ANC restricted their access to the state, which in turn meant that government failed to pass policies that would have been beneficial not only to their constituency, but would have enabled them to grow organizationally. A classic example to illustrate the impact of government policy on the organization of SANCO and other organizations representing the poor was the government policy regarding the funding of NGOs and other civil society organizations. Almost all civil society organizations had historically relied on donor funding for financing their daily operations and programs (Bond, 2004;

Seekings, 1997; CASE, no date). In the case of SANCO Seekings (1997:8) notes that when

SANCO was formed it received substantial donor funding from the European Union, the

Swedish labor movement and the USAID. That funding was discontinued as soon as the ANC took over government. CASE (no date: 31) notes that almost all of donor funding was re- channeled to the ANC government to enable it to finance its RDP projects. CASE also observes that while the government was meant to distribute some of this donor funding to

NGOs and other civil society organizations that was never done. Most organizations mobilizing the poor suffered as a result of the lack of funding.

Had SANCO been more influential it is conceivable to expect that it would have pressured the government to distribute funding to NGOs and other organizations as it was meant to do. SANCO’s participation in the Transitional National Development Trust, a body

48 established to develop policy on funding civil society organizations after the democratic transition, was so weak that its influence was considered very limited (Seekings, 1997:12). All these organizational weaknesses had a negative impact on SANCO’s influence in the ANC and the state, which in turn further compromised its organizational strength and political influence.

Importantly, its weaknesses undercut its ability to shape the trajectory of social reform in favor of the poor.

Conclusion

My focus in this chapter has been to analyze the state of organization of bodies representing the poor and their relationship to the ANC. I have shown that strong organization tended to lead to strong voice and influence inside the ANC, which in turn led to better access to the state and influence on government policy. To illustrate these general arguments, I showed that COSATU’s better organization enabled it to have better representation and voice inside the ANC. That political influence in the ANC opened access for COSATU in the state and allowed it to influence policy. Its successes in shaping policy had a positive effect of further strengthening its COSATU’s political standing and bolstering its organizational resources. The opposite was of course true for SANCO and other organizations of the poor.

In a sense what the experiences of COSATU and SANCO demonstrate is a positive relationship between strong organization, and political influence inside the political party ally and the state on the one hand and influence on public policy on the other. COSATU’s success shows that organizational strength, if well deployed, can translate into an enormous political resource that can be used to open access to and increase influence with the political party ally and in the state. However, the experience of COSATU also shows that positive government action can reinforce the organizational strength of organizations in civil society. This feedback

49 loop from the state to civil society is important because it suggests that while better organization is critical; its absence as in the case of SANCO and other organizations representing the poor should not be crippling. If positive state action can reinforce the organization of an already strong COSATU, it probably could assist in building SANCO’s organizational strength. It could be done, for instance, by channeling donor funding to civil society organizations; or better still, by providing financial support drawn from the state coffers to civil society organizations especially those representing the poor. It is these synergistic relationships between the state and civil society that have proven to be key to equitable development (Evans, 1997).

Finally, the South African case seems to suggest that it may be useful to make a distinction between the organized sections of the working class and the unorganized sections.

This is a fundamental departure from the power resources theory, which has tended to treat the working class as a one monolithic whole.

50

Chapter 3: State capacity and its implications for social reform

Introduction

Contrary to the argument I have put forth in the last chapter and throughout this dissertation, the ANC government consistently explains its general failure to implement pro- poor policies by arguing that this failure is due to limited state capacity to implement what are otherwise good policies. In one of the discussion papers for its National Conference held in

2002, the ANC contended that some of the problems it has encountered while in government

“are rooted in the vexed issue of limited capacity, both within government and within the

ANC” (2002). This view of a state limited in capacity had earlier been expressed by a commission appointed by President Mandela to review the structure and functioning of the

South African state bureaucracy. In its report published in 1998 the Presidential Review

Commission (PRC)—as it came to be called—argued that there were deficiencies and shortcomings in the public service and the machinery of government. It contended that “the system of governance in the new Republic of South Africa is in a number of crucial respects

51 not working well at this stage of the transition process”. It went on to observe that the “delivery of public services, their costs and quality, leave much to be desired” (PRC, 2002).

Echoing this view of a dysfunctional state bureaucracy, two senior officials from the

National Treasury have also suggested that the “public sector is not performing at anywhere near a level where it should be performing” (Naidoo and Simmonds, 2007:01). They argue that there are “flaws in our personnel policies, our human resources management systems, our macrostructure of government, our financial management models and our approach to training”. These flaws, they posit, have “skewed our development stance away from building human capabilities or of stimulating inclusive growth” (Naidoo and Simmonds, 2007:2). The argument of a limited state capacity that prevents government from implementing policies that promote social and economic development is also shared by some scholars such as Brian

Dollery and Joe Williams (1999:20), who argue that “state incapacity [has] frustrated efforts to date to ameliorate the lot of poor communities in South Africa”.

My purpose in this chapter is two-fold. First, using different dimensions and measures of state capacity, I will show that the South African state is not incapacitated, as the government claims. As a matter of fact, I will demonstrate that the South African state is one of the most capacitated in the developing world. Where capacity gaps exist, I will posit that they are not so severe as to drastically compromise any attempts at progressive social reform. I will show that while the apartheid state was repressive and normatively disagreeable, it however succeeded in building a relatively well capacitated state, which the ANC inherited in 1994.

Second, I will show how the ANC government’s attempt at reforming the state partially eroded these state capabilities that had been built over a period of almost 100 years. I will suggest that two principal factors lied behind the ANC government’s state reform project. It was firstly a reflection of its commitment to a neoliberal agenda, which required cutting

52 government spending and reducing the size of the state. It was also driven by a political imperative to employ senior ANC leaders and supporters to senior positions in the state bureaucracy. Employing them in the state bureaucracy was partly a typical instance of dispensing patronage to influential supporters. There was also much more to it. The ANC leadership wanted its trusted “cadres” running the high echelons of the state—a somewhat understandable consideration given the history of South Africa and the fact that the majority of senior civil servants were known sympathizers of the government the ANC had vigorously fought and was replacing. The combination of a strong ideological commitment to reducing the size of government with a political imperative to employ supporters into senior positions precluded any possibility of adding ANC sympathizers to the already existing bureaucratic corps, because that would have been considered expanding an already big bureaucracy. The only available course of action was to retrench a number of senior white bureaucrats who possessed vast experience. Their retrenchment meant that their experience that could have been used to deliver basic services was lost.

Using the arguments I introduced in chapter 1 and elaborated in chapter 2 I will explain how the project of restructuring the state the ANC implemented upon taking over power partly reflected the weak organization of the poor; their lack of influence and voice in the ANC; and the emergence of state-society relations that limited their access to institutions and networks of government. First though, it is important to describe briefly the history of state building in

South Africa, which left the ANC government with a state with expansive infrastructural capabilities.

The state bureaucracy inherited from apartheid

The establishment of the South African state bureaucracy can be traced back to the turn

53 of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. With the defeat of Afrikaners in the Anglo-

Boer War of 1899-1902 the British colonial administration extended its rule and control to the whole South African territory. Alfred Milner, who had been a Governor of the Cape and Natal colonies before then was appointed governor of what became the British colony of South

Africa, and moved his headquarters from the Cape to Pretoria, South Africa’s capital city

(Pickard, 2005:25). Using the British bureaucracy and its Cape Colony offspring as his model,

Alfred Milner began to build the South African state apparatus. He personally recruited,

Pickard notes, a team of young technocrats drawn from elite British colleges to reorganize the police service, the judiciary, public health, telephones, and established new institutions of local government. Milner and his team, Pickard further observes, “deliberately sought to give the post-war [i.e. the Anglo-Boer War] political system, civil service and education ‘an emphatically British bias’” (p.27). He did not only model the public institutions he was building on British ones, but also made English the language of government, and restricted access to the colonial administration to native English speakers (Pickard, p.27). As a result of this Anglicisation of the nascent South African public service 85% of civil servants were

English speaking by 1910, and the employment of Afrikaners into the public service was limited to those who were thoroughly Anglicised10.

The marginalization of Afrikaners from participation in state institutions was however short-lived. The establishment of the Union of South Africa in 1910, which essentially brought about a unitary South African state under the dominion of the British Empire, brought to an end exclusive domination of the public service by the British. Afrikaner political interests, now leading the state, began to press for better representation of Afrikaners in state institutions.

Afrikanerizing state institutions, as it came to be known, became the central policy goal of the

10 It was of course unimaginable that black people could be seriously considered for employment in the public service.

54 National Party-Labour Party coalition after its electoral victory in 1924. This coalition government introduced what its leader, JB. Hertzog, called a “civilized labour policy”, according to which the public service was to be used to employ poor and less skilled

Afrikaners, and where feasible, according to which black people in the economy as a whole were to be replaced by Afrikaners (Meredith, 1988:18). The introduction of this racially exclusive policy began what scholars such as Miller (2005) call the Afrikanerisation of the

South African public service. While there had been about 5000 whites employed in the state railway enterprise in 1921, for example, that number had increased to almost 16 000 by 1928.

This explosion in the number of state employees was due to the government policy of using the state as an employment agency for poor whites, principally Afrikaners (Miller, 2005:52). As part of the Afrikanerisation of the public service English speaking bureaucrats were encouraged to take early retirement from their public service positions. Miller (p.53) observes that by the 1980s the Afrikanerisation of the public service was almost complete with over

80% of the public service positions occupied by Afrikaners.

The employment of vast numbers of Afrikaners in the state bureaucracy resulted in its substantial increase in size as Table 3.1 below shows. In just five decades the bureaucracy increased from just 40 000 employees to well over a million. Consequently, by 1980 40% of all

Afrikaners in South Africa was employed in the state bureaucracy. An observation by Seegers

(1993:478) that the growth of the Afrikaner middle class was a result of their employment in the public service is therefore not surprising.

Table 3.1: Total number of civil servants, 1930-1980

55 Year Number of civil servants 1930 40 042 1950 280 000 1960 454 692 1970 549 865 1980 1 601 158 Source: Pickard (2005:37)

The development of the state bureaucracy was also tied to apartheid in other ways.

Having surprisingly won the 1948 general elections, the National Party went about implementing its policy of “separate development”, otherwise known as apartheid. At the core of apartheid was not only the idea of racial separation between white and black people; it was also an attempt to solve what was considered to be the problem of the minority status of whites in South Africa by banishing black people to their “homelands”—which were defined on an ethnic basis—away from “white” areas. That meant that each ethnic group had to have its own homeland administered by its own government. For other racial groups that were neither black nor white such as Asians and the people of mixed race, semi-independent administrative institutions were established to cater for these groups’ own affairs. The result of all this was a massive state bureaucracy that literally reached every corner of South Africa. At the dawn of the democratic elections in 1994 the combined state bureaucracy in South Africa was composed of 15 separate administrations consisting of 195 departments employing close to 2 million people (Public Service Commission, 1997:34). Just to illustrate the absurdity of these institutional duplications wrought by apartheid, it is worth considering Pickard’s observation that by1985 the “homelands’ governments” consisted of 14 legislatures with 1 270 members and 151 departments, which included 18 departments responsible for health, 14 departments of education and 14 departments of finance (2005:293).

56 While the purpose of establishing this complex web of state institutions might have been normatively undesirable, its impact on extending the reach of the state into the most remote areas of South Africa was impressive. This is the state apparatus that the ANC inherited in 1994. Its reach and capacity made it possible, for instance, for the government to deliver social security checks to over 12 million people, the large numbers of whom live in the most rural and remotest of areas.

To be sure, the state bureaucracy was complex, fragmented and unrepresentative of the majority of South Africans. To compound matters the newly elected government couldn’t fire any of the state bureaucrats no matter how poor their performance. The reason behind this was that the ANC committed itself to an agreement that would guarantee employment of state bureaucrats for a period of at least first five years after the democratic elections11 during the negotiations with the government of President F.W. de Klerk. Moreover, government ministers in the ANC government could not hire or fire employees in their departments because of a clause in the interim Constitution—another outcome of negotiations with the F.W. de Klerk’s government—which stipulated that all matters concerning the employment of employees in the civil service were the responsibility of an independent Public Service Commission—the majority of whose members were known to hold sympathies for the previous government12. So there was some reform of the state bureaucracy that the ANC would have to undertake.

The need for some state reform should not detract from the enormous state capabilities that the apartheid regime bequeathed to the ANC. As stated earlier, its reach covered every corner of South Africa, while its administrative capacities were considered equal to some of the best in the developing world.

11 Interview with Professor Sangweni, Chairperson of the Public Service Commission—(12.8.2006) 12 Interview with Professor Sangweni, one of possibly two commissioners sympathetic to the ANC then.

57 Reforming the state bureaucracy

Perhaps to show the urgency with which the new ANC government considered the reform of state bureaucracy, the first law it passed in office was the Public Service Act13, the purpose and effect of which was to create one central state bureaucracy and its nine provincial counterparts. By passing this law the ANC government wanted to redefine the values of the civil service so as to align them with the ethos and political imperatives of a developing democratic society. Chapter 13 of the interim Constitution passed in 1993 stipulated that such as civil service should, among other things, be non-partisan; serve all members of the public in an unbiased and impartial manner; loyally execute policies of government of the day; and be career-oriented.

The kind of a civil service envisaged in the interim Constitution was a rule-bound body that was efficient in the execution of its responsibilities, representative of the general population it served, and responsive to the needs of all citizens. What however became the focus of government’s efforts at reforming the civil service came short of these guiding principles enshrined in the Constitution. The central focus of government reforms was on reducing the size of the state bureaucracy in order to cut costs, which was consistent with its conservative macroeconomic strategy, GEAR (Wenzel, 2007). This focus was evident in the first White Paper that the ANC government published, which was on the Reconstruction and

Development Programme. In Chapter 5 of the White Paper the ANC government declared that the goal of reforms would be to reduce government consumption expenditure; and since most of its spending was on the remuneration of state bureaucrats, its focus became the reduction of the size of the state bureaucracy. The means identified to achieve that goal included leaving vacant posts unfilled (without compromising the affirmative action goals) and outsourcing

13 Interview with Professor Sangweni.

58 some government services to private providers (Ministry in the Office of the President, 1994).

Instead of concentrating on reform measures that would strengthen the capacity of the state and make it more representative of the citizenry it purported to serve, the ANC government’s state reform measures became simply about reducing the size of the bureaucracy in order to cut costs. While the language that the ANC had used prior to it taking over government focused on transforming relations between the state and society; when it came translating that rhetoric into action, the goal posts changed. Increasingly the rhetoric and the measures used were borrowed from New Public Management (NPM). Ivor Chipkin (2008) has observed that the influence of NPM became evident in most government policies. One of the major laws that carried the DNA of NPM, according to Chipkin, was the Public Finance

Management Act, which was passed in 1999. The Public Finance Management Act, Chipkin contends, removed responsibility for financial accounting from cabinet ministers and gave it instead to senior officials in their departments. The effect of this, Chipkin argues, was to give to senior members of the public service a high degree of autonomy vis-à-vis their ministers

(Chipkin, 2008:138).

Another sign of the ascendance of New Public Management was the government’s principal policy document on the reform of the state bureaucracy—the White Paper on the

Transformation of the Public Service—which declared that the Government of National Unity

“will seek to achieve its objectives of a reduced wage bill and a learner, but more effective, public service” through ‘“rightisizing” the public service’, “efficiency savings and productivity”, “adjusting remuneration structures”, “retrenchment, early retrenchment and attrition” and “ redeployment and retraining” (Department of Public Service and

Administration, 1995).

According to the Presidential Review Commission this “rightsizing” of the state

59 bureaucracy was the government’s attempt to cut costs as part of its GEAR policy (PRC, 1998,

Chapter 3). The rightsizing exercise involved, the Presidential Review Commission further revealed, imposing a ceiling on recruiting new staff; setting retrenchment targets for departments; abolishing all funded vacant posts; offering voluntary severance packages (VSPs) to employees in order to encourage them to leave the state bureaucracy, to mention just a few measures (ibid).

The results of “rightsizing” the state bureaucracy were immediate and disastrous for its capacity and functioning. The Presidential Review Commission observed that benefits of the exercise “have been vastly outweighed, however, by a number of important disadvantages, related in particular to the narrow budget-driven focus” (PRC, 1998, Chapter 3). The

Commission also noted that the restructuring of the public service has had a number of

“undesired and serious adverse effects”, including low staff morale, motivation and productivity; compromised the delivery of government services through the loss of skilled employees; failed to meet its affirmative action goals by placing ceilings on the recruitment of new staff (PRC, Chapter 3). It went on to argue that even when judged on its terms, the government restructuring exercise had failed. It concluded that the government’s state reform measures were inimical to the development imperatives of the RDP.

The argument by the ANC politicians in government that the reason for the government’s failure to bring about pro-poor social development is a weak state is rather odd considering that it is the same government’s state reform efforts which essentially weakened the state instead of strengthening it. Furthermore, rather than strengthening what the government considered to be a weak state, it established special purpose agencies for numerous functions and purposes, which it located outside the state (Philip Wenzel, 2007:52). The proliferation of such agencies, Wenzel observes, stood in sharp contrast to the “government’s

60 stated goals of eliminating duplication and fragmentation” (2007:53). As it turned out, many of the same parastatal agencies tended to be as bureaucratic and rule driven as departments they were intended to replace, Wenzel observes (ibid).

Another important plank of the ANC government’s project of reforming the state was the centralization of power at the national government level at the expense of subnational levels. Reflecting this bias in favor of national government, the South African constitution and various laws give enormous policy and fiscal powers to central government over (and perhaps at the expense of) subnational levels of government. For instance, various laws prohibit subnational levels of governments from raising their own revenues through taxation.

According to law, a municipality, for example, may not exercise its power to tax private property in a way that would “materially and unreasonably prejudice national economic policies”, and central government can set limits on the amount of the rate that municipalities may levy on property (the Draft Local Government Property Rates Bill, quoted in McDonald,

2002:23). As a result of policies and laws like the one quoted above subnational levels of government rely on central government for fiscal transfers from central government.

While this division of power may not be problematic per se, scholars (see McDonald,

2002:23) have shown that the amount of funding that the central government transfers to subnational government is so low that it would take decades for subnational levels of government to address service delivery backlogs. In the year 2000 for example, central government transferred R3 billion to local government, and yet projections of capital costs required to address service backlogs were in the order of R45-89 billion (depending on the level of service provided) (McDonald, 2002). In addition to the inadequate fiscal transfers to subnational government, the National Treasury was introducing policies that would, for instance, bar central government guarantees for loans taken out by municipalities (Pape and

61 McDonald, 2002:5). The effect of this policy was to further weaken municipalities’ ability to raise funds to finance development at the local level. The shortage of funds for development at subnational levels led to a phenomenon of unfunded mandates, a situation in which the central government mandates subnational governments to provide social services while denying them the resources to meet those mandates.

A look at the ANC government’s efforts at state reform shows that those reforms were antithetical to strengthening state capabilities. Instead, its reforms had the effect of gradually eroding the capacities that were inherited from the apartheid state. Shifting power to central government while devolving responsibility to subnational government further undermined the state’s capacity to meet the development needs of citizens. Even after implementing all these reforms, the capacity of the South African still rivaled some of the best in the developing world, as I show in the next section.

State capacity after reform

Before assessing the capacity of the South African state, it is important that the concept of state capacity be clearly defined. By state capacity I mean what Michael Mann (1984) calls the infrastructural power of the state. By that he means the “institutional capacity of a central state… to penetrate its territories and logistically implement decisions (quoted in Soifer,

2008:231). Soifer (2008:232) identifies three approaches for analyzing the infrastructural power of the state: its capabilities (i.e. resources at its disposal); its territorial reach; and the effects of its actions and policies on society.

Judged against these three dimensions of state capacity (or its infrastructural power), it is impossible to reach any conclusion other than that the South African state remains highly capacitated. For instance, one measure of the state’s capabilities is its ability to raise revenue

62 from society. Evidence shows that the South African state’s capability for collecting tax is very

good and has been increasing in the last decade and a half. Table 3.2 below shows, for

example, that between 1996 and 2006 the revenue collected by the South African state almost

quadrupled, while the number of people paying tax doubled.

Table 3.2: Tax collection capacity

1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 Revenue R’million 147.3 165.3 184.8 201.4 220.3 252.3 282.2 302.5 355.0 417.3 486.4 collection Tax Number 3 166 3 568 3 671 3 941 4 094 4 623 5 102 5 608 6 085 6 624 7 277 register of tax 795 089 130 375 271 870 227 223 436 767 006 payers Source: The Presidency, Republic of South Africa, 2007

Unlike most states in the African continent and other parts of the world whose reach in

territories under their jurisdiction is uneven, penetration of the South African state even to the

remotest of rural areas is legendary. It is able to do this partly because of an extensive road and

rail network. The Department of Transport (2005) estimates that the road network in South

Africa covers a total of 752, 700 square kilometers out of the 1.2 million square kilometers of

the country’s surface area (which includes forests, rivers and other inhospitable areas). This

road network covers both urban and rural areas. The rail network is the 10th largest in the world

connecting with networks in the sub-Saharan region (Department of Transport, 2005).

As a result of this extensive transport infrastructure the South African government is

able to provide services to the remotest of areas and build state institutions in every corner of

the country. For instance, every month the government pays social security checks to about 12

million people, the majority of whom live in rural areas (The Presidency, 2008). The reach of

the South African state into every corner of the country is also demonstrated by its wide

63 presence through state institutions such as schools, police stations, hospitals, etc. To take the example of education, provinces with large rural populations such as the Eastern Cape,

KwaZulu Natal, Limpopo and Mpumalanga paradoxically tend to have the highest number of public schools. The rural population in the Eastern Cape Province, for example, constituted

64% of the total provincial population in 2006 and yet the province had the highest proportion of public schools in South Africa (23.5%). 52% of the people in KwaZulu Natal province lived in rural areas and the province had 22.4% of the total number of public schools (SAIRR,

2006/07). While this is a rough indicator of the state territorial reach and penetration, it does suggest that its capacity to reach the most remote areas is high.

These measures of state capacity strongly indicate that the South African state does not suffer from incapacity. Moreover, assessments of state capacity from the government itself suggest that the capacity to provide state services is strong in South Africa. In August 2004, a few months after his reelection as president of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki wrote a letter to all his newly appointed ministers enquiring whether their departments possessed the capacity to deliver on the mandate of development that the ANC had just received from the electorate

(Department of Public Service and Administration, 2007:3). In response to this letter the South

African government began an exercise of assessing the capacity of the public service to achieve the goals set by government. In a consolidated report written after these capacity assessments, the Department of Public Service and Administration—a department appointed by the government to spearhead this exercise—found that while there are some capacity gaps in various areas of the public service, they do not fundamentally compromise government’s effectiveness. On the contrary, the report indicates that the capacity of the public service is gradually strengthening.

The fixation on state capacity by the government leaders, misplaced as it is considering

64 the capacity that exists in the state, belies a much bigger problem. It fundamentally reflects a perspective held by many with influence inside the ANC government about the meaning of development and how development occurs. It is a perspective, Sindane (2004) and McLennan

(2007) observe, that is modeled on Fordism, which assumes that given a number of inputs

(resources, decisions, plans and capacity), a specific output (development in this case) can be expected. According to this perspective, development is achieved, to quote Anne McLennan

(2007:2), “simply through the articulation and implementation of policy, better delivery systems or strategic state intervention”. Patrick Heller (2000) has called this view “technocratic creep”, the notion that solutions to problems of poverty, inequality and underdevelopment can be solved through technocratic solutions. Considering the dominance of this model of development in the higher echelons of the South African government, it should not be surprising that the language of state reform and its objectives were framed using the mantras of

New Public Management.

What this vision of development also brings to the fore is the fundamental question of the relationship between citizens and their government. At the core of this vision is the notion that the state stands apart from its citizens; the idea that to govern essentially means wielding the technical instruments of the state to deliver services to an otherwise passive citizenry. In the

South African business press the metaphor that is often used is that of “South Africa

Incorporated” with the president as the CEO—the notion that South Africa is essentially a corporation and that citizens are either customers or shareholders, and that the role of the state is basically to deliver services to a disengaged citizenry. The other metaphor which is widely used in official government documents and by senior members of government is that of the state as a machine. The state is often imagined as a machine that should be deployed for some public good. Ivor Chipkin (2008:135) notes that there is a lot at stake in the usage of these

65 metaphors. He suggests that what is at stake in the final analysis is the character of the modern state. In the case of South Africa, officialdom conceives the modern state as an instrument/machine that operates above society.

An explanation for the government’s approach to state reform

The foray of the ANC government into NPM wilderness was in large part a reflection of its general embrace of neoliberalism, with its focus on reducing the size of government.

What was striking was how little resistance the government’s project of state reform elicited from those who had most to lose from it: the poor. Part of the poor’s surrender reflected their weak organization, as I stated in the previous two chapters. The organizations that had historically organized them had almost collapsed by then. Describing SANCO of that period,

Mervin Gumede (2007:351) calls it “rudderless, embroiled in petty leadership tussles, routinely ensnared in allegations of corruption and shunned from the policy-making process”, “a patient in intensive care”. While other community based organizations such as the Anti-Privatisation

Forum (APF), the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee (SECC), the Landless People’s

Movement, to mention a few, emerged in the late 1990s to push-back against the privatization of public services; their struggles were too localized to have any major impact on changing policy (Ballard, Habib and Valodia, 2006). They also received a hostile reception from government authorities and civil society organizations such as COSATU.

The influence of the poor inside the ANC and the state was also nil. In the case of

SANCO the ANC for a long time held a view that civic associations were not welcomed since they were occupying the political space that the ANC branches at the local level should be occupying. The head of President Mbeki’s office in the ANC, Smuts Ngonyama, best articulated this view when he asked “Now that we have a democracy, why not incorporate

66 SANCO branches into those of the ANC?’ (quoted in Gumede, 2007:353). Reflective of the view that civic associations had to be disbanded in favor of ANC branches, their influence in the ANC was simply non-existent.

What is also striking about that period of state restructuring is the extent of COSATU’s involvement and consultation about the reform process. On every major policy proposal on state reform, be it the restructuring of local government or the human resource policy for the public service, COSATU was invited to make submissions. This partly reflected COSATU’s better organization. But it also reflected the increasing influence of public sector unions in

COSATU (the members of which had a direct stake in the outcome of state reform)14.

Reflecting on its involvement in shaping policy on the “transformation of the state”, COSATU states that it has used a combination of strategies “ranging from submissions to government departments, the Presidential Review Commission, and Parliament; discussions in the

[Tripartite] Alliance and NEDLAC; mass campaigns; within the structures created by the NFA

(National Framework Agreement on restructuring state owned enterprises); and within the collective bargaining arena” (COSATU, 2000: Chapter 7).

COSATU was able to do all this because it was organized and had access and influence in the ANC and in the state. The unemployed poor on the other hand had no strong organization that could represent them. SANCO, as Gumede noted, was like a patient in intensive care. Even at the local level where some civic organizations seem to have been active and vibrant (Heller, 2007:15-18), they were shut out from state structures and from influencing policy (Booysen, 2007). Their exclusion led some community organizations mobilizing the poor to engage in some sporadic and yet localized mass protests. Susan Booysen (2004:23) estimates that between March 2004 and March 2006 between 1 500 and 2000 grass-roots

14 See the next chapter for a discussion of the influence of public sector unions in COSATU.

67 protests occurred in South Africa principally against poor service delivery. She observes that those protests spanned South Africa’s metropolitan, urban and semi-urban areas and were “an unprecedented development, unmasking pent-up anger with service delivery a decade into

South Africa’s democracy” (p.23). She argues that the protests were essentially about poor people’s “struggle to make their voices heard in the corridors of power” (p.22). Booysen observes that “negligible, or at best unsatisfactory, levels of councilor contact with communities prevailed in many parts of the country” (p. 23).

The government’s response to these protests was classically technocratic: it blamed protests on what it called weak technical capacity in municipalities and started a program of sending technical experts to those weak municipalities (Department of Provincial and Local

Government, 2006). A classic problem of a lack of democratic participation and citizenship was misperceived by the government as a problem of state capacity. This was consistent with the government’s tendency to seek technical solutions to what are essentially political problems. The argument of limited state capacity which it has advanced to explain the dearth of progressive social reforms should be viewed in this broader context.

It is only recently that the ANC government essentially agreed with Susan Booysen that at the heart of the problem was the exclusion of the poor from institutions of governance and decision-making. In the recently published Fifteen Year Review report, the government admits that:

“The protests that engulfed some communities in recent years have had a variety of causes. They have been about service delivery and reflected local political dynamics. They have also arisen from failures of public representatives to account or fully involve citizens in decision-making that affects their lives; and failures of communities to exploit the opportunities of representative institutions (The Presidency, 2008:80

And yet for the most part of the past fourteen years, the influence of the poor in shaping

68 policies on important issues such as state reform was simply non-existent. The cost of their exclusion in the case of state reform has been an emergence of a state that is not only distant and unaccountable to them; but also a state that has essentially failed to provide them with the basic services they need for living.

Conclusion

The objective I have sought to achieve in this chapter is to debunk the ANC government’s argument that weak state capacity is at the root of its failure to bring about progressive social reforms. I have demonstrated that the South African state does not suffer from any crisis of capacity. In fact, I have shown that its capacity is strong and probably one of the strongest in the developing world.

I have argued that the government’s argument of state incapacity is reflective of its tendency to take refuge in technocratic solutions for what are essentially political problems.

Faced with a challenge of reforming the state bureaucracy inherited from apartheid to be functional and to reflect the values of a democratizing society, the ANC government implemented New Public Management measures of cost-cutting, rightisizing and privatizing public services. The effect of implementing these measures was neither an efficient nor effective state bureaucracy. Instead, the most skilled professionals were lost from the public service; staff morale declined; the cost-cutting budget targets were not met; and even the prized affirmative action targets were unmet.

When thousands of protests about poor service delivery and poor interaction between citizens and their government erupted across the width and breath of the country between 2004 and 2006, the government blamed poor service delivery on what it considered to be weak capacity in local government. Once again it turned what was essentially a political problem

69 into a technical one.

I have also argued that the ANC government’s approach to state reform reflected significant weaknesses in the organization of the poor. The organizational weaknesses translated into a total lack of access and influence in both the ANC and the state. Being shut out from these important political institutions where decisions about policy on state reform were taken meant that the poor could not shape it to their favor.

Chapter 4: A neoliberal turn in economic policy

Introduction

For the first democratic elections which took place in April 1994, the ANC campaigned on a redistributive and pro-poor economic development manifesto called the Reconstruction and Development Program (RDP). A few years into government it completely abandoned the

RDP in favor of the Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) strategy, a macroeconomic program that is widely considered to resemble neoliberal policies advocated by proponents of the Washington Consensus. The change from the RDP to GEAR proved important not only because it signified a clear departure from a pro-poor development agenda.

It was also important for the message it communicated about the power and influence of

70 organizations representing the poor. It is thus the purpose of this chapter to explain the change from the RDP to GEAR using the prism of the explanatory framework I introduced in the first chapter.

The introduction of the GEAR strategy

The introduction of GEAR in June 1996 and the policy proposals it contained differed quite substantially from the RDP. While the development of the RDP had been widely consultative; GEAR was written by a technical team of 15 policy makers and consultants comprised of officials from the Development Bank of Southern Africa (DBSA), the South

African Reserve Bank (SARB), three state departments, academics and two representatives from the World Bank (Visser, 2004:8). There was neither involvement nor consultation of any groups from civil society such as the trade unions and civic associations, as had been the case with the RDP. As Nelson Mandela would later admit, the vast majority of the leadership of the

ANC in and outside of government was also unaware that there was a new macro-economic strategy in the making15. Nor were Members of Parliament informed. A story is told that a day before the announcement of GEAR, the then deputy president Thabo Mbeki led a team of two ministers to a hastily convened meeting of the ANC caucus in Parliament in which he informed the caucus that the macro-economic strategy would be publicly announced the following day and that no dissent would be tolerated from any one16. Worse still, most members of

Mandela’s own Cabinet were not aware of GEAR’s existence days before its unveiling. On the day it was announced to the public Nelson Mandela declared that none of its proposals were

15 Interview with Goolam Aboobaker, Deputy Head of the Policy Unit in the Presidency (1.19.2005). 16 Interview with Ashraf Kariem, (1.29.2007). Ashraf Kariem is a Senior Economist at the Office of the President in South Africa. At the point of the unveiling of GEAR he was a researcher for the ANC caucus in parliament specializing in economic policy. He was present at the caucus meeting and was subsequently asked to write a speech for the chair of the chairperson of the parliamentary portfolio committee on finance, which was supportive of GEAR as the leadership had demanded.

71 negotiable.

It is important to remind ourselves of the political context under which GEAR was released to the public. In February 1996 the then President Nelson Mandela remarked in his address to parliament that South Africa was facing a stagnant economy, rising unemployment and persistent poverty. He therefore called on the public and private sectors to develop and implement a “national vision to lift us out of this quagmire” (quoted in Nattrass, 1996:25). An organization that represented big companies in South Africa, the South African Foundation, was the first to answer Mandela’s call by releasing its economic development vision document titled “Growth for All”. The basic policy proposal from this grouping was that the government had to implement neoliberal economic policies if it was serious about tackling the problems that Nelson Mandela had mentioned in his parliamentary address (Nattrass, 1996).

Labor unions, including COSATU, FEDSAL and NACTU, released their own counter- proposal to the business corporations’ titled “Social Equity and Job Creation” in which they argued for a set of policies that can be roughly described as Keynesian. Unlike the business group which considered what it called the rigidity of the labor market as the central impediment to employment creation; the document from labor pointed at low wages as the central problem. It was in this context of competing visions from big business and big labor that the ANC government released its GEAR macroeconomic strategy.

What GEAR proposed was a set of standard Washington Consensus policies: it prescribed a tight monetary policy; a relaxation of exchange controls; price liberalization; export-orientated growth; deficit reduction; privatization of state-owned enterprises; and, fiscal restraint, to mention a few. GEAR’s central proposals particularly with regards to social and economic reforms were well captured in the following paragraph:

In brief, government consumption expenditure should be cut back, private and public sector wage increases kept in check, tariff reform accelerated to

72 compensate for the depreciation and domestic savings performance improved. These measures will counteract the inflationary impact of the exchange rate adjustment, permit fiscal deficit targets to be reached, establish a climate for continued investor confidence and facilitate the financing of both private sector investment and accelerated development expenditure. (GEAR, 1996: sub-section ‘Accelerated Growth’).

More specifically, the ANC government promised that the implementation of GEAR would achieve the following:

• A GDP growth rate of 6 per cent per annum by the year 2000; • An inflation rate reaching 7.6 percent by the year 2000, later revised to a band of between 3 percent and 6 per cent after the adoption of inflation targeting; • Job creation to rise steadily to about 409 000 jobs annually by the year 2000; • An increase in foreign direct investment equivalent to almost 4 percent of the GDP; • An average real private investment growth of about 11.7 percent; • An increasingly smaller proportion of the national budget going towards servicing government debt; and, • A reduction of the government’s fiscal deficit to 3 percent of GDP by the year 2000. (Source: Lesufi, 2002:290-291)

GEAR’s unveiling drew immediate rebuke from various quarters. COSATU and other progressive organizations criticized both the secretive manner in which it was developed as well as its substantive policy proposals. Academics raised critical questions about the assumptions underpinning its econometric models (Adelzadeh, 1996), while others decried its rosy predictions about attracting private foreign investment (Nattrass, 1996). To add salt to injury to organizations such as COSATU, the unveiling of GEAR was soon followed by the shutting down of the RDP office, which had been located in President Mandela’s office. To

COSATU leaders and other left-leaning analysts the closure of the RDP Office was yet another indication that the ANC in government was quickly abandoning its progressive social reform program, the RDP, in favor of a neoliberal path as represented by GEAR (Adelzadeh, 1996).

The fierce opposition to GEAR did not however stop the ANC government from implementing it. What soon became the center of debate was whether GEAR was delivering on

73 its promises of economic growth, job creation, increased private investment, to mention a few.

The verdict from many independent observers was very negative. Writing almost a decade after its unveiling, Visser (2004:10) observed that GEAR “has not lived up to all the expectations of its planners to enhance growth, employment or redistribution”. He noted that in the period

1996-2001 the economy grew by only 2.7% a year instead of the 6% originally envisaged. He further observed that employment shrank instead of growing by 3%. Visser noted that instead of the additional “1, 3 million job opportunities supposed to be created by 2001; more than 1 million jobs have been destroyed since 1996” (2004:10). Visser was supported by Lesufi

(2002:291) who also stated that “not only has the strategy [GEAR] failed to deliver the forecasted growth rate, it has also failed to realize projected growth in manufacturing output”, a sector which was supposed to be an engine of economic growth according to GEAR’s projections. Lesufi noted that the ANC government had only been able to meet GEAR’s target on reducing the government deficit. He observed that government expenditure on most basic services and social infrastructure declined between 1997 and 2000. He noted that during that period spending on housing declined by 16.2%, on water by 7.2%, on education by 1.3% and on welfare by .3%. Furthermore, income was redistributed from the poor to the rich (p.293).

While the failure of GEAR to meet its objectives is considered an objective fact by most scholars even though the ANC government often makes justifications for GEAR’s introduction and implementation; what is significant is the politics behind its introduction and implementation. To understand the significance of its introduction one only has to remember that GEAR was publicly unveiled a mere two years into the ANC’s first term in government.

One also has to remember that just two years before then the ANC had won an overwhelming electoral mandate on the basis of a redistributive electoral platform called the RDP. Important also to remember is the fact that COSATU, the SACP and many progressive organizations had

74 invested substantial political capital in the adoption of the RDP as the ANC’s manifesto and therefore held significant political interest in its implementation by the ANC in government.

What happened in the political calculus of these political actors, one has to ask, that enabled the ANC leadership in government not only to formulate GEAR without the involvement of its political allies in labor and civil society, but also to implement it with utter disregard to their concerns and consideration? Using the explanatory framework I introduced in the first chapter, the next sections focus on answering this important question.

Explaining the ANC’s neoliberal turn in economic policy

There are significant disputes about why the ANC had to abandon the RDP and introduce GEAR. As stated in the first chapter the ANC government argues that it was a necessary response to a deteriorating macroeconomic environment17. Left organizations such as COSATU and scholars who are supportive of them contend on the other hand that the adoption of GEAR signified the ANC government’s shift from redistributive politics in favor of capitalist class interests18. In the interpretation of scholars such as Patrick Bond (2001), the

ANC government was effectively selling out to big business.

Whether the ANC was selling out or pragmatically responding to objective economic conditions is open to debate; what is beyond dispute is that GEAR and the closure of the RDP office did actually represent a shift from a pro-poor policy orientation to a neoliberal one.

Three factors, in my view, are critical to understanding this neoliberal turn. First, the political ease with which the ANC leadership shifted to the right reflected the emerging organizational weaknesses of progressive organizations. As shown in chapter 2, organizations that historically

17 Interview with Goolam Aboobaker 18 Interview with Trevor Ngwane, leader of the Anti-Privatisation Forum and the Soweto Crisis Committee (3.3.2005).

75 organized the poor outside the formal labor market such as SANCO had literally collapsed organizationally by 1996. It was however the changes taking place in COSATU that proved significant (I discuss these changes in detail in the next section). Second, progressive organizations such as COSATU were completely shut out from participating in the development of GEAR both inside the ANC and in the state. As stated earlier on in this chapter, only a few persons knew about the formulation of GEAR. Finally, the adoption of

GEAR reflected a shift of power inside the ANC away from the less powerful and poorer sections of society to an emerging black upper middle and capitalist class. It is the combination of these three political factors that is critical to understanding this shift towards neoliberalism.

Organizational weakening of the working class

In previous chapters I have discussed the collapse of organizations mobilizing the poor outside the formal sector and the impact this had on the representation of this segment of the population in policy debates and decisions. For the most part the interests of workers employed in the formal sectors were better advanced because COSATU was well organized and politically influential. The introduction of GEAR however exposed some serious weaknesses within COSATU itself. COSATU’s reputed organizational strength was actually beginning to show some signs of waning19. This weakening can be attributed to two main factors. The first was the exodus of many COSATU leaders to jobs in government, either as members of parliament or the executive, or as leading bureaucrats in the civil service. For example, both the president and secretary general of COSATU left the organization to become members of

Parliament and Cabinet respectively. Cyril Ramaphosa, a leading figure in the National Union of Mineworkers, became the chairperson of the committee of parliament drafting the new

19 Interview with Dinga Siqwebu, Deputy Secretary General of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA)

76 constitution of the country. While the presence of trade unionists in strategic posts in government was in many respects good for COSATU, the loss of experienced leaders left it in a much weaker position. Table 2.1 below shows that COSATU’s weakening came from other sources too.

Table 4.1: Trade unions and membership, 1994-2005 Registered union Number of Membership membership as a Registered of registered proportion of total Year trade unions trade unions employment (%) 1994 213 2 470 481 31.0 1995 248 2 690 727 33.3 1996 334 3 016 933 39.7 1997 417 3 412 645 45.2 1998 463 3 801 388 40.5 1999 499 3 359 497 32.4 2000 464 3 552 113 29.0 2001 485 3 939 075 35.2 2002 504 4 069 000 36.0 2003 369 3 277 685 28.7 2004 341 3 134 865 26.9 2005 341 3 112 000 25.3 Source: South Africa Survey 2006/07, SAIRR

In less than 10 years (between 1997 and 2005) the proportion of total employees who were members of a labor union declined from 45% to 25%. This decline in union membership coincided with also their splintering. While there were only 213 registered unions in 1994, that number had increased to 341 by 2005. Most of these trade unions, it is important to note, were not affiliated to COSATU, which meant that they were competing for membership with

COSATU-affiliated trade unions. The collective impact of these developments was to further weaken COSATU at the time the ANC government was beginning to assert its authority.

77 Additionally the character of COSATU’s membership was also changing. Historically

COSATU had drawn its members from industrial sectors such as mining, metal and steel; consequentially trade unions that tended to be dominant inside COSATU were mainly from these sectors. With job losses that took place in the industrial sectors in the 1990s and early

2000s, those unions lost members and began to decline. This decline coincided with growth in public sector unions, who represented mainly state employees such as teachers, nurses, and police officers20. While unions with the largest memberships had historically been industrial ones by 2003 that had begun to change; public sector unions had become bigger, as can be observed in Table 2.2 below. Take CEPPAWAWU for instance: it is a union representing workers in the paper and wood sector. In 1997 it had 104 422 members and yet by 2003 its membership had declined to a mere 67 162. NUMSA, a union of metal and steel workers boasted 220 000 members in 1997. By 2003 that membership had declined to just over 174

000. Another example is SACTWU, which is a union of workers in the clothing and textile sector. In 1997 it had 150 000 members, by 2003 they were only 110 216.

Over the same period public sector unions grew exponentially. A union such as

NEHAWU, which represents health professionals grew from 162 530 members in 1997 to over

234 000 by 2003. Similarly SADTU, which represents teachers experienced phenomenal growth between 1997 and 2003, as Table 2.2 below demonstrates.

Table 4.2: The changing profile of COSATU membership

Union 1997 1999 2003 CEPPWAWU 104 422 89 000 67 162* NEHAWU 162 530 231 825 234 607 NUM 310 596 251 954 299 509 NUMSA 220 000 220 000 174 212

20 Interviews with Sakhela Buhlungu and Eddie Webster, two of the most insightful observers of the trade union movement in South Africa.

78 POPCRU 44 999 59 145 75 937 SACTWU 150 000 127 000 110 216 SADTU 146 000 210 509 214 865 Source: Author’s adaptation from Ballard, Habib and Valodia (2006, p.225) *(Note that the unions in italics are industrial unions and those without are public sector ones).

Two points deserve comment about the growth of public sector unions. The first concerns the timing of their emergence. Most of them were formed at the beginning of political transition in the early 1990s. SADTU, NEHAWU and POPCRU respectively representing teachers, nurses and prison officers were formed during this period. Because these unions represent state employees, and labor union organizing in the state sector was prohibited before the political transition, their emergence is partly an indication of the political opening. The second spur to their growth was however due to the restructuring of the public service that took place in the mid to late 1990s (see chapter 3 for a discussion of this restructuring). The fear of losing their jobs pushed many state employees to form and/or join unions for protection. In certain state sectors such as the police service and health you have numerous unions representing the same constituency as a result.

The impact of all these changes in the economy, accompanied by the growth of public sector unions, on COSATU as an organization and on its relationship with the ANC proved significant. The political significance of the decline of industrial unions is that they have historically been the source of the most progressive ideas in COSATU. The RDP actually originated from NUMSA, the industrial labor union representing metal and steel workers21.

The increasing numbers of state employees in COSATU unions resulted in the increasing influence of their unions in COSATU. This influence often manifests itself in various ways.

For instance, never in its history had COSATU elected a non-industrial worker to its senior

21 Interview with Dinga Siqwebu

79 leadership. However in 2002 public sector unions ensured that one of their own—Willie

Madisha, the president of the teachers union SADTU—was elected president of COSATU. For a union which was formed by industrial and mineworkers, this was a significant development indeed for COSATU.

The dominance of public sector unions inside COSATU has become evident in other ways too. The South African Institute of Race Relations (2007:222) for instance notes that from 1995 onwards most strikes by workers in South Africa were committed by public sector workers. 87% of these strikes were over wages (p.220). Two points are significant about this.

The first is that it confirms the increasing significance of public sector unions and the decline of the industrial ones not only in COSATU but also in the labor market generally. Secondly, it is striking that almost all of the strikes by public sector unions were over wages. This is a significant departure from COSATU’s tradition of social movement unionism, which mixed shop-floor concerns with broader societal issues. The shift to narrow “shop-floor” focus suggests that public sector unions were narrowly concerned with improving their material conditions; broader issues such as macroeconomic strategy were probably not their immediate concern.

It is my contention that COSATU’s gradual organizational decline coupled with an increasing influence of public sector unions (with their narrow focus on wages) made it possible for the ANC government to abandon the RDP and implement GEAR. It would have been difficult, I submit, for the ANC leadership to act with such boldness and disregard for

COSATU in implementing its neoliberal agenda had COSATU been stronger. The organizational weaknesses of popular organizations such as SANCO and COSATU were however just one contributory factor. The other was changing politics inside the ANC.

80 ANC politics in the aftermath of apartheid

The history of the development of welfare regimes suggests that left of center ruling parties play a critical role in the development of such regimes. In the case of South Africa that would be the ANC. It is therefore worth looking at the changes the ANC went through that enabled its leadership to easily abandon implementing a pro-poor social reform agenda.

Experiences from other countries such as Argentina or Mexico, just to mention two, suggest that significant changes have to happen to social democratic parties before their leaders can easily implement unpopular policies. As I will show in this section, significant changes did indeed occur in the ANC that enabled the leadership in government to implement neoliberal reforms. Noteworthy in this regard was the shift in the balance of power away from the poor and their interests towards the more powerful and wealthy sections of the ANC’s support base.

This is the point that COSATU was making when it argued that the abandonment of the

RDP by the ANC and the introduction of GEAR were not just coincidental. They reflected the

ANC’s turn away from a redistributive social reform path in favor of creating a class of well- off black people. They called this the 1996 class project (COSATU, 2005)22. This class of black capitalists, COSATU and the SACP contended, would be the political base that would support the conservative reform path that the ANC government had chosen to follow.

COSATU and the SACP further contended that the political enterprise of creating the black capitalist class had overtaken a concern with improving the standard of living of the poor as a priority for the ANC government.

As evidence for their contention, COSATU and its allies pointed to various laws and policies that the ANC had implemented once in government to bring about what it calls black economic empowerment –popularly known as BEE in South Africa. What BEE means in

22 The project derives its name from the unveiling of GEAR in June 1996.

81 practice is that any private company that seeks a government contract should partner with a black company in order to be considered by government. Companies active in important sectors of the economy such as mining are also expected by the ANC government to include black people as shareholders in those companies. What that means in practice is private companies have to sell part of their equity to black companies in order to be considered good corporate citizens. For example in July 2002 the government’s Department of Minerals and

Energy proposed a mining charter through which all mining operations in South Africa would have to be 51% owned by black people in ten years, while at the same time a mining company would have to have a black company as a partner with at least 30% stake in existing operations in order to secure a new mining license (Southall, 2004:323)23.

The BEE laws have forced most companies, particularly those that depend on government contracts for business, to look around for prominent black personalities with close ties to the ANC to serve as BEE partners. Consequently prominent BEE companies are led by prominent ANC politicians some of whom occupy important positions in the state and the party. For instance, Harmony Gold sold 14% of its stake to Patrice Motsepe—a businessman with strong ANC links24. Gold Fields sold 15% of its shares to Mvelaphanda Resources, a company owned by Tokyo Sexwale, currently a prominent member of the NEC and former premier of the Gauteng Province. In finance major banks sold shares to ANC heavyweights such as Saki Macozoma, to whom Standard Bank sold a significant stake in what became a jointly controlled company. Many other companies followed suit selling their shares to prominent ANC leaders so much so that close observers estimated that between 1994 and 1997

23 These targets were reduced considerably when the mining companies protested. Instead of 51% black ownership in ten years, the percentage was reduced to 26% in ten years with the mining industry agreeing to raise R100 billion to fund the transfer (Southall, 2004). 24 One of Motsepe’s sisters in married to the ANC’s Minister of Transport, and another to the prominent member of the ANC’s National Executive Committee Cyril Ramaphosa.

82 10% of shares on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange was owned by black companies (Jacobs,

2002).

There is therefore evidence to support COSATU’s contention that there has been a concerted attempt by the ANC to create a black capitalist class. This is also supported by scholars such as Southall (2004:326) who argues that the ANC has embarked on a “more assertive approach to BEE with the objective of promoting a ‘patriotic’ capitalist bourgeoisie”.

He contends that the ANC is “constructing a pro-capitalist, interventionist state prepared to use its power, influence and divestment of assets to create a black bourgeoisie, expand the black middle class, and generally to produce a seismic transfer of wealth from white to black over a period of ten to twenty years” (2004:326). And COSATU and the SACP argue that this class project by the ANC is being implemented at the expense of poor black people in particular.

It is important to identify the political conditions that made it possible for the ANC leadership to abandon a pro-poor agenda in favor of a neoliberal and pro-black capitalist class one. I have identified two conditions so far: first, I have argued that the organizational weaknesses of progressive groups such as SANCO and COSATU undermined their political influence inside the ANC and the state. Because of these political weaknesses the ANC elite was able to exclude them from important policy decisions such as the formulation of GEAR.

Second, I have suggested that the control over state resources that followed the ANC becoming government gave its leadership enormous power of patronage, which it used to co-opt some leaders of progressive organizations and to shun those it considered troublesome.

For instance, in late 2001 the leadership of the ANC circulated a document in which it called leaders of COSATU and the SACP an ultra-leftist tendency within the ANC political alliance that had to be expelled from the ANC. Another attempt at excluding leaders of

COSATU and other progressive organizations occurred at the ANC National Conference in

83 1997 wherein the ANC leadership circulated a list of leaders whom it instructed its members not to vote into its powerful National Executive Committee (NEC). Most of those who were blacklisted were prominent leaders of COSATU and the SACP25. As a result the NEC during the presidency of Thabo Mbeki did not have a single trade unionist as a member, which was a significant departure from both history and tradition.

To the two political conditions identified above should be added a third. The ability of the ANC leadership to abandon a pro-poor reform agenda in favor of GEAR reflected significant weaknesses of the ANC grassroots structures. In numerous reports the Secretary

General of the ANC lamented about the poor state of the ANC at branch level. In his report to the 1997 National Conference he reported that ANC branches had become weak; its members less disciplined; the leadership less accountable to its members; its representatives in

Parliament more detached from their organization; and its financial resources in dire straits26.

Five years later at the 51st National Conference in 2002, the Secretary General also reported that the state of the ANC had become worse since his last report in 1997. He reported that the weakening of branches had worsened; its leadership ever more detached from ordinary members; and factional fights over positions and access to patronage had plunged the organization into crisis. The ANC’s Secretary General concluded his report by observing that the membership of his organization was completely demobilized.

The point about demobilization is particularly significant because a demobilized membership could not build strong grassroots organizations, which could have been used to challenge the ANC leadership when it introduced GEAR. The other important point to note is that the demobilization of the ANC grassroots structures mirrored similar demobilizations that had taken place in other countries. Hipsher (1996:273), for example, notes that similar

25 Interview with Gwede Mantashe. Gwede Mantashe was one of those who were blacklisted. 26 Section three of the Secretary General’s Report to the 50th National Conference. www.anc.org.za

84 experiences of demobilization occurred in numerous countries such as Poland, Uruguay,

Brazil, Chile, Spain and Russia, to mention a few examples. Noting the specific experiences of

Spain and Chile, Hipsher (1996:274) claims that there were deliberate attempts by political elites to constrain political activism out of fear that it might provoke the reaction of the right.

This was the same charge that COSATU and the SACP leveled against the ANC under the leadership of President Mbeki.

COSATU (1996:13) argued that because of these weaknesses in the branches of the

ANC, the ANC “operates more as an adjunct to, rather than a driver of, the state”. “[The

ANC’s] internal democracy is constantly being undermined as resolutions of the democratic process [in the ANC] are openly undermined or not implemented”, COSATU further charged.

This is combined [COSATU further charges] with fears of systematic sidelining of comrades and state institutions being used in a factional fashion” (ibid).

While the detail of these charges is open to contestation, what is beyond doubt is that the ANC experienced significant organizational decline in the aftermath of the democratic elections in 1994. Its weakening branches and a demobilized general membership was becoming unable to monitor whether its leadership in government was implementing a social reform agenda that benefited the poor sections of society. It was that environment of weakness, whether deliberately orchestrated by the leadership or not, that enabled the government to implement policies that some have called anti-poor.

The weaknesses in the ANC also provided an opportunity for the party’s leadership to implement what COSATU calls the modernization of the ANC. There were two substantive elements to this modernization project. The first involved shifting the ideology of the ANC from a far left organization advocating a political program of “radical social transformation”, to a “centre left” party that advances “third way” politics (COSATU, 1996:14). The second

85 element involved “attempts to further centralize power at the top” (ibid, p.14). COSATU argues that this modernization project is not driven “from the notion to open more space for mass participation in policy development and for the movement [i.e. the ANC and its allies] to retain its vibrancy and culture of robust debates”; rather, it “aims to reinforce technocratic processes and to further consolidate the power of leadership” (ibid, p.14).

The centralization of power at the top that COSATU alludes to is a reference to the power that the president of the ANC now possesses. He appoints not only members of his

Cabinet as the constitution of the country entitles him to. But he has also acquired the power to appoint premiers of provinces, mayors of big cities, and heads of departments of government departments. As COSATU warns, this concentration of power has a potential of “systematic sidelining of comrades” who are perceived to be opponents of the president, and creating a

“culture of yes-men and women in the democratic movement” (ibid, p.13).

In short then, the demobilization that often follows democratic transitions provides opportunities for political elites from ruling parties to implement policies that are at odds with the interests and wishes of their constituencies. So the story I have told here of a political elite that gets elected promising radical social reforms and then immediately abandons those promises once in power is not new. While those in COSATU and in other left organizations often express shock at what they consider to be a revolution betrayed, situating things in a broader comparative context does provide perspective sometimes. This is what I briefly do in the next section (an extensive comparative analysis is done in Chapter 7).

ANC’s turn to neoliberal reforms in comparative perspective

86 The ANC is not the first left party with strong links to the working class to embrace neoliberal reforms. In the last two to three decades there has been almost a stampede towards conservative social reforms in both the developed and the developing worlds. The experiences of several Latin American countries are however interesting for their close similarities to South

Africa under the ANC government. Take Argentina in the 1980s and 1990s for instance. Faced with an economic crisis, President Carlos Menem of the Justicialista Party (PJ) or the Peronist

Party introduced a fundamental program of neoliberal reforms, which he himself likened to surgery without anesthesia (Burgess and Levitsky, 2003:890). The reforms included standard neoliberal measures such as privatizing state controlled enterprises; reducing the size of government through cutting jobs in the bureaucracy; eliminating price controls; radical reduction of tariffs; to mention a few. Accompanying the economic reforms was also a program of transforming the PJ itself, delinking it from its long standing relationship with labor. That transformation involved reducing labor participation from the party and replacing with clientelist connections with the working class (Levitsky, 2003:4).

Further north in Mexico the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) was also undergoing a similar transformation. The economic reforms that Mexico went through under

President Carlos Salinas (1988-1994) also followed the Argentine path, if not in scale, then in content. What had been a strong relationship dating back to the early 1930s between labor and the PRI gradually caved in under the heavy burden of harsh neoliberal reforms, the cost of which was largely carried by labor and the poor (Burgess, 1999). In Venezuela, Chile, Peru and many other countries in Latin America the same path of neoliberal reforms was followed; long standing relationships with the working class were sacrificed; and the poor carried the burden.

The working class and the poor went through similar experiences in Eastern Europe, Asia,

Africa and indeed everywhere else in the world, with very few exceptions. The exceptions, as

87 will be shown in chapter 7, were in those countries where working class organization was very strong and the poor fought back.

The embrace of neoliberal reforms by a historically left of center party is thus not unique to South Africa. What is perhaps different about South Africa as compared to the Latin

American countries I have discussed above is that South Africa took a decision to adopt neoliberalism without a financial crisis preceding such a decision. That raises questions about the significance of financial crises for the adoption neoliberal reforms. Is the existence of a financial crisis a sufficient condition for the turn towards neoliberalism? The South African case seems to suggest that it is not.

The other difference is that while some Latin American countries had substantively de- linked their association with the organized working class as a condition to adopting neoliberal reforms; the ANC implemented neoliberal reforms while still linked to the organized working class. It was also still largely dependent on the working class and the poor for electoral support.

This created a serious contradiction which the ANC leadership tried to resolve by trying to drive a wedge between the leadership of the organized working class from the working class constituency27. In other words, the leadership of the ANC wanted to keep working class electoral support without having to deal with its organizations. As COSATU (1996) correctly observed the ANC leadership wanted to develop clientelist relations with the working class and the poor so as to minimize the working class’s resistance to its neoliberal reforms. The organizational weaknesses of the working class and the poor in some sectors made it possible for the ANC leadership to implement neoliberal reforms without losing working class support28. In other sectors such as education where the working class was organizationally strong, the ANC government failed to implement its reforms.

27 Interviews with Eddie Webster, Dinga Siqwebu, and Gwede Mantashe. 28 Interview with Sakhela Buhlungu

88 The ANC government’s rush to neoliberalism in the absence of any pressure imposed by a financial crisis or from international financial institutions raises questions about the ideological character of the ANC: is it really a left of center party? This is a difficult question to answer partly because the ANC is admittedly a hybrid political party with many ideological strands. It has been called a “broad church” because of the presence of competing ideological factions inside it. What is perhaps noteworthy to point out is that of the two main factions that have dominated politics in the ANC—the African nationalists on the one hand and the leftists on the other—it is the African nationalists who have led the ANC for the most part since the collapse of apartheid. To the extent that the nationalist faction was not as committed to the left agenda as the leftist faction was; it could be argued that its ideological orientation influenced its approach to social reforms. There is evidence to support this view. Alan Hirsch (2005) contends that the ANC government adopted neoliberal policies not because it was a fashionable thing to do or because it was browbeaten by the IMF or private bankers. Rather, the leadership of the ANC was preoccupied with not surrendering the country’s sovereignty to international financial capital, private or multilateral (p.5). According to this view, the implementation of pro-poor policies was economically unsustainable and would in fact have opened up the South African economy to difficulty that would have necessitated dependence on international financial institutions. The better option was to pursue a conservative path, which would hopefully lead to economic growth thereby preserving South Africa’s sovereignty. This view is shared by Gevisser (2007:663) who quotes Thabo Mbeki as saying

“Africans will be objects of compassion and contempt until such time as we have become demonstrable masters of our own destiny”. Mandisa Mbali (see the next chapter) identifies the same nationalist preoccupation as the factor behind Thabo Mbeki’s adventure to AIDS denialism.

89 While the explanation provided by Hirsch and Gevisser may be disputed by others, it is important to mention that African nationalism has over the years been one of the major ideological strands in the ANC. In fact, it came to define the presidency of Thabo Mbeki and informed many of its policies including its approach to addressing many conflicts in the continent such as the Zimbabwean crisis. It is likely that the same nationalism also informed the approach of the ANC government to domestic policy. What the nationalism explanation does not address is why the nationalist ideology of the ANC leadership had to be at the expense of the poor? It is this question which I have sought to address in this dissertation. I have argued that the organizational and political weaknesses of organizations of the poor and their exclusion from policy and governance processes undercut their ability to influence the trajectory of social reform in South Africa. It is the same weaknesses that kept COSATU inside the ANC even when the ANC government’s policies were detrimental to its constituency.

COSATU’s continued participation in the alliance with the ANC

There are three reasons, in my view, that explain COSATU’s continued presence in the alliance. The first concerns the general membership of COSATU. While the political rhetoric of the leadership of COSATU has increasingly suggested that it is ready to exit the alliance, opinion surveys of COSATU members have consistently shown that they would rather prefer that COSATU stay in the alliance with the ANC than leave it. This support for the alliance with the ANC is well demonstrated in Table 2.4 below, which shows that the vast majority of

COSATU members (66%) in 2004 supported the alliance with the ANC and wanted COSATU to remain within it. While the drop in members’ support from 82% in 1994 to 66% in 2004 seems significant, the support for the alliance even at 66% is still way above the 18% for those who prefer that COSATU be non-aligned to political parties, which receives the second

90 percentage support. Moreover, the drop in support for the alliance should be put in its proper perspective, which is that in 1994 the ANC had not made the policy choices it had made by

2004. The higher percentage support for the alliance in 1994 can be interpreted as reflecting feelings of solidarity from a collective struggle against apartheid, and perhaps the promises contained in the RDP.

Table: 4.3 COSATU members’ attitudes towards the alliance

1994 (%) 1998 (%) 2004 (%) Support the alliance 82 70 66 SACP alone 2 4 4 ANC alone n/a* n/a n/a New workers’ party n/a 4 6 Non-aligned 15 14 18 Another party/ies n/a 1 2 Do not know n/a 4 5 Source: Buhlungu, 2006 *Note: n/a means the question was not asked in that survey

Furthermore, the 66% support for the alliance in 2004 is significantly higher than all the other alternatives combined. This suggests that even by 2004, after all the infighting about policy and the attempts to break up the alliance by the ANC’s ruling faction, the membership of COSATU still preferred the continued existence of the alliance with the ANC. It is also

91 notable that members of COSATU much preferred the alliance with both the ANC and the

SACP rather than with the SACP alone. This is despite the widely held belief that COSATU is much closer to the SACP ideologically than it is to the ANC. It is also despite the influence that the SACP is understood to wield in COSATU29. I think the support by COSATU members for the alliance has probably dissuaded its leaders from even considering exit.

Other observers have suggested that there other reasons for COSATU’s continued participation in its alliance with the ANC. Dinga Siqwebu, the Deputy Secretary General of

NUMSA, for instance, contends that while COSATU leadership may find the policies of the

ANC government detrimental to the interests of the poor and its members; they still see the

ANC as the only viable political vehicle for realizing its own political ambitions30. He notes that there is no guarantee that if COSATU were to exit from the alliance with the ANC and form either its own party or join up with the SACP, it would win the elections. This view is shared by Moeletsi Mbeki, the brother of the current president, who also suggests that what would likely happen if the alliance were to break up is that some COSATU members would remain supporting the ANC, others would move on with COSATU, while others may simply decide to support other parties31. While the validity of these scenarios would only be known if the alliance were to break, the idea that some members of COSATU may remain supporting the

ANC seems plausible. After all, a very few of COSATU members either support an alliance with the SACP alone or a new workers party, as Table 2.4 above shows.

Experiences from other countries with party-union alliances also suggest that there may be another reason for COSATU’s continued relationship with the ANC. In her insightful

29 Interview with Professor Edward Webster 30 Interview with Dinga Siqwebu. It should be mentioned that NUMSA is considered the most radical of COSATU union affiliates; they have shown this by consistently arguing for the break up of the alliance and the formation of a workers party, ala PT in Brazil.

31 Interview with Mr. Mbeki (3.1.2007)

92 comparative analysis of party-union alliances in Mexico, Spain and Venezuela Katrina Burgess

(1999:19) observes that the responses of labor leaders to the implementation of neoliberal polices by their party allies depends on the balance of forces within the alliances themselves, and on the control that labor leaders have over the trade union movement as a whole.

Interesting in this regard is the case of Spain in which the alliance between the PSOE and the

UGT collapsed partly because, as Burgess observes, the balance of power within the alliance favored the UGT, which also faced fierce competition from other unions for workers’ loyalty and support.

This Spanish example is interesting for South Africa. Unlike the UGT, COSATU’s power inside its alliance with the ANC is very minimal. Furthermore, COSATU does not face any fierce competition for workers’ support from other unions. These two conditions that led to the break up of the alliance in Spain do not therefore exist in South Africa.

The leadership of COSATU therefore faces a serious political dilemma. It disapproves of the social reform project that the ANC is implementing in government, and yet it cannot do much about it because its influence in the alliance has diminished. It also cannot leave the alliance partly because its general membership still prefers staying inside by large percentages.

Even if it were to exit the alliance the political consequences of choosing that option are very uncertain at best.

Conclusion

My objective for this chapter has been to explain the ANC’s turn to neoliberalism in economic policy. I have argued that what made the turn possible was the waning organizational strength of COSATU and other pro-poor formations; the shifting balance of power in the ANC away from the poor towards the wealthy; and also the demobilization of the ANC local base.

93 As was evident in the last chapter and will soon be seen in the next one, weak organization of the working class tends to have a negative serial effect on other factors such as influence in the

ANC and access in the state and policy making. In the case of economic policy, I have shown that weak organization of the poor (and the working class generally) ensured their political sidelining and exclusion by the ANC not only from its policy making structures but also from participating in important policy decisions made by government policy makers such as the formulation of GEAR .

94

Chapter 5: The tragedy of HIV/AIDS

Introduction

The analysis in this chapter focuses on the ANC government’s response to the AIDS pandemic. Unlike in education where the ANC government has implemented pro-poor policies, its response to HIV/AIDS has been dismal. I argue that the different responses by the government to the economy, HIV/AIDS and education respectively can be explained primarily by the differences in the organization of poor people and their access to and influence on policy making bodies and networks. In the area of health, particularly AIDS, poor people have historically been weakly organized, and their access to policy making bodies and influence on policy also weak. This is in marked contrast to the education sector where their level of organization has always been high and their access on policy making bodies also substantial.

The consequences of the ANC government’s failure to deal with the AIDS pandemic have been overwhelmingly tragic as the next section shows.

HIV/AIDS prevalence in South Africa

The prevalence of HIV/AIDS in South Africa has reached pandemic proportions.

Statistics from various sources including the South African government’s own Department of

95 Health indicate that by 2002 there were 5.3 million South Africans living with HIV/AIDS32— the largest number of people living with HIV/AIDS in any country in the world (Department of

Health, 2002). Of the 5.3 million infected, 2.9 million are women and 230 000 are children.

The Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) 2004 Report on the Global AIDS

Pandemic further estimates that 1.1 million children are orphaned as a result of HIV/AIDS in

South Africa. The same report also estimates that 370 000 adults and children died from

HIV/AIDS in South Africa in 2003 alone—more than 1 000 deaths a day (UNAIDS, 2004).

These are grim statistics by any measure. It is however worth noting that the situation has not always been this dire in South Africa. As a matter of fact, when the first survey on the prevalence of HIV/AIDS was conducted in South Africa in 1982, only two gay males were discovered to be infected by the HI Virus. Alan Whiteside (2006) claims that it was only in

July 1991 that the number of heterosexually transmitted HIV cases was estimated to be equal the number of homosexual cases. Whiteside (ibid) also notes that a number of surveys that were conducted in the 1980s showed an almost total absence of the HIV/AIDS prevalence in the black sections of the South African population, the migrant laborers being the exception. In

1990 only 0.8 percent of pregnant women attending antenatal state clinics were found to be positive. The small prevalence of HIV/AIDS led many, including those in government, to consider AIDS in South Africa a primarily gay disease affecting only white people.

And yet between 1990 and 1994 the percentage of pregnant women who were diagnosed with HIV had increased to 7.6 percent. Five years later in 1999 HIV prevalence had increased to 22.4 percent, and in 2004 it stood at 29.4 percent. So between 1982 and 2004 the number of South Africans infected by the HIV had increased from a mere two cases—two individuals—to well over five million people, young and old. And in just fourteen years—that

32 This was out of a total population of 43 million.

96 is between 1990 and 2004—the percentage of South Africans estimated to be infected had jumped from less than a percent (at 0.8) to close to 30 percent. In other words, in the first 10 years of democratic government HIV infection ballooned from 7.6 percent in 1994 to 29.4 percent in 2004. That means that most of the increase in HIV infection happened under the

ANC government’s watch.

Table 5.1 clearly demonstrates that the impact of the HIV/AIDS pandemic on the South

African population has been significant and devastating. By the year 2006 accumulated AIDS deaths in South Africa had passed the 1 million mark, and increasing. It is estimated that by

2010 50% of total deaths in South Africa will be caused by AIDS related diseases. The 50% death figure is actually not surprising if one considers that close to 6 million people are expected to be infected by the HI Virus by the end of 2008.

Table 5.1: Estimated effects of HIV/AIDS on total population, 2000-08

2000 2002 2004 2006 2008 Population 44 871 939 46 086 931 47 071 291 47 866 985 48 545 699 Total HIV 3 559 584 4 419 442 4 997 456 5 372 474 5 628 473 Infections

AIDS deaths 147 525 237 235 315 870 354 379 374 355

AIDS deaths 28% 38% 45% 47% 49% as a proportion of total deaths

Accumulated AIDS deaths 302 790 641 903 1 161 686 1 814 457 2 535 835

Prevalence rate (total population) 7.9% 9.6% 10.6% 11.2% 11.6%

Life expectancy 56.2 53.5 51.4 50.7 50.5 at birth Source: Adaptation by the author from the South African Survey 2006/07, SAIRR

This explosion of HIV/AIDS into pandemic proportions raises serious questions. The

97 first is: why did the situation in South Africa get so bad, so fast? And secondly and related to the first question: what has been the government response to the AIDS pandemic? The large part of this chapter focuses on providing answers to these questions. Following from the argument introduced in the first chapter I argue that to understand the tragedy of AIDS in

South Africa requires understanding the power resources of poor people. Historically, the health sector has been an area in which the working class and the poor have been weakly organized. It is a sector which has historically been dominated by professional non-government organizations (NGOs)33, associations of professionals such as medical practitioners, and large corporate organizations such as pharmaceutical and medical insurance companies. Key to explaining the government’s ineffective response to the pandemic is an understanding of the weaknesses of the poor in this sector.

The shift in the balance of power inside the ANC-led alliance after the 1994 democratic elections, I will argue, also contributed significantly to the ANC’s poor response to HIV/AIDS.

Progressive organizations such as COSATU that would ordinarily have vigorously opposed the government’s policy on AIDS were cowed by strong-arm tactics used against those who opposed government’s policy. This was especially the case under the Mbeki presidency, which came to be associated with his denial of the scientific link between HIV and AIDS. His presidency was also characterized by the government’s reluctance, if not refusal, to provide antiretroviral treatment to persons infected with HIV and AIDS. This refusal to provide antiretroviral drugs reached a climax in October 1999 when President Mbeki, in an address to the National Council of Provinces, a second chamber of Parliament in South Africa, declared

33 It is important to mention that the role that professional NGOs have played in relation to the poor has either been to advocate for policy changes on their behalf or to provide services such as taking care of the sick. By and large, they have not played a role of mobilizing the poor into a political force that would challenge the policy of government on HIV/AIDS. It was only with the arrival of the Treatment Action Campaign that the poor who are infected by the HIV/AIDS got politically mobilized.

98 that AZT—an antiretroviral drug which was proposed by medical scientists for use by HIV positive pregnant mothers to prevent their unborn children from infection by the HI virus—was toxic, and instructed his minister of health to investigate its safety and efficacy34. This claim of

AZT’s toxicity would later be used by his administration to deny pregnant mothers access to the ARVs; a decision that was challenged by the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) in the courts of law and won.

My argument is that such catastrophic adventures into denialism and its associated tragic consequences would have been less likely had the poor been well organized; had the balance of power inside the ANC and in civil society favored those who carried the heavy burden of the AIDS pandemic: the poor; and had the poor had access and influence in policy making bodies in the state. But before the onset of President Mbeki’s denialism there was what

Mark Heywood calls President Mandela’s “benign neglect” of the pandemic35.

The Nelson Mandela administration: the era of benign neglect, 1994-1999

In the five years in which Nelson Mandela was president of South Africa the prevalence of HIV/AIDS jumped from 7.6 percent at the moment he became president in 1994 to 22.4 percent by the time he left office in 1999 (Pieter Fourie, 2006: 109). In an interview with the

BBC in 2003 Mandela confessed that his office did not do much to combat the epidemic. He explained this failure thus: “during the 1994 elections I wanted to win and I didn’t talk about

AIDS”, and that once he was President he “had no time to concentrate on the issue”36. While his honest admission is commendable, the failure of his administration to effectively address the pandemic is odd considering that the ANC had long been aware of the devastating impact

34 Interview with Mark Heywood, the secretary of the Treatment Action Campaign (12.11.2006) 35 Interview with Mark Heywood 36 BBC interview cited in Heywood, 2004:96.

99 of HIV/AIDS when not properly addressed, and had even vowed that it would address it if elected to government in 1994.

In fact as early as 1990 when its leaders returned from political exile, the ANC had voiced its concerns with its internal allies and the government under FW de Klerk about what it considered to be an impending disaster of the AIDS epidemic. At the forefront of this awareness campaign about HIV/AIDS were two females who would later become ministers of health in post-apartheid South Africa, Drs Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma and Manto Tshabala

Msimang, respectively former and current Minister of Health. They were joined by other leaders such as the charismatic Chris Hani, who also advised the administration of President de

Klerk to confront the AIDS epidemic with haste and resolve if South Africa were to stand a reasonable chance of defeating it37. The dominant view inside the ANC at the time was that the apartheid government had dismally failed to prepare for and address the AIDS pandemic.

As a response to what the ANC considered to be South Africa’s unpreparedness to confront HIV/AIDS it collaborated with President de Klerk’s administration in organizing a first conference on AIDS in South Africa held in 1992 in which all major political, medical and civil society players participated. The key result of that conference was the establishment of the

National AIDS Coordinating Committee of South Africa (NACOSA). Fourie (2006:100) notes that the role of NACOSA was to serve as a caucus for all major stakeholders which sought to devise a strategy to respond to the AIDS pandemic. The fact that this body was formed two years before the first democratic elections in 1994, and at the sensitive period during the negotiations for the democratic transition demonstrated the seriousness with which the AIDS

37 This information comes from the interviews with Mark Heywood and Francie Lund (2.10.2005). Francie Lund, a Natal University academic who was an ANC activist and participated at various fora at which the ANC leadership dealt with the issue of AIDS. Their recollection of events is corroborated by Fazel Randera, who heads the health department of the Chamber of Mines and was for a long time a leading health activist of the ANC in exile (interview, 12.12.2005).

100 epidemic was beginning to be taken. NACOSA released its battle plan for combating AIDS simply called the National AIDS Plan (NAP in short or just the Plan). This National AIDS Plan was soon adopted by the ANC-led government when it took office in 1994 as its plan for combating AIDS.

The NAP marked a significant departure from the approach that the apartheid government under presidents PW Botha and FW de Klerk had taken to AIDS. At first the two administrations had treated AIDS predominantly as a disease that afflicted what they considered to be social and moral deviants such as homosexuals, prostitutes and those who contracted the virus through the use of needles when abusing unlawful drugs (Fourie, 2006).

Their approach to “moral deviants” was to strengthen laws that dealt with immorality in an attempt to further portray persons infected by HIV as moral social and moral outcasts. For instance, when the de Klerk administration signed the Public Health Act into law, which sought to make AIDS a notifiable disease thereby compelling physicians and other health practitioners to report persons who were HIV/AIDS positive who came through their care, the purpose was to publicly expose such persons. Immigrant laborers from other African countries north of South Africa were also required to be tested for HIV as a condition for obtaining a permit to work in South Africa (Fourie, 2006). At the center of the de Klerk administration’s approach to the HIV/AIDS epidemic was a desire and an attempt to demonize and exclude those who were infected38.

The NAP on the other hand took a completely different philosophical and socio- political approach to the epidemic. At the core of the NAP was a human rights approach to the epidemic, which meant that the human dignity and rights of those infected with the HIV had to be respected. What this approach meant in practice was that a person’s HIV status had to be

38 Interview with Fazel Randera (12.12.2005)

101 treated with confidentiality; health practitioners and any other authority that came to know about it were obliged by law to respect such confidentiality. Thus the notion of making AIDS a notifiable disease was roundly rejected because it was realized that forcing people to publicly declare their status at the moment when there was so much stigma and fear around the epidemic would drive it underground (Fourie, 2006:108; Heywood, 2006). Importantly, the

NAP recognized that combating the epidemic required more than medical interventions; after all, AIDS threatened the social, political and economic foundations of societies. In the NAP’s view, the only way in which the scourge of HIV/AIDS would be fought would be through forming a social movement of awareness, living safe and healthy lifestyles, and providing treatment to those who were already infected39.

While the NAP’s philosophy was admirable, its real test, as is almost invariably the case with all public policies, turned out to be in practice. Challenges with the implementation of the plan soon emerged. The first public misstep the Mandela administration found itself entangled in occurred in 1996 when it came up with the idea of using drama to increase the youth’s awareness of AIDS. A famous South African playwright, Mbongeni Ngema, was awarded a government tender to produce a play, Sarafina II, which would show the dangers of

AIDS to young people. While the idea of using this medium to communicate the message of prevention was creative, the manner in which the tender was awarded and the amount involved raised serious questions about the government’s judgment on the most pressing issue facing

South Africa. It was alleged that tender procedures were not followed, and that the money given to the playwright for producing the play took more than a third of the total HIV/AIDS budget.

The second misstep was more serious. In 1997 a group of academics associated with

39 Fourie, ibid.

102 the University of Pretoria in South Africa announced that they had found a miraculous vaccine that would cure AIDS. According to various accounts, the then Deputy President of South

Africa, Thabo Mbeki, organized for these scientists to make a presentation on their

“miraculous cure” to the South African Cabinet. From what happened thereafter, it would appear that the Cabinet endorsed their cure, and Deputy President Thabo Mbeki and the then

Minister of Health fought hard for the scientists to be allowed to conduct clinical trials in order to establish the efficacy of their vaccine. The trouble was that the scientific community in

South Africa, especially the Medicines Control Council (MCC), refused to allow the clinical trials to go ahead because the scientific validity of their claims were considered questionable and the safety of their vaccine suspect. What followed the refusal by the MCC to allow the clinical trials for the “vaccine” was an unparalleled outburst by Deputy President Mbeki, who accused the MCC of preventing the said scientists from providing African solutions to African problems. A few years later, the MCC was disbanded and a new body formed40.

The two incidents mentioned above could perhaps be excused as missteps of a government that was still getting a grip on the task of governing. What the missteps did achieve however was to erode public confidence in the government’s ability to deal with the epidemic right at the moment when it was reaching its tipping point. The defining moment of the Mandela administration’s failure to effectively address the AIDS epidemic however came in 1998. At stake was the demand by people already living with AIDS for the state to provide them with medical treatment. This demand went against the government’s response to the epidemic which concentrated mainly on promoting prevention rather than treatment41. This government’s insistence on prevention as the strategy to combat AIDS seemed to ignore that a large number of people who were already infected were transitioning from the HIV phase to

40 The information in this sections is largely drawn from Fourie (2006) 41 Interview with Francie Lund (see date above).

103 full blown AIDS. Demands for treatment also coincided with the production of new drugs in the United States that slowed down the progression of AIDS related diseases. The drug that particularly caught the attention of South African AIDS activists was AZT, which had been shown to reduce the transmission of HIV from a pregnant mother to her unborn child. When people living with AIDS proposed to the Mandela administration for the purchase of ARVs such as AZT to prevent mother to child transmission; the administration balked at the proposal42. Its argument was that the drugs were too expensive and therefore unaffordable, and belatedly that ARVs were toxic. The response of people living with AIDS (PWAs) to the government’s refusal was to launch the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) in December 1998, to serve as a pressure group to force government to provide treatment to people already infected with AIDS. The campaign for treatment reached its climax when the TAC took the

South African government to the highest court in the land, the Constitutional Court, over its refusal to provide treatment therapy to PWAs, and TAC won the case43.

Explaining the Mandela administration failure to address the HIV/AIDS epidemic

Commentary on the tragedy of AIDS in South Africa has mostly focused on the strange views of President Mbeki and his Minister of Health, Manto Tshabala Msimang, regarding the relationship between HIV and AIDS. What is often neglected is that the explosive spread of the

AIDS epidemic happened under President Nelson Mandela’s watch. What needs to be explained is why did a president whose record in office often evokes admiration fail so dismally on the most important issue facing the nation he led? One answer to this important question has been provided by Mr. Mandela himself. In the BBC interview quoted above, he

42 Interview with Mark Heywood (see date above). 43 Interview with Andile Mngxitama, a noted political activist in South Africa (1.19.2005).

104 stated that his focus in office was on many other challenges that faced the South Africa.

I think his explanation has some merit. It should be remembered that Nelson Mandela led a Cabinet of people who had never served in government before; it has to be assumed that there was a lot of learning that took place in the early years of his presidency, and that some issues, AIDS included, got neglected in the process. An argument can also be made that some matters were more pressing. For instance, one can legitimately argue that race relations required immediate attention.

But Nelson Mandela’s explanation raises more questions than it provides answers. For one, it raises the question of what factors determine which policy area a government decides to focus on. In other words, in a world of competing social imperatives, how does a government or president decide to focus on one area instead of the other? To answer these questions requires that we delve into the political sociology of policy making, for it is in this area where I think some interesting explanations lie.

First and foremost, for the most part of Mandela’s presidency there was no active group that organized and lobbied for a policy agenda that would benefit people living with AIDS44.

There were organizations such as the National Association for People with AIDS (NAPWA), but such organizations really existed in name alone. For Mark Heywood, who is one of the prominent campaigners on the issue of AIDS and a founder member of the TAC and the AIDS

Law Project, there are two major reasons that made it difficult to organize around AIDS in the early years of Mandela’s presidency. The first reason interestingly concerned the nature of

HIV/AIDS itself. He points out that it takes an average of 8, 10 or even 15 years between infection with the HIV and the visible signs of AIDS. What this means is that most of the people who were already infected by the time Mandela became president were either not aware

44 Interviews with Fazel Randera, Mark Heywood and Andile Mngxitama (see dates above).

105 of it, or if they did, in denial or ashamed of disclosing their status. The longer period it takes to notice the physical signs of HIV infection would have made hiding it quite easy. Second,

Heywood mentions that the stigma associated with being HIV positive made organizing infected people very difficult. He observes that being infected with the virus is often associated with being sexually promiscuous and at times being a prostitute. His view is supported by extensive research done by scholars in areas such as KwaZulu Natal, which shows the high levels of stigma associated with HIV infection, and the manner in which this stigmatization prevents individuals from disclosing their status45. So building an organization of infected people would have been difficult in an environment in which people were afraid to come out about their status46. When Nelson Mandela says that in 1994 he was only concerned about winning the election, he is alluding to a much bigger point: he is basically suggesting he was not prepared to lose votes by raising such a taboo subject like HIV/AIDS.

The absence of a strong organization pressuring government to develop sensible policies to address HIV/AIDS leads to yet another question: what did organizations such as

COSATU and the SACP do about AIDS during Mandela’s presidency? The simple answer is: not much. That was particularly surprising for COSATU because of one important reason: its members especially the miners were the major carriers and transmitters of the HI Virus. It is commonly known that one of the main reasons why the southern African region carries a third of the total number of people in the world infected with the HIV/AIDS is because of the migratory labor system the epicenter of which is the urban and mining centers of South

Africa47. Thousands of (predominantly) men from across the region travel to South Africa in

45 Interview with Fazel Randera (12.12.2005). 46 The fear was not without any basis. One AIDS activist, Gugu Dlamini, was killed in Durban for publicly disclosing her HIV positive status. But in most cases disclosing meant losing friends; being shunned by your family and community; and even sometimes losing employment. 47 Interview with Fazel Randera, Chamber of Mines (see date of the interview above).

106 search of work in mines where upon arrival they live in single sex compounds without their families48. Living without their families exposes them to risky sex lifestyles, which makes them vulnerable to the AIDS epidemic. They pick up the virus from the urban centers of South

Africa and transmit it back to their areas of origin such as KwaZulu-Natal, the Eastern Cape,

Swaziland, Lesotho, Malawi, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Congo and even Kenya in the east. These are the areas that have become major theaters where the tragic drama of HIV/AIDS is playing out. The failure of COSATU during the Mandela administration was surprising considering that the early victims of the pandemic were migrant laborers, who in many ways were the backbone of its membership.

Fourie (2006) provides some insightful analysis on the response of the trade union movement in South Africa to HIV/AIDS. He notes that the National Union of Mineworkers

(NUM)—a COSATU affiliated union—did recognize early on that its members in the mines were becoming major victims of the AIDS epidemic. However, it argued that the issue of

AIDS could not be dealt with separately from other broader political concerns. In other words,

NUM’s argument in the 1980s was that AIDS in the mines could only be addressed within the context of struggles for democracy in South Africa. For Mark Heywood49, however, the absence of serious engagement with the AIDS epidemic by trade unions such as COSATU was much deeper and troubling. He suggests that the leadership of the trade union movement was dealing with the same anxieties, fears and stigmas associated with AIDS. In his assessment the weakness of labor- led HIV programs reflected labor’s inability to come to terms with the reality of AIDS. In support of his view he relates a story of a study that was commissioned by

NUM in the early 1990s to assess the vulnerability of its members to HIV/AIDS. Heywood claims that when the results of the study came back and revealed that miners were involved in

48 See Clarence Tshitereke (2006) on the migrant labor system. 49 Interview, ibid.

107 the most risky of sexual behaviors and most of them were already infected, the leadership of

NUM canned the study and prevented it from being discussed within the trade union movement50.

What all these events show is that labor had as much difficulty in dealing with the

AIDS epidemic earlier on as did larger society. As a consequence it failed to vigorously pressure the Mandela administration to pursue a more effective strategy to combating AIDS.

This weakness of progressive organizations is in my view the most important factor that explains the benign neglect with which the Mandela administration treated HIV/AIDS in South

Africa. The worst was however yet to come under the administration of President of Mbeki.

The Thabo Mbeki administration: the era of denial, 1999-2008

Thus does it happen that others who consider themselves to be our leaders take to the streets carrying their placards to demand that because we [black people] are germ carriers, and human beings of a lower order that cannot subject its [sic] passion to reason we must perforce adopt strange opinions, to save a depraved and diseased people from perishing from self- inflicted disease…convinced that we are but natural-born promiscuous carriers of germs…they proclaim that our continent is doomed to an inevitable mortal end because of our devotion to the sin of lust51

Yes we are sex crazy! Yes we are diseased! Yes we spread the deadly HI Virus through our uncontrolled heterosexual sex…Yes among us rape is endemic in our culture!...Yes, what we need and cannot afford because we are poor, are condoms and anti-retroviral drugs!52

I have started this section by quoting at length from both President Mbeki’s speech and

50 I did ask Gwede Mantashe, the General Secretary of NUM, about this matter and he did confirm that there was such a study done, and that there were disagreements within in the leadership of NUM about how to handle its findings. So it was decided that it shouldn’t be made public. 51 South African President Thabo Mbeki speaking at the Inaugural ZK Matthews Memorial Lecture at the University of Fort Hare, October 26th 2001 52 Peter Mokaba, 2001, p.88.

108 Peter Mokaba’s respectively because both passages capture in the most vivid manner the dismal failure of the Mbeki administration to appropriately deal with the AIDS pandemic.

Instead, what has singularly characterized the administration’s response to AIDS has been taking refuge in denial about the existence of a scientific link between HIV and AIDS; courting and soliciting the views of discredited AIDS denialists in the name of scientific enquiry; expounding conspiracy theories about some racist and capitalist plot aimed at profiting from and humiliating black people; dragging feet on providing life saving ARVs; and, even denial by President Mbeki that he knows anybody who has either died of AIDS or is infected with the

HIV. The cost of denial has been, to use Dr Letlape’s words, a loss of human life of genocidal proportions53.

It is tempting to dismiss Dr Letlape’s characterization of the Mbeki administration’s policy on AIDS as genocidal as sheer hyperbole. However, the massive scale of human loss and the cost to society as a whole that the AIDS pandemic has brought about in South Africa cannot be underestimated. As mentioned in the introduction of this chapter, more than five (5) million South Africans are estimated to be infected by HIV/AIDS; this is out of a population of approximately 45 million. What has been more astounding than these numbers has been the response of the South African government, especially the response of President Mbeki himself, to this national crisis. Considering that the President often refutes the charge that his government has undermined the fight against the pandemic, it is useful to briefly rehash some of his and his administration’s most counterproductive interventions on the issue of

HIV/AIDS54.

The first major incident happened a few months (in late October 1999 to be precise)

53 Interview with Dr Letlape, chairperson of the South African Medial Association, and also president of the World Medical Association (4.12.2005). 54 I have heavily relied on Fourie (2006:153-159) for the series of these incidents. I have supplemented his account with interviews with several persons who know a lot about the incidents.

109 after Mbeki’s inauguration as president. He gave a speech in the National Council of Provinces

(NCOP)55 in which he referred to what he called the toxicity of the antiretroviral drug AZT, and instructed his Minister of Health to undertake an investigation about its safety and efficacy.

This incident happened right at the time when medical scientists and organizations such as the

TAC were calling for the government to provide AZT to HIV positive pregnant women to prevent mother to child transmission of the virus.

In early 2000 President Mbeki instigated the formation of the Presidential AIDS Panel, which included among its members infamous AIDS dissidents to investigate the causal link between HIV and AIDS. In February of the same year, President Mbeki questioned the orthodox etiology of AIDS; and in March also of 2000 he accused the TAC of being funded by pharmaceutical companies56. The most widely reported incident was of course the letter

President Mbeki wrote to world leaders in April of the same year in which he defended AIDS dissidents and likened them to Galileos. In June 2000 he addressed the world conference on

AIDS in Durban wherein he argued that poverty was the major cause of AIDS deaths, not HIV.

In 2001, he refused to declare the AIDS pandemic a national emergency and started to question the statistics that suggested that AIDS was becoming a leading cause of death in South Africa.

In 2002, a document allegedly written by members of the ANC’s national executive committee close to President Mbeki, particularly the late Peter Mokaba, was published and it argued that there was a racist and imperialist conspiracy afoot which used AIDS as a ruse in order to generate profits for big pharmaceutical companies at the expense of black people. Later on in

2002 the Minister of Health, Manto Tshabalala, began to promote good nutrition as a means for ameliorating AIDS instead of ARVs. The overall impact of these acts of denialism by the

55 The NCOP is the second chamber of the National Assembly, which is the national legislative body in South Africa. 56 This charge was repeated by Thami Mseleku, the most senior civil servant in the Department of Health in the interview I conducted with him (3.20.2005).

110 senior political leadership in South Africa was to cause further confusion in the minds of ordinary South Africans about the seriousness with which they had to treat the scourge of

AIDS57.

The AIDS denialism increasingly shown by the Minister of Health, Dr Tshabalala-

Msimang, was the most shocking for many observers because she had been an early advocate for a vigorous response to the AIDS epidemic in South Africa58. And yet when given the responsibility of tackling the AIDS epidemic head-on as Minister of Health, she abandoned her earlier resolve and adopted some of the strangest views about how to fight the AIDS epidemic59. While bewilderment over the change of the Minister’s views on AIDS was quite legitimate, it distracted from focusing on a much larger question: what made it possible for the

Mbeki administration to behave in the most irresponsible manner when faced with the AIDS pandemic? The remainder of this chapter attempts to answer this question.

Explanations for the Mbeki administration’s failure to deal with AIDS

The human cost of the Mbeki administration’s policy on HIV/AIDS often provokes questions about what has caused a democratic government that in many ways cares for the people it leads to display such indifference and callousness to human suffering caused by

AIDS. While numerous explanations have been proffered, one view has particularly dominated and it is well articulated by Gaurie and Lieberman (2006). In their explanation of why Brazil has formulated sensible and effective HIV/AIDS policies while South Africa has not, they argue that the existence of what they call boundary institutions in South Africa has been a decisive factor. By boundary institutions they mean “those sets of rules and practices that give

57 Interviews of Mark Heywood, Dr Kgosi Letlape and Francie Lund 58 Interviews with Dr Kgosi Letlape and Mark Heywood. 59 The South African media dubbed the Minister “Dr Beetroot” for her promotion of beetroot, garlic and other vegetables as alternatives to using ARVs.

111 social and political meaning to group identities” (2006:47). They suggest that when “boundary institutions consistently reinforce racial or ethnic group identities, this is likely to impede the political mobilization to a generalized threat and to facilitate patterns of denial and blame across group lines, ultimately leading to less aggressive national responses” (2006:47-48).

Gaurie and Lieberman contend that South Africa’s failure to formulate effective policies to combat HIV/AIDS is due to the existence of policies that seem to reinforce racial differences, which then make it very difficult for South Africans to mobilize as a united force for sensible policies to combat the pandemic. In their view, the existence of boundary institutions is what distinguishes South Africa from Brazil.

This view is similar to Mandisa Mbali’s ((2002), who traces President Mbeki’s denialism to South Africa’s colonial and racial history. Mbali argues that the roots to Mbeki’s denialism lie deep in the history of colonialism and apartheid, particularly what is considered to be white people’s negative perceptions of black people and their sexuality. For Mbali the two quotations I have used at the beginning of this section illustrate President Mbeki’s obsession with how black sexuality has historically been portrayed by white people. In the extract taken from President Mbeki’s speech, he accuses some people, presumably white, of seeing black people as “germ carriers, and human beings of a lower order that cannot subject its (sic) reason to passion”. He alleges that white people have pressurized his government to

“perforce adopt strange opinions, to save a depraved and diseased people from perishing from self-inflicted disease… convinced that we are but natural-born promiscuous carriers of germs”.

Peter Mokaba—one of President Mbeki chief supporters who is alleged to have died from an

AIDS-related illness—carries the same gambit by sarcastically declaring:

Yes we are sex crazy! Yes we are diseased! Yes we spread the deadly HI Virus through our uncontrolled heterosexual sex…Yes among us rape is endemic in our culture!...Yes, what we need and cannot afford because we are poor, are condoms and anti-retroviral drugs!

112

It does seem—judging from the two quotations from Mbeki and Mokaba—that the history of race relations in South Africa or boundary institutions (to use Gauri’s and

Lieberman’s terminology)—is a critical factor impeding formulation of sensible polices on

AIDS. This may well be the case. I wish to suggest however that two separate issues be considered before accepting this view line, hook and sinker.

The first concerns the source of President Mbeki’s denialism. Mbali may very well be right in tracing Mbeki’s denialism to South Africa’s history of colonialism and apartheid.

However, the actual source of his denialism is very difficult to determine, unless of course

President Mbeki truthfully confesses about what motivates his views on HIV/AIDS. Absent of a truthful confession the best that scholars can provide are simply educated guesses. But guesses are what they are, guesses. In my opinion, studies like this should not particularly concern themselves with matters such as sources of politicians’ views. Their views matter to the extent that they influence public policy. And to the extent that they do, the central focus of analysis should be identifying conditions that make it possible for their views to influence public policies.

It is this big question that Gauri’s and Lieberman’s argument is aimed at explaining.

What is striking about their argument is how little evidence it is based on, attractive as its explanation is. Specifically, they fail to establish a direct relationship between the existence of what they call boundary institutions on one hand and poor policy responses to the AIDS on the other. The causal link in their explanation goes like this: the effect of boundary institutions on

AIDS policy occurs through negatively influencing the attitudes and behaviors of different groups to one another, which then makes it difficult to mobilize society across all social divisions for an effective policy response to AIDS. To support this scenario in the case of

South Africa Gauri and Lieberman cite survey data which suggests that “eight times as many

113 South Africans expressed the view that they did not want people of a different race as a neighbor” (2006:62). This is in addition to other data that shows that negative views “toward people of a different race have worsened in South Africa since 1995-1997” (p.62).

While it is plausible that race relations in South Africa is not particularly positive and probably worsening, this trend alone does not constitute adequate evidence to support their rather bold claim. Is it not possible, for instance, that South Africans of different races may prefer to have neighbors of the same race and still simultaneously consider the AIDS epidemic such a threat that they collectively mobilize for an effective response to it? Evidence from my fieldwork and other secondary sources suggests that there is a consensus across the color line in South Africa that the AIDS epidemic has reached such a crisis that a very bold and urgent response is required. This cross-racial consensus manifests itself in condemnations of the government’s tepid response to the AIDS that have come from all race groups60. It is also reflected most importantly by the Treatment Action Campaign, which draws its senior leadership and membership from all race groups. For instance, its chairperson, Zackie Achmat, is a South African of Indian extract, while its secretary for a very long time was Mark

Heywood—a white male with strong links to the ANC61. The current general secretary of TAC is a black female. While the majority of TAC members are admittedly black people from urban townships, this has nothing to do primarily with their race. It is due to the fact that the vast majority of people who are HIV positive in South Africa are poor blacks, which has something to do primarily with their socio-economic status. Moreover, political parties that traditionally represent white people in South Africa such as the Democratic Alliance have clear AIDS

60 For instance, I interviewed leaders and activists in the health sector from all race groups in South Africa, and at no point in my interviews did the issue of race get mentioned as a central impediment to effective response to AIDS. Importantly, there were simple no differences that could be ascribed to race in the views of my interviewees. Even when the Minister of Health tried to introduce race in the public debate over AIDS policy in South Africa, she was roundly condemned by all notable leaders in South Africa, black and white. 61 Mark Heywood was for some time the chairperson of the ANC branch in Yeoville.

114 policies, and have also been very scathing in their criticisms of the government’s policy on

HIV/AIDS.

There is thus neither credible evidence I am aware of nor any provided by Gaurie and

Lieberman that suggests that there exist fault lines along race, which prevent South Africans from collectively mobilizing for an effective response to AIDS. President Mbeki’s invocation of race does not enjoy any popular support either in the black community or in South Africa as a whole. His harshest critics have actually been prominent black leaders and ordinary black people on whose behalf he purportedly speaks62. Multiracial organizations such as the TAC bear testimony to the all-race-inclusive response to the government’s policy to the epidemic.

There have been other explanations for the government’s failure to address the AIDS crisis, and one of them has actually been provided by the government itself. Senior government officials explain the government’s failure to provide ARVs to HIV infected people by arguing that the state lacks capacity to meet the demands of infected citizens63. The area of state incapacity that both Mr. Mseleku and Dr Mahlati point to in their explanation for the government’s failure is what they see as the shortage of skilled health professionals, who in their view, hinder the ability of government to deliver effective health services to the majority of citizens. Particularly significant for Dr Mahlati has been the gradual loss from the public sector of senior health professionals either to the private sector or to emigration to developed countries such as Canada, Australia and New Zealand64.

As I argued in chapter 3, the government’s claims of state incapacity are not supported by evidence. In fact available evidence indicates that the South African state is relatively strong

62 Leading figures such as Desmond Tutu, Njongonkulu Ndungane, Nelson Mandela, Kgosi Letlape, William Makgoba, and organizations such as COSATU, TAC and the SACP have criticized the government’s stance on HIV/AIDS. 63 Interview with Thami Mseleku, the most senior bureaucrat in the national Department of Health (3.20.2005); and interview with Dr Mahlati, the second most senior bureaucrat in the national Department of Health, (3.13.2005). 64 Interview, ibid.

115 and capable as compared to other middle income developing countries (see Chapter Three).

Indeed, Lieberman’s (2003) earlier work on the South African state shows that it is a relatively capable state. His recent work with Gauri I have focused on in this chapter suggests that when compared to the Brazilian one especially on the capacity to provide health services the capacity of the South African state far exceeds that of the Brazilian state (p.56). Moreover, the South

African government has done relatively well in the education and social welfare sectors, and that alone makes it difficult to understand why it has been able to make progress in these areas if state capacity is the constraint.

Contrary to the explanations proffered by other scholars and the government, my argument is that the failure of the Mbeki administration to provide an effective response to

HIV/AIDS is largely political. The first aspect of politics that contributed to poor HIV/AIDS policy was the virtual absence of civil society organizations working to mobilize the poor in the area of health generally and of HIV/AIDS in particular. As mentioned earlier on in this chapter, the TAC was established only in December 1998. And it was formed because there was a realization that the absence of strong mobilization by the poor in the area of health generally and AIDS in particular was weakening their response to the government’s failure to formulate good policies to combat the AIDS crisis65. Interestingly, this absence of a progressive well organized force working in the health sector is cited by Thami Mseleku, the senior official in the Department of Health, as one of the reasons why the health sector has lagged behind the education sector in terms of progressive social reform.

As mentioned in chapter 2, the absence of strong civil society organizations with close links to poor people working in the health sector is partly historical. While the June 1976 student protests had led to the emergence of strong subaltern organizations in the education

65 Interview with Mark Heywood.

116 sector, a spark similar to the 1976 student protests did not take place in the health sector. What emerged instead were professional organizations such as the South African Medical

Association (SAMA), which represents medical professionals; the National Health and

Education Workers Union (NEHAWU), which is a labor union representing health professionals such as nurses; and a plethora of professional health NGOs. All these organizations had minimal or absolutely no relationship with poor people’s organizations. The only organization to ever have a close relationship with poor people themselves and some of the organizations purporting to be representing them was the TAC, and it was only formed at the end of 1998.

The absence of organization of the poor ensured that their voices were not expressed in policy debates inside the ANC and in the state. Tolerance for President Mbeki’s eccentric views on HIV/AIDS is only comprehensible if viewed not only in the context of enormous power he wielded as president of the ANC and that of the country, but especially as a reflection of the enormous political weaknesses of the poor wrought mainly by their weak organization.

Mark Heywood, who held office in the ANC during the high noon of Mbeki’s denialism, observes that what characterized the debate inside the ANC on the issue of AIDS at the time was either deference to President Mbeki or an uncomfortable silence induced by fear of reprisals in the event of expressing opinions critical or contrary to those of the president. The widely reported rebuke of Nelson Mandela by supporters of President Mbeki in the ANC NEC when Mandela challenged Mbeki’s views on HIV/AIDS only serves to show the high levels of intolerance inside the ANC on anybody expressing dissent about the government’s HIV/AIDS policy66. If so highly respected a figure as Mandela was a target of Mbeki’s wrath, one can only imagine the fear instilled in ordinary members of the ANC NEC about challenging Mbeki

66 See Gumede, 2007 on the attack on Mandela by Mbeki’s supporters.

117 on the issue of his denialism.

What is striking is that as Mbeki’s grip on the ANC has begun to loosen, so have the voices critical of his government’s handling of the AIDS crisis become louder. Increasingly

COSATU leaders have begun attacking President Mbeki’s views on AIDS, something that would have been inconceivable a few years ago. Historically, criticisms of the Mbeki administration’s AIDS policy even by TAC leaders were expressed in mild language and often prefaced by declarations of loyalty to the ANC. That has changed significantly in the last two to three years. This change has coincided with strong mobilization of the general public by the

TAC and an increasing isolation of Mbeki inside the ANC.

Conclusion

In chapter 1 I mentioned that the performance of the ANC government in the health sector has been the least impressive especially on the issue of HIV/AIDS. This seemed puzzling when compared to a relatively good performance in education. In this chapter I have sought to explain the reasons for this divergence of performance by the same government. The argument I have put forward is that the failure of both the Mandela and Mbeki administrations to provide an effective response to the AIDS epidemic can be explained primarily by the weak organization of the poor in the area of health (especially HIV/AIDS); the absence of their voice in policy discussions related to AIDS policy inside the ANC and the state; the shifting balance of power inside the ANC in favor of President Mbeki and his allies.

The evidence from field research and other secondary sources seems to strongly support my argument. To reiterate, I have shown that the anti-apartheid struggle did not produce progressive organizations with strong links to poor people organizations working in the area of health, least of all HIV/AIDS. I noted that the organizations that emerged in the 1970s, 1980s

118 and early 1990s were professional associations representing very narrow interests of their members or professional NGOs without any strong links to working class organizations. The absence of strong progressive organization in the health sector significantly constrained the fight against HIV/AIDS in the first years of the democratic transition. It was only the establishment of the Treatment Action Campaign at the end of 1998 which marked the real first steps in the mobilization of poor people for an effective response to HIV/AIDS. In less than ten years of its existence, the TAC has mobilized thousands of South Africans for a progressive response to AIDS, and the fruits of TAC’s labor seem to be showing67. Significantly, the TAC has courted important progressive organizations such as COSATU to join it in pressing for a better government policy on HIV/AIDS. The criticisms of government by the COSATU leadership on the AIDS pandemic partly reflect the success of TAC’s efforts in building a broad political coalition for a sensible AIDS policy. Its [TAC] recent successes demonstrate the significance of strong civil society organization for progressive social reform. This is the point that advocates of the power resources theory often make; the South African experience on the case of HIV/AIDS seems to support their contention.

I have also argued that the absence of critical voices from the ANC –led political alliance pointed to an unequal power relationship inside the alliance in favor of President

Mbeki. While Mark Heywood suggested that the silence of ANC and COSATU leaders reflected their confusing their respect for President Mbeki with withholding their criticism of his policies they disagreed with; I have contended that their complete silence on the most important issue facing South Africa was more than a matter of respect for the president. It reflected the balance of power inside the ANC that was overwhelmingly in favor of President

67 In March 2007 the Mbeki government released a policy on HIV/AIDS which promised to provide ARVs to all HIV positive people by 2014. Correctly in my view the TAC was widely credited for this change of policy by the Mbeki administration.

119 Mbeki. As stated in Chapter Two the control of state resources and structures of the ANC meant that President Mbeki had the power to decide the political and increasingly economic fate of ANC leaders. So any ANC leader who criticized him was most likely to suffer professionally and financially. The rebuke of Nelson Mandela only proved that nobody was immune from President Mbeki’s power inside the ANC. Without this balance of power inside the ANC, it is difficult to imagine that President Mbeki’s retrogressive views on HIV/AIDS would have been allowed to paralyze the government’s response to the AIDS pandemic.

Chapter 6: A glimmer of hope in education

Introduction

Unlike the health sector where the ANC government’s policy has been dismal and the outcomes almost universally disastrous especially in the area of HIV/AIDS; its policies in the

120 area of education have been very progressive. The objective of this chapter is to explain why the ANC government has implemented pro-poor education policies while it has failed to do the same in health and in the economy. I explain the progressive posture of public policy in education by drawing attention to the history of strong political organization of the poor in the education sector. This strong organization, which can be traced back to the Soweto students’ uprising of the mid-1970s, ensured not only that the education concerns of the poor occupied the center stage of South African politics from the 1970s right through the democratic transition. The organizational and political strength of the poor also increased their access to state and non-state political institutions entrusted with the responsibility of crafting education policy. As I will show later on in this chapter, the impact on public policy of the organizational strength and political influence of the poor was evident well before the advent of democratic government in South Africa when the apartheid regime under presidents P.W. Botha and F.W. de Klerk began expanding access to education to the vast numbers of black students and investing substantially on black education.

It was however with the ANC coming into power in 1994 that far -reaching progressive education policies were enacted. As I will show in the next section, progressive education policies were introduced to expand access to education by the poor; to make education affordable; to democratize the governance of public schools; and to improve the quality of learning and teaching. While some scholars have raised concerns about the impact of progressive reforms introduced by the ANC government in transforming the education system; there is acknowledgment even by the most ardent of critics that significant effort has been made to make education accessible to all South Africans, young and old.

Expanding access to education

121 A few months before it was elected into government, the ANC published a policy framework on education in which it estimated that between 15-20 percent of children who were supposed to be in primary school were not there (ANC, 1994, part III). In order to address this lack of access to education to some South Africans, especially those from poor backgrounds, the drafters of the Constitution for a democratic South Africa made access to basic education a human right protected by the Constitution. Section 29 of the Constitution in particular makes it explicit that “everyone has the right to basic education, including adult basic education…”

(Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996). As Fiske and Ladd (2004:61) have correctly observed, this right to basic education applies to all persons, children and adults alike; and in contrast to other rights such as health care and social welfare, the right to basic education is not qualified.

In order to give meaning to this constitutional injunction of a right to basic education to everyone, the ANC passed a law in 1996 (South African Schools Act) in which education was made compulsory for all South African children from ages 7 (Grade 1) to 15 (or the completion of Grade 9). Any parent who fails to send his/her child to school without justifiable cause is, according to this law, guilty of a criminal offense. This law also commits the state to provide schools so that learners who are expected to attend school compulsorily would attend. Section

5 of the same law prohibits any public school from preventing a child from attending school because his/her parent cannot afford to pay school fees. In addition to making education compulsory and free from grade 1 to grade 9, the ANC government committed itself to reducing class sizes to a maximum of 40 learners per teacher—still a large size, but way better than 80 learners in a class, which was a norm in township schools. Furthermore, a reception grade (grade R) was introduced in order to prepare young children to enter the compulsory school phase, although attendance in the reception grade was not made compulsory.

122 These commitments, while modest at first glance, had far reaching implications if placed in their proper context. In the first instance, making education compulsory and free for the first nine grades would require a huge investment in financial resources. And yet South

Africa was already spending a substantively huge amount of resources in education. Fiske and

Ladd (2004:70) note that in the final years of apartheid education spending had already exceeded 7 per cent of the gross national product, a share that was high by international standards. Committing to invest more in the face of competing demands from other areas such as building houses; creating jobs; providing basic amenities, all of which required huge financial resources was thus quite significant. Secondly, reducing class sizes would also require appointing more teachers and building more schools, which in turn required increased financial investment. Third, making schooling compulsory called for government to force a generation that had rejected schooling for a decade to go back to school. That was better said than done. It would require spending enormous political capital persuading a generation of militant youth that it was worth going back to school, and threatening parents with prosecution in case the youth of a school going age failed to attend school.

Notwithstanding all the constraints of resources and politics, the implementation of these policies showed some positive results. As Table 6.1 below shows, the total number of learners enrolled across all the grades increased by 4.4% between 1995 and 2006. For instance, while there were no learners in Grade R in the year 1995, there were well over 400 000 by

2006.

Table 6.1: Enrolment by grade at ordinary public and independent schools, 1995 and 2006

------Number of pupils----- Grade 1995 2006 Increase/decrease

123 Pre-Grade R --- 31 928 --- Grade R --- 441 621 --- Total pre-primary --- 473 549 --- Grade 1 1 666 980 1 186 011 -28.9% Grade 2 1 233 256 1 082 501 -12.2% Grade 3 1 163 222 1 100 150 -5.4% Grade 4 1 087 623 1 073 604 -1.3% Grade 5 1 070 611 1 026 779 -4.1% Grade 6 949 756 920 187 -3.1% Grade 7 889 058 872 693 -1.8% Total primary 8 060 506 7 261 925 -9.9% Grade 8 970 858 1 021 377 5.2% Grade 9 833 738 971 493 16.5% Grade 10 719 190 1 093 750 52.1% Grade 11 626 683 890 902 42.2% Grade 12 553 944 568 930 2.7% Total secondary 3 704 413 4 546 452 22.7% Total 11 764 919 12 281 926 4.4% Source: Department of Education, 2006 School Realities

Enrolment in secondary schools over the same period also increased by a substantial

24%. A 10% decrease in primary school enrolment between 1995 and 2006 shown in the table above reflects a 26% decline in grade 1 enrolment (SAIRR, 2007:277). The enrolment of learners in grade 1 and other primary school grades was very high in the early years of the

ANC government due to its massive campaign to get children who were not attending school to enroll. The impact of that recruitment were the huge numbers of children who enrolled in 1995 as shown in the table above68. By 2006 the backlog of out-of-school children had been eliminated and enrolment in primary education had been normalized.

As a consequence of the implementation of measures intended to increase access to education, the Department of Education in South Africa estimates that nearly 97% of South

African children of school going age attended some form of education institution in 2003

68 Interview, Penny Vinjevold—Deputy Director General of the national Department of Education (8.1.2007).

124 (Department of Education, 2006). This percentage is supported by the OECD review study of

South African education, which proclaims that “South Africa can be said to be close to achieving universal basic education” (OECD, 2008:49). What makes the high school participation significant is that most learners in South Africa attend public schools in rural poor provinces such as the Eastern Cape, KwaZulu-Natal and Limpopo, which respectively accounted for 18,3%, 22,5% and 15,8% of total learners in 2005 (National Treasury, 2007).

To further increase access to education to the poor, the distribution of schools across

South Africa has been skewed in favor of rural provinces because the poor tend live in them.

The Eastern Cape, which is considered the poorest province in South Africa had 6 035 schools,

KwaZulu-Natal 5 827, Limpopo 4 340, while better off provinces such as Gauteng and the

Western Cape had 2 246 and 1 581 schools respectively in 2006 (Department of Education

School Realities, 2006). Similarly, there were more teachers in rural provincial schools in 2006 than in urban provincial schools. While there were 57 620 teachers in the Gauteng province, the number in KwaZulu-Natal was 83 960 (Department of Education School Realities, 2006).

The superiority in the number of schools and teachers in the rural provinces partly reflects the large numbers of learners in such schools, which is evident in average student: teacher ratios which tend to be higher in rural schools than in urban schools (e.g. the student: teacher ratio in the Eastern Cape was 33 students per teacher in public schools as opposed to 31, 7 students per teacher in Gauteng in 2005) (National Treasury, 2007). Most importantly, however, the high distribution of schools and teachers in the rural areas reflects the government’s intent to reach the poor sections of society who normally live there.

Another way to measure whether access to education has been increased for those sections of society that are traditionally disadvantaged is to disaggregate enrolment rates by gender. This is because girl learners in societies with a history of discrimination such as South

125 Africa tend to be under-represented in educational institutions. The authors of the OECD review of education in South Africa observe that the same number of girls attend school as do boys. The authors reach a conclusion that “gender parity has been reached [in South Africa]”, unlike “the situation in many developing countries” (OECD, 2008:51).

The OECD observations about gender parity in South Africa are supported by the South

African government’s own reviews. Table 6.2 below, for instance, shows that, overall, gender parity in gross enrolment was achieved between 1997 and 2005.

Table 6.2: Gross Enrolment Rates (GER) and Gender Parity Index (GPI)

1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005

Total GER of girl 105.6 105.2 103.7 96.8 97.1 97.6 97.8 98.3 97 learners

Total GER of boy 102.5 102.4 101.3 96.2 95.8 96.7 97.2 97.8 97 learners

Gender Parity Index 1.030 1.027 1.023 1.006 1.013 1.009 1.005 1.004 1.000

Source: The Presidency, Development Indicators-Midterm Review, 2008

What the table above does not show because it does not disaggregate between enrolment in primary and second school is that from the year 2000 more boys were enrolled in primary school than were girls. The Presidency explains this disparity by stating that more boy learners repeat grades in primary school than girl learners. Furthermore, the Presidency also notes that more girls are enrolled in secondary school than boys. This is because, it claims, more boys are held up in primary school. While no explanation is proffered for the high repetition rates of boys in primary school, it is noteworthy that more girls are doing well in both primary and secondary school, and that overall gender parity has been achieved in gross

126 enrolment rates.

The financing of education

Another area in which the ANC government has demonstrated its commitment to progressive education policies is the financing of education. This is shown in a variety of areas of education finance. For instance, public expenditure on education in South Africa is one of the highest in the world. This is well demonstrated by table 6.3 below which shows that the proportion of the total government budget that was spent on education exceeded what was spent by the Britain, Switzerland, Sweden, the United States, Poland, Japan, India and Brazil, to mention a few. It is only Chile in this list which spent more of its budget on education than

South Africa.

Table 6.3: Public expenditure on education as a proportion of total government expenditure, 2002/03, in selected countries

Proportion of total Country government expenditure (%) Brazil 12.0 Chile 18.7 Hungary 14.1 India 12.7 Ireland 13.5 Italy 10.3 Japan 10.5 Poland 12.2 USA 17.1 Sweden 12.8

127 Switzerland 15.1 United Kingdom 11.4 South Africa 18.5 Source: Adapted by the author from the SAIRR, 2007 (p.267)

Fiske and Ladd (2004:70) cite the United Nations data for 1995-1997, which shows that

South Africa spent 7.6 per cent of its GNP on education, which far exceeded the 4.7 per cent average for the seventy-eight countries that the United Nations characterized, along with South

Africa, as having medium human development. Fiske and Ladd actually note that South Africa was among the top ten highest spending countries on education in its comparable group. In the

2002/03 financial year alone, total government spending on education was 5.2% of the GDP, which is very high indeed. By 2003/04 it had increased to 5.5%, and it is estimated to remain in the 5.3% range up until 2008/09 (National Treasury, 2007). The largest percentage of this funding goes to public schools, which is traditionally where children from poor families go for education.

Importantly, Martin Gustafson and Firoz Patel (2006:65) show that the 2005 public spending pattern on the schooling system was 17 times more equal (between the rich and the poor) than the apartheid pattern that existed in 1991. They also note that in 2005 the poorest

40% of enrolled learners received around 57% of the national budget allocated to schools.

They conclude that “This indicates a pro-poor distribution of this resource” (2006:66). This redistribution of resources in education in favor of the poor is supported by analysis of the apartheid spending patterns of 1991 done by Buckland and Fielden’s (1994), which indicated that current spending on each white learner in the public schooling system was 4.5 times as great as spending on each African learner. By 2005 public current expenditure on each white learner had dropped by 85% and that of African learners increased by 96% (Gustafson and

128 Patel, 2006:68). This redistributive fiscal regime in the post-apartheid education system is further shown in the analysis by Servaas van der Berg (2006:60), who shows that between

1991 and 2001 teaching resources were considerably redistributed. He observes that “State- paid teachers per 1000 pupils increased from 24 to 31 in former black schools, and were reduced from 59 to 31 in former white schools” (p.60).

The bias of spending in favor of the poor is further evident when one looks at the budgets of provincial governments in South Africa. In 2002/03 the percentage of provincial education expenditure on public ordinary schools was 84.6% of the total provincial education budgets, and it has since remained in the 84% range. It is estimated to continue along this trajectory for the next coming two to three years. Of this funding over 50% goes to public primary schools, an area of schooling which is known to have a very large percentage of poor children.

Another important indicator of progressive government spending on education is the percentage share that each of the nine provinces spends on primary and secondary schooling.

Provinces such as the Eastern Cape, Limpopo, KwaZulu-Natal, North West and Mpumalanga have large concentrations of poor people; so percentage spending on education in those provinces would indicate that government is spending more on education for poor people, as compared to provinces such as Gauteng and the Western Cape where on average people’s living standards are higher.

As Table 6.4 below shows provinces with the highest concentrations of poor people such as the Eastern Cape, North West, Limpopo, Mpumalanga and KwaZulu-Natal spend significantly more of their total budgets on education than those where relatively better off citizens live such as Gauteng and the Western Cape. Limpopo and Mpumalanga for instance, spend on average 50% of their total budgets on education. What this trend suggests is that

129 government is spending more on education in areas where the poor live.

Table 6.4: Percentage of total provincial spending on education

Province 2002/03 2003/04 2004/05 2005/06 Eastern Cape 49, 6 47, 5 49, 3 48, 7 Free State 45, 6 45, 8 45, 3 46, 0 Gauteng 38, 5 40, 2 39, 7 38, 4 KwaZulu-Natal 46, 5 47, 2 46, 5 45, 0 Limpopo 50, 8 50, 0 51, 3 49, 5 Mpumalanga 49, 6 50, 2 48, 6 49, 8 Northern Cape 44, 2 41, 6 42, 1 39, 5 North West 48, 3 48, 1 46, 6 45, 3 Western Cape 40, 5 40, 3 38, 9 38, 5 Source: National Treasury, Provincial Budgets and Expenditure Review, 2007

Another area where the ANC government has explicitly shown its bias towards the poor is in its no-fees school policy. The no-fees school policy is a government program by which learners from poor households are exempted from paying any school fees in public schools.

This policy is important especially for children from poor families who often cite the unavailability of money as the reason for their failure to attend school. The findings of the

General Household Survey conducted by Statistics South Africa in 2003, for instance, show that 40% of 7 to 18 year olds surveyed cited no money for school fees as the main reason why they do not go to school. In order to ensure that every child of school going age goes to school, the ANC government has introduced a policy by which money is provided to those schools with children who cannot afford to pay school fees so that those learners can continue studying.

As Table 6.5 below shows, close to five million learners (about 40% of the total number of learners in South African schools) in South Africa are beneficiaries of the no-fees

130 schools policy, and the overwhelming majority of these beneficiaries are from poor families.

This is attested by the large number of learners from provinces such as the Eastern Cape,

KwaZulu-Natal and Limpopo who are beneficiaries of this policy. This 40% of beneficiaries is also close to the percentage of people in South Africa who are estimated to be in the region of

46%.

Table 6.5: Implementation of No Fees Schools Policy in 2007 No. of learners No. of no fee Total projected Province in no fee schools schools spend (rand million) Eastern Cape 1 224 711 3 825 687 Free State 298 184 1 304 203 Gauteng 377 274 432 213 KwaZulu-Natal 1 173 503 3 341 704 Limpopo 1 015 524 2 557 588 Mpumalanga 404 432 983 292 Northern Cape 102 244 335 57 North West 267 042 728 176 Western Cape 132 560 407 93 Total 4 995 560 13 912 3 003 Source: Department of Education, 2007

Judged against the commitment of making education compulsory and free in the first nine grades, a coverage of only 40% of learners by the no-fees school policy seems modest.

The recent statements by government officials that suggest they are considering increasing coverage to 60% indicate that the government is aware that the reach of this program falls short of the need. The short falls and gaps in government policy should not however take away from the measures that have already been taken to make education affordable and accessible. The enormous amount of resources that is invested in education and the channeling of such resources to public schools where the poor attend bear testament to the progressive bent of

131 public policy in education. While some of these resources have been shown to be wasted through inefficiencies and corruption, most of the investments are received by their intended beneficiaries, especially the poor.

The impact of investment in education is already evident in some areas. Due to investment in physical infrastructure, for instance, the number of overcrowded schools69 has fallen from 51% in 1996 to 24% in 2006. The number of schools with electricity has also increased from just 11 000 in 1996 to over 20 000 in 2006 (out of a total of about 26 000 schools). The number of schools without water has decreased from close to 9 000 in 1996 to almost 3 000 in 200670.

The ANC government has also introduced pro-poor programs in other educational areas. These include democratizing school governance through the establishment of school government bodies in all schools in which teachers, parents, and learners are represented.

Another is the government policy on the language of instruction at schools: the South African

Schools Act encourages schools to use learners’ home languages in their teaching. Another explicitly pro-poor program that government has introduced is the

. In the case of the school feeding program the government provides one meal a day to learners while they are at school. The reason behind the introduction of this school feeding scheme is that most learners (92.2% of seven to eighteen year olds, according to one government estimate) regularly attend school without a meal (Department of Education, 2007).

In the provinces of the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal, two of the poor provinces in

South Africa, there were about 794 000 and 883 000 learners whose families are unable to regularly feed them (Department of Education, 2007:44). Going to school hungry adversely affects their school attendance and performance. The objective of the feeding scheme is to

69 A school is considered overcrowded if the teacher :learner ratio is above 40. 70 All these figures come from the National Education Infrastructure Management System, 2007

132 provide a meal to these children so that they can concentrate in class. As can be seen from the

Table 5.3 below, the scheme already reaches about five million learners; plans are afoot to ensure that the scheme reaches about six million. Significantly, as can further be seen from the table below, learners from the poorest provinces of the Eastern Cape, KwaZulu-Natal and

Limpopo are the biggest beneficiaries from this scheme.

Table 6.6: The national school nutrition programme, 2005/06 and 2006/07

2005/06 2006/07 Number of beneficiaries Province Targeted Reached Targeted Growth rate Eastern Cape 999 364 999 364 1 461 917 31, 6% Free State 246 857 246 857 407 743 39, 5% Gauteng 337 859 337 859 389 361 13, 2% KwaZulu-Natal 1 251 140 1 251 140 1 367 655 8, 5% Limpopo 1 002 609 1 002 609 1 054 609 4, 9% Mpumalanga 492 687 492 687 492 025 -0, 1% Northern Cape 122 200 122 200 184 592 33, 8% North West 336 464 378 312 406 910 17, 3% Western Cape 156 617 156 617 203 183 22, 9% Total 4 945 797 4 987 645 5 967 995 17, 1% Source: National Treasury, Provincial Budgets and Expenditure Review, 2007

The significance of all of these education reforms introduced by the ANC has been a subject of much public and academic debate in South Africa. What has been at the heart of the debate is how transformative such policies have been. Or to frame the question differently

“How successful has South Africa been in overcoming injustice in education and the larger social injustices that result from it?” (Pendlebury and Enslin, 2004:31). This is an important question to address largely because fundamentally transforming the education system and

133 making it accessible to every citizen has indeed been the goal of public policy.

Scholars have tended to give conflicting answers to this important question. Graeme

Bloch (2007) has argued that on many indicators the education system in South Africa is

“failing to make the grade”. He observes that there are alarming disparities amongst schools, and reaches the conclusion that education is “contributing to marginalization and inequity rather social advance and cohesion for many, especially the poor and rural”. He further cautions that “such failure of education could spell disaster for South Africa”. Bloch’s verdict receives some concurrence from Jansen (2004:01), who contends that most of the education policies have failed. Penny Venjevold on the other hand paints a completely different picture to

Bloch’s. She argues that the policy changes that have been introduced by the ANC have fundamentally transformed the education system in South Africa especially in favor of the poor. To support her argument, she cites government’s policies such as making attending school compulsory for every child from grades 1 to 9; providing financial support to children whose parents cannot afford to pay school fees; and channeling more resources to provinces and schools where poor children live and attend71.

While there is some validity in claims made by both Bloch and Vinjevold respectively; a more accurate picture seems to be half-way between the two extremes. It is better captured by

Pendlebury and Enslin (2004:44) who note that “social justice in educational access, participation and outcomes is far from achieved, especially for rural children, the poor, the illiterate and semi-literate youth and adults, and children with disabilities” (2004:44). And yet they also observe that “education policy across the board accentuates distributive justice” and that education legislation passed by the ANC government since coming to power “establishes

71 Interview with Penny Vinjevold, a senior official in the Department of Education and a well known scholar of education in South Africa (10.6.2006)

134 structures and guidelines for procedural justice” (p.42).

Explaining progressive education reforms

It seems puzzling at first that the ANC government has expended so much financial and political capital to progressively reform the education system while its policies on the economy and HIV/AIDS have been so anti-poor. It is puzzling until one looks closer at the education sector. Three factors explain the pro-poor public policy in education in my view. The first is the history political activism and the strength of political organization of the poor in the education; second is the influence that these organizations have had inside the ANC; and, third is their access and influence on policy making inside the state. In the following sections I look at each of these factors.

A history of organization and struggle

The history of political organization of the poor in education can be traced back to the political event that took place on the16th June 1976. The morning of that day saw thousands of school students from Soweto gathered in Orlando West for a march to protest against the imposition of Afrikaans language as a medium of instruction in black schools. Faced with thousands of marching school youths the police panicked and opened fire which killed hundreds of students. That very act of shooting unarmed protesting school children transformed what had started as a Soweto children’s march into a political event that came to define the very injustice and brutality of the apartheid regime. Salim Badat (1999) argues that the Soweto uprising marked a watershed in political relations between the apartheid state and the dominated social groups. In effect, it marked the beginning of the implosition of the apartheid project.

135 Prior to the Soweto uprising massive resistance to apartheid inside South Africa had virtually died with the banning of the liberation political organizations such as the ANC, the

Pan Africanist Congress and the South African Communist Party at the beginning of the 1960s.

That meant that for a decade and a half the apartheid state went about implementing its separatist laws without any hindrance or challenge inside South Africa. That lull in resistance,

Philip Bonner (no date) notes, gave the apartheid state the courage and arrogance to introduce even more repressive and discriminatory apartheid laws. The imposition of Afrikaans as the medium of instruction reflected the confidence of the government in its ability to implement any policy without expecting any challenge from black people. On that one occasion, the

National Party government had completely misjudged the anger imposing Afrikaans in black schools would evoke in the youth. The Soweto uprising ensured that education would occupy the center stage of struggles against apartheid, and for the first time gave confidence to black people that they could challenge the apartheid state in other areas.

Overnight hundreds of organizations were formed across the length and breadth of

South Africa to challenge various apartheid policies. Most organizations formed after the

Soweto uprising were in the area of education. The Congress of South African Students

(COSAS) was formed in November 1979 to organize secondary school students, while the

Azanian Students Organization (AZASO) was formed to mobilize college students. These two organizations organized a historic boycott of schooling in March 1980—literally a few months after their founding—in which thousands of students participated. Struggles by student organizations such as COSAS further inspired many young people across South Africa to form their own organizations. In every township a youth organization was formed72. For instance, there was the Soweto Youth Congress representing the young people of Soweto; the Port

72 Interview with Nhlanhla Ndlovu, a former youth activist (3.19.2005)

136 Elizabeth Youth Congress in Port Elizabeth; the Western Cape Youth League in Cape Town; the South African Youth Congress; the Eastern Cape Youth Congress; the Black Students

Society; the Azanian Students Movement; Cape Youth Congress; Muslim Students

Association; the iconic National Education Crisis Committee (NECC); Mamelodi Youth

Organization, to mention just a few.

All of these organizations and many others not mentioned here mobilized young people, their parents and communities of the oppressed to resist apartheid primarily in the area of education and secondarily in society as a whole. This vast organization in the education sector and its politicization made it almost inevitable that the transformation of education would be one of the key priorities of any post-apartheid government. And it did.

Because of the political significance of the Soweto uprising not only for sparking the transformation of education that would take place later on, but also for planting the seeds for the eventual collapse of apartheid it is important to understand the context that made its occurrence possible. In other words, it is important to explain briefly why the Soweto uprising not occur, for example, in the 1950s or the 1960s.

In retrospect, the seeds of the Soweto uprising had been paradoxically planted in the conditions of the 1960s. I say paradoxically because the 1960s are known to have been the most repressive phase of the apartheid project. Not only were anti-apartheid organizations such as the ANC banned, some of the most repressive laws that entrenched apartheid were passed during that decade. Partly because of political repression the growth of the South African economy reached unprecedented levels during the 1960s. As a result historians such as Philip

Bonner (no date) describe that decade as a boom time in South Africa, particularly in

Johannesburg. Bonner observes that the economy grew by 8.5% between 1963 and 1964; foreign investment increased by over 60% between 1965 and 1969, and much of this growth

137 was in the manufacturing sector.

That economic growth led to increased demand for labor, which resulted to significant migration of predominantly black people to urban centers such as Johannesburg. Particularly scarce was semi-skilled labor, which resulted to business leaders calling for the improvement of black education and the enrolment of more black people in schools. Consequently black enrolment in primary and secondary schools started to increase quite dramatically in the 1970s.

Crouch and Vinjevold (undated:08) claim that “no country in the world expanded its secondary education access faster than SA’s [South Africa’s] African population in the period 1970 to

1995”. And yet between 1962 and 1971, notes Bonner, no new secondary schools were built in the largest township in South Africa, Soweto. Instead the apartheid government channeled all resources for schooling in “homelands” as part of consolidating its policy of separate development. That resulted to serious overcrowding in urban black schools with some classes containing over 100 students and teachers having to teach double shifts. The overall effect of all this was declining educational standards and growing discontent among black students and their parents73.

The response of the apartheid regime to the economic downturn that started late in the

1960s also worsened the situation. The apartheid government cut government spending to social services earmarked for black people such as education, resulting in the further deterioration of black schools. The economic squeeze also affected large areas of the industry, which led to significant job retrenchments. All of this led to a general mood of discontent in black areas. The government’s attempt to impose Afrikaans as the medium of instruction turned to be a spark to an environment which was anyway increasingly becoming volatile. The concentration of students in schools made organizing much easier, which explains the reason

73 Interview with Penny Vinjevold

138 why the Soweto uprising—and event which had started in Orlando West in Soweto—quickly spread to other areas in South Africa.

The significance of the Soweto student uprising can never be underestimated: it was profound and far reaching. It rekindled resistance against apartheid, and transformed the struggled for equal education into the very center piece of the anti-apartheid movement. It is almost impossible to imagine the mass insurgency against apartheid that emerged in the 1980s without the June 1976 student revolt, for it was this revolt that gave birth to community based organizations that were at the forefront of that insurgency. The Soweto student uprising began a movement that essentially laid the foundation for progressive reforms in education that have been implemented by the ANC government in some form since 1994.

The organizations that were formed in the aftermath of the Soweto uprising embarked on pitched battles with the apartheid state between 1976 and 1986. At the heart of the battle were demands for equality in the education provided to white and black children. It was call for an immediate end of apartheid in education. The demand for fundamental change in education crystallized into a call for “people’s education for people’s power”. The notion of people’s education for people’s power was at once a critique of the educational system in South Africa at the time as it was also a manifesto for change. People’s education for people’s power was defined as education that “eliminates capitalist norms of competition, individualism and stunted intellectual development and one that encourages collective input and active participation by all, as well as stimulating critical thinking and analysis” (Kruss, 1988:19). One of the leaders of that movement, Father Smangaliso Mkhatshwa, defined the education system they were struggling for as “one which prepares people for total human liberation; one which helps people to be creative, to develop a critical mind, to help people to analyse; one that prepares people for full participation in all social, political or cultural spheres of society” (cited

139 in Kruss, 1988:19). Mkhatshwa went on to declare that “education based on values of consumerism or affluence, of military adventurism and aggression and on racism is certainly not our ideal type of education” (Kruss, ibid).

To give concrete meaning to their vision of people’s education, the popular organizations working on education formed People’s Education Commissions, in which sympathetic academics from various universities participated. The objective of the commissions was to draw alternative People’s Education curricula in areas such as history, languages and math. The guidance provided to the commissions was that they apply the principles of People’s Education to the content of each subject in the design of each subject’s curriculum (Kruss, 1988:32). New courses, education material, workbooks and programs that were developed by the commissions reflected the framework and discourse of People’s

Education. To give expression to the spirit and intent of people’s education, the commission on language and literature, for instance, argued that the “definition of what constitutes literature should be expanded to include popular culture, oral literature, and texts from other subjects”. It also contended that “People’s English should enable students to analyse the ideological significance of all language”, and that “People’s English for adults and workers” should be prioritized (Kruss, ibid.).

The educational materials produced were actually intended for usage at black schools across the country. For instance, the People’s History Commission produced its first workbook so that it could be used in schools from the beginning of the school year in 198774. Kruss (ibid,

35) describes it as presenting various historical events as contested and tried to show how there are different interpretations of each event. The materials produced by the commissions were also circulated widely to black schools and were actually used by sympathetic teachers in their

74 Interview with Salim Valley, Senior Education Analyst at the Wits Education Policy Unit ((9.12.2007).

140 classrooms.

The fact that non-state actors could actually decide what got taught at school showed the extent of the state retreat from the socio-political space of black people. It also reflected the progress that had been made since the students’ revolt against Afrikaans in 1976. What had begun as an uprising in the mid-1970s had transformed into the most imaginative educational experiment in the history of South Africa. In every black township and every street there was an education committee representing parents, teachers and students tasked with the responsibility of improving the quality of education in black schools.

It was however one thing to establish an education committee and a people’s education curriculum, but a completely another matter to influence the apartheid state to adopt and implement the policy changes that were being proposed. For it has to be borne in mind that ultimately the state controlled the resources and power to recognize what was essentially taught at schools. Cognizant of this fact, efforts at influencing policy debates and government policy occupied the center stage in the period leading up to the first democratic elections in 199475.

Influence on policy making

The response of the apartheid regime to the challenge to the education system was immediate and decisive: it vastly increased financial resources it allocated to black schools; built training colleges to train black teachers; and provided more financial assistance for black students to attend college (Bundy, 1986). As a result between 1977 and 1985 African secondary enrolments more than doubled, while those of Coloured and Indian schools grew by

50%. This spectacular growth in the enrolment of black students was unprecedented in the

75 Interview with Mary Metcalfe, Dean of the School of Education at Wits University and a former Minister of Education in the Gauteng Province (9.6.2007).

141 history of South Africa76, and it was “an explicit attempt since Soweto (the uprising) to upgrade education so as to stave off school based rebellion”, Bundy contends (19986:54).

Bundy further suggests that it formed part of a strategy by the apartheid government and its business allies to foster a pliant black middle class that would serve as a buffer and a moderating influence against radicalism in the black community.

The investments in black education and the resultant increase in school enrolments of black children began to close the gap in educational enrolments between blacks and whites in

South Africa (Crouch and Vinjevold, n.d.:08). While the difference in enrolment in secondary education between the two groups was about 25 percentage points in 1975, that gap had decreased to 8 percentage points in just 20 years in 1995. This narrowing of the gap leads

Crouch and Vinjevold to declare that dramatic increase in the enrolment blacks in secondary education in such a short period of time was “really quite unprecedented by international standards” (ibid, 08).

While these changes were quite significant, they were however conceived and implemented by the apartheid state without seeking input and involvement of a vast network of organizations that had emerged to challenge apartheid education. In that sense they lacked legitimacy and also fell short of the changes that insurgent organizations were proposing. It was only in the early 1990s that serious steps at engagement between the apartheid government and progressive organizations took place77. The first serious interaction was organized after poor matriculation results from the 1990 school year. As a response to those Nelson Mandela, just a few months after getting out from prison, convened an Education Delegation comprised of the ANC, other progressive political parties, anti-apartheid education groups and other groups to meet the government to find ways to resolve what was seen as the education crisis.

76 Interview with Penny Vijevold 77 Interview with Mary Metcalfe

142 The outcome of the meeting between the government and the Education Delegation was the establishment of the Joint Working Group (JWG), which was meant to develop a joint program for reforming education (Badat, 1995:143). While nothing much came out of the work of the

JWG, the engagement between the apartheid government and the progressive groups was significant because it gave these groups the first chance at influencing government policy.

It was only with the establishment of National Education and Training Forum (NETF) in 1993 that signs of the influence of progressive organizations on government policy began to emerge. The NETF brought together representatives from government, political parties such as the ANC, student and teachers organizations, and business. Its mandate was to address the crisis in education as well as to prepare for a transition from apartheid education to education under a democratic form of government. Significantly, it was agreed that decisions taken at the

NETF would be binding to all parties, and the government was obliged to implement them.

The NETF devised mechanisms to monitor the implementation by the government of the decisions taken (Badat, 1995: 144). As Badat observes, the powers given to the NEFT provided progressive organizations with an enormous opportunity and space to influence education policy (p.144).

The late date by which the NETF was formed (it was formed in 1993) ensured that its impact on government policy before the democratic elections would be limited. However,

Jansen (no date) observes that some of its work was quite influential and some of its committees continued to function even after the democratic elections in 1994. One area in which the NETF had significant influence was in developing a curriculum framework for a democratic South Africa. Jansen states that the ANC minister of education provided the committee which was entrusted by the NEFT to review the curriculum all the political, financial and logistical support to review the curriculum of more than 100 school syllabi. The

143 recommendations of the committee were adopted by the new ministry of education.

The most significant impact of civil society on policy making in the area of education after apartheid however occurred with the appointment by the Minister of Education of a committee to review the organization, governance and funding of schools78. The specific brief of the committee, according to the Minister of Education, was to propose a national framework of school organization and ownership and norms and standards on school governance and funding which, in the view of the committee, would command the widest public support

(Minister of Education, 1995). In other words, the mandate of the committee was to propose measures to fundamentally overhaul the whole school system in South Africa.

The importance of the committee went beyond its mandate. Equally important was also its composition. It was dominated by activists who had been involved in struggles for equitable schooling. It drew the majority of its members from teacher organizations, parents associations, progressive education research institutes, academics with strong ties to progressive organizations and government representatives.

The recommendations the committee made came to define the trajectory of education policy development in South Africa. For instance, the committee recommended that there be two types of schools in South Africa: public schools and independent schools. It recommended that public schools be governed by governing bodies constituted by parents, teachers and students. It also called for the introduction of compulsory education phase for the first nine grades. All the recommendations were adopted by government and made government policy. A comparison of the committee recommendations and the clauses contained in the South African

Schools Act passed in 1996 shows their close similarities. It demonstrates that the recommendations of the committee became the backbone of the principal reform legislation in

78 Interview with Mr. Mahlathi, the second senior bureaucrat in the Department of Education in South Africa (2.10.2005)

144 education.

Progressive organizations influenced government policy through other means other than participating in committees. One of those mechanisms was lobbying. Thami Mseleku, who was the Director General in the Department of Education during the period when most of the ANC government’s progressive education policies were introduced also credits progressive organizations for lobbying the government to introduce pro-poor policies79. He notes particularly the influence that organizations such SADTU, SASCO and COSATU exerted to the Department of Education while it was working on the South African Schools Act of

1996—the principal legislation on education in post-apartheid South Africa. Mseleku singles out the student organization COSAS for insisting on the inclusion in the South African Schools

Act clauses that made education free for students who could not afford to pay school fees up until grade 9. While Mseleku seemed reluctant to state whether those progressive clauses could have been included in the legislation without the influence of COSAS and other organizations, he argues that their influence was significant. He contrasts education and health where he is currently the Director General to support his argument. He mentions that implementing progressive policies in health has been more difficult because of the strength of corporate organizations such as pharmaceuticals in the sector, which have resisted government policies that they perceive to be threatening to their interests. He cites as an example the incident whereby international pharmaceutical companies took the government to court over its intention to import generic drugs to AIDS patients80. He argues that while the government received support from the Treatment Action Campaign to fight the court case, the power that these corporations brought to bear to fight the case far out surpassed that of progressive

79 Interview with Thami Mseleku, the former Director General of Education 80 Interview with Thami Mseleku, the Director General in the Department of Health (see date in the previous chapter).

145 organizations such as the TAC.

Progressive organizations exercised their influence on public policy in education also through leveraging their access to networks in the state that made policy81. What made the access possible was made the policy makers under the ANC government were the same people who had been leaders of some of the most progressive organizations. The chairperson of the parliamentary committee on education for instance, Blade Nzimande, had been the leading figure in the anti-apartheid National Education Coordination Committee. He became the chief architect of the South African Schools Act—a principal piece of education reform that was passed by the ANC government. The other typical example of a reformer with a history and strong links to the progressive movement was Mary Metcalfe, who was part of Mandela’s

Education Delegation and a leading member of the NETF. She was appointed the first minister of education in the Gauteng province and was instrumental in her that capacity in introducing pro-poor education policies82. There were many individuals like her who moved from leading progressive organizations to important positions in government.

What is different about education is however not the fact that these former activists moved to occupy important positions in government, important as that is. Mary Metcalfe contends that what kept them committed to implementing a pro-poor education agenda was the continuing contact they kept with progressive organizations outside government83. That link with progressive organizations ensured a channel of communication about education policy was open. Crucially, progressive organizations served as a political base that could be mobilized for supporting pro-poor reforms in case of resistance from other social groups, and

81 Interviews with Salim Valley and Mary Metcalfe. 82 Interview with Mary Metcalfe (9.6.2007). 83 Interviews with Mary Metcalfe and Salim Vally of the Wits Education Policy Unit (9.12.2007).

146 also as a base to which they had to account84. So the role of the policy networks was not just to allow different groups to lobby government officials and vice versa; crucially, they also served as a base for political support and accountability85.

Reflecting on the impact progressive organizations have had on pushing the ANC government to introduce progressive policies, Jonathan Jansen (2001) observes that there “are few states in the postcolonial world that has (sic) developed more education policies than

South Africa”. He claims that since the Mandela administration in 1994 “there has been a policy for everything from early childhood development to language-in-education to school finance to higher education. Laws have been made, amended and re-made to give legal authority to formal policy”. Jansen (2004:02) claims that all these policies have been made in order to placate “that important political constituency—black schools and black universities”.

Conclusion

My explanation for the ANC government’s implementation of pro-poor education polices The notable movement towards distributive justice in education would have been impossible, I have argued, without the presence of strong organization of the poor in the education sector. I have traced the development of these organizations to the Soweto students’ revolt of June 1976. I have contended that the organizations of the used their organizational strength to place the demands for pro-poor education reform at the center of the emancipatory project. They also used their strong organization to exert political pressure on the ANC to take up the cause for progressive education reform. Thus did it come about that a few months after his release from prison Nelson Mandela convened an Education Delegation that negotiated with the apartheid government of President FW de Klerk. Their influence extended to the

84 Interview with Mary Metcalfe and Thami Mseleku. 85 Interview with Trevor Ngwane.

147 government led by the ANC after the elections, which was reflected by the almost direct translation of their demands and policy proposals into government policy.

The trajectory of the ANC government’s policy on education seems to support the central claim of the power resources theory (and the argument of this dissertation) that the organization and power resources of the poor tend to tip public policy towards the progressive bent. What the education case also shows is that access to and influence on policy making structures is also important. This is of course in marked contrast to the health and economic sectors where pro-poor organizations were neither well organized nor had access and influence in policy making bodies in the ANC and the state. In the next chapter I will discuss in detail the implications of these findings for our understanding of the development of pro-poor social reforms.

148

Chapter 7: South Africa in comparative perspective

Introduction

The purpose of this concluding chapter is two-fold: first, I return to the puzzle that this dissertation has sought to unravel, which is explaining why a center left governing party with strong ties to a well organized trade union movement has implemented a social reform agenda that is largely anti-poor. In the introductory chapter I argued that this apparent contradiction can be explained by the weakness of pro-poor organizations especially in areas such as health and the economy, and also by the weakening position of largely pro-poor organizations such as

COSATU and the SACP inside the ANC-led political alliance and their exclusion from policy making in the state. In this chapter I assess whether the evidence I have put forth in the chapters preceding this one support this hypothesis.

The second objective is to compare the South African case to other similar cases. This comparison is useful because it demonstrates that the trajectory that the South African government has followed post-apartheid is not unique. But the comparison serves more than this purpose; it will be useful as a test of whether the arguments I have proffered to explain the

South African case are also valid in cases similar to it.

149

Restating the puzzle and assessing the evidence

In the run-up to the first inclusive democratic elections in South Africa held in 1994, the African National Congress published and ran on a manifesto—the Reconstruction and

Development Program (RDP)—that was hailed as pro-poor and progressive. To those who knew the history of the RDP—that it had originated from the trade union movement under the leadership of COSATU—it was unsurprising that its policy posture was explicitly biased in favor of the working class and the poor. Of more than 60% popular vote that the ANC garnered in those elections in 1994, it received the largest proportion from the black working class and the poor. However, the program that the ANC has implemented in government has been largely, to take once again from the UNDP, anti-poor. The purpose of this dissertation has been to explain this rather stunning turn of events. I say stunning because while we have come to expect that politicians “campaign in poetry and govern in prose”, none would have predicted that in South Africa the “prose” would be a social reform program that is anti-poor. None would have predicted that almost a decade and a half after the defeat of apartheid half of the

South African population would be living below the poverty line. None too would have predicted that overall human development in South Africa would have deteriorated to the extent that South Africa’s ranking in the HDI would significantly decline the way it has. Very few would also have anticipated on that historic day when Nelson Mandela was inaugurated as president of South Africa that HIV/AIDS would ravage a country that was once the example and hope of the world and leave behind thousands of sickly children without mothers and fathers.

This turn of events is also surprising because it has gone against the grain of what scholars who write about South Africa predicted would happen after the collapse of apartheid.

150 Writing in the editorial of the Monthly Review in 1986, Harry Magdoff and Paul Sweezy argued that (it is worth quoting their argument extensively for it shows what some scholars once predicted, justifiably or not, would happen in South Africa):

South Africa’s system of racial segregation and repression is a veritable paradigm of capitalist super-exploitation. It has a white monopoly capitalist class and an advanced black proletariat. It is so far the only country with a well developed, modern capitalist structure which is not only “objectively” ripe for revolution but has actually entered a stage of overt and seemingly irreversible revolutionary struggle.

Madgoff and Sweezy went on to suggest that anything short of a social revolution they were predicting for South Africa would be “a stunning defeat for the world revolution”.

Exactly a decade and two months after this bold prediction, the South African government was unveiling its neoliberal macro-economic strategy, GEAR, and publicly declaring it to be non- negotiable.

It is tempting to dismiss Madgoff’s and Sweezy’s prediction as having been too far- fetched in the first place and therefore unlikely to materialize. However, its usefulness here is to show the fundamental shift that has taken place in South Africa in a matter of a few years.

The purpose is to demonstrate that what has happened in South Africa would have been inconceivable a decade before the democratic elections in 1994.

While Madgoff and Sweezy were not alone in predicting a social revolution for South

Africa86, the bar set by others was much lower than socialism. Others predicted that a post- apartheid South Africa would join a family of social democracies in the world. Their prediction and hope for a social democratic South Africa stood on firm theoretical ground. As stated in the first chapter of this dissertation, South Africa possessed all the conditions that have made social democracies possible (and probable) in other countries. Not only was the ANC a left of

86 See John S. Saul, 2005.

151 center political party with strong ties to COSATU and other left organizations such as the

SACP, the structure of the state in South Africa also favored the development and implementation of social democratic reforms. However, what happened instead was that the reform program that the ANC implemented in government was the opposite of social democracy. The result of that reform program was significant job losses, increasing levels of poverty, rising social inequality and general decline in the standard of living especially for the poor sections of the population.

It is this paradox of a left of center party with strong ties to well organized working class organizations operating in a favorable institutional terrain which this dissertation has sought to explain. I have argued that the weakness of pro-poor organizations in civil society is the major explanatory factor for understanding this paradox. I showed in the chapter on health

(chapter 5) that the weakness of pro-poor organizations in civil society provided political space for government to initially ignore the AIDS pandemic (during the Mandela administration) and to out rightly refuse to implement policies that would have saved lives (during the Mbeki administration). The chapter on economic policy (chapter 4) also demonstrated that organizational weakness of the working class and the exclusion of its organizations from important policy making bodies often lead to public policies that do not serve the interests of the poor. The chapter on education (chapter 6), on the other hand, provides a positive example on what the strength of pro-poor organization can do. Even prior to the transition to democracy, the state was already investing enormous resources to education; the government

ANC continued with these investments in education even though it was implementing its self- imposed structural adjustment program called GEAR. So the evidence from health, economic policy and education seems to support the central thesis, which is that organization matters in shaping policy outcomes.

152 The explanation I have put forth has however its rivals, the most cogent of which is what I call the “globalization thesis”. This thesis has its advocates both in South Africa and in other countries. In their article published in 2000, Adam Habib and Vishnu Padayachee articulate this thesis best by arguing that “The shift in economic policy [by the ANC in government], we would contend, was the result of the ANC’s perception of the balance of economic and political power at both the global and local level” (2000:245). They argue that the ANC government implemented certain policies in order to please the international and domestic investor community in the hope of attracting inward capital flows. In order to achieve the goal of attracting foreign investment, the ANC decided to adhere strictly to “principles of the Washington Consensus” (p.246).

Implicit in Habib’s and Padayachee’s argument is the notion that globalization is antithetical to progressive social reforms. In their view domestic and global economic elites tend to favor economic and social policies that are largely regressive. This view receives some support from Gay Seidman (1998:1-2) who observes that social democrats in Brazil, South

Africa and South Korea, upon assuming state power, argued that globalization undermine the control of national states over economic processes thereby circumscribing their ability to enact pro-poor social and economic reforms. An often repeated refrain by governments, Seidman notes, is that pro-poor policies would frighten prospective international investment, lead to capital flight, and even bring about job losses.

It is the same argument that was used as a justification for GEAR in South Africa, and it has been used in many countries as a pretext for either avoiding or abandoning pro-poor social reforms. While there is no clear consensus about how globalization negatively affects the enactment of pro-poor policies; there is a strong view that the globalization of capital strengthens the power of business at the expense of labor. This view is articulated by James

153 Piazza (2001), who, after analyzing the effect of globalization on the relationship between labor unions and their social democratic allies concludes that globalization weakens the power of labor unions and increases that of employers. Significantly, Piazza also contends that the weakening of labor unions is negatively associated with social democratic reforms. Piazza’s contention is supported by Kurzer (1993), who also credits the globalization of finance for the collapse of social democracy in Northern European countries, as does Huber and Stephens

(1998) as well as Dani Rodrik (1997).

In the case of developing countries the same argument has been advanced with added forcefulness given their weak position in the world system of economic production and trade.

After their analysis of the effect of globalization on social spending in 14 Latin American countries including Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Bolivia, Costa Rica and Mexico, Robert Kaufman and Alex Seugar-Ubiergo (2001:554) reach a general conclusion that “trade integration has a consistently negative effect on aggregate social spending and that this is compounded by openness to capital markets”. Kaufman and Seugar-Ubiergo are supported by another quantitative study of 53 less developed countries conducted by Nira Rudra (2002). Rudra

(2002:435) posits that welfare spending in less developed countries is negatively affected by

“greater trade flows and capital mobility”. A similar conclusion is also reached by Glatzer and

Dietrich Rueschemeyer (2005), who in the concluding chapter of their volume on globalization and social policy argue that there is an inverse relationship between globalization and progressive social policy reform. Glatzer and Rueschemeyer especially observe that in Latin

America the debt crisis that hit some countries in that region early in the 1980s exposed them to “very strong pressures from the international financial institutions urging austerity and market oriented reforms”. It was the IFIs, Glatzer and Rueschemeyer note, which “insisted on severe budget cuts as well as drastic opening to international trade”.

154 Glatzer’s and Rueschemeyer’s argument is important because it identifies the mechanisms that link globalization to regressive social policies—at least in the case of Latin

America. Therein lies the paradox of the South African government’s embrace of extreme neooliberal measures. While the debt crisis in Latin America exposed the affected countries to structural adjustment programs of the IMF and the World Bank; South Africa did not face any crippling debt burden when the ANC assumed power in 1994. As a matter of fact, the ANC government has consistently worn it as a badge of (nationalist) honor its refusal to accept aid from the IFIs. So to suggest as Habib and Padayachee do that the failure of the ANC government to follow a progressive social reform path was largely because of globalization is to ignore the significance of this important difference between most Latin American countries and South Africa.

Moreover, the globalization argument also ignores that some other developing countries have implemented very progressive social policies under the very same conditions of a globalizing world economy. This is well demonstrated by Sandbrook et al (2007) who in their recently published book on social democracy in the global periphery demonstrate that progressive social reforms are possible in developing countries under conditions of globalization. They assert that the four cases (Kerala, Mauritius, Costa Rica and Chile) they analyze in the book “contradict [this] association of trade openness with lower social spending”

(p.220). In fact they observe that the four cases rank highly in competitiveness in their respective regions despite their high levels of social spending. They note that the cases have adjusted to globalization without abandoning social programs (p.221).

Sandbrook et al identify each country’s domestic politics as the overarching explanation for the emergence and prosperity of social democratic regimes. They contend that any country’s adaptation to globalization is mediated by its unique political dynamics (p.253).

155 Particularly important in their view is the strength of civil society organizations mobilizing the working class. They posit that countries with strong labor movements such as those in the

Southern Cone of Latin America have tended to have generous social welfare regimes as compared to those with weaker civil societies (p.182). To underscore the significance of civil society on shaping social reform trajectories of developing countries Sandbrook et al note that

“Civil society looms large in any explanation of social democracy in the periphery because it is the terrain on which social classes are formed” (p.183).

It is this salience of domestic politics and the importance of civil society which I have emphasized in my explanation of the South Africa paradox. Without understanding the politics of post-apartheid South Africa particularly the weakness of civil society organizations such as

SANCO and COSATU and their exclusion from policy making bodies, it would be difficult to understand the conservative social reform trajectory that the ANC government has followed. I have shown that in cases such as education where there is a history of popular mobilization and a presence of a strong civil society the policies that the ANC in government has implemented have been largely pro-poor. The opposite has been true in cases such as health and the economy where the organization of poor people has been historically weak.

Important as working class organization in civil society is, it is only a necessary condition for the development of redistributive social reforms; it is not sufficient. Equally important are other factors including the relationship between a well organized working class and a left of center government. In chapter 2 I discussed the relationship between the ruling

African National Congress and its working class allies such as SANCO and COSATU. I showed that their relationship was often shaped by the strength of working class organization.

Those which were better organized such as COSATU (particularly in the early days of the democratic transition) tended to wield influence in the ANC and to shape public policy. I also

156 showed that COSATU’s political strength gave it political independence in its engagement with the ANC, which allowed it to challenge the ANC when it deemed its policies to be detrimental to its constituency. The opposite was of course SANCO whose organizational and political weaknesses sidelined it to political irrelevance and helped ensure the development of a paternalistic relationship with the ANC.

The discussion in chapters 2 and 4 showed that while COSATU started with organizational and political advantages that shaped its relationship with the ANC and its impact on public policy; its influence did not last long. The weakening position of COSATU in its alliance with the ANC had much to do with the increasing power of the ANC leadership as much as it did with their own organizational weaknesses. As I showed in chapter 4,

COSATU’s membership had been steadily declining from its peak of the late 1990s, which was due to massive job losses in the manufacturing sector that followed the opening up of the South

African economy to global competition. The loss of jobs in the industrial sector also contributed to the changing composition of COSATU’s membership, which increasingly became dominated by state employees such as teachers, nurses and police officers. The influence of public sector employees thus also increased in COSATU. Their interests and concerns became to dominate. The militancy of the industrial working class was soon replaced by the moderation of lower middle class civil servants. A once fiercely independent leadership of COSATU started to hesitate to openly criticize the leadership of the ANC for fear of undermining its career prospects in government.

This happened right at the time President Mbeki had arrogated to himself the power to appoint leaders into important positions in the civil service, in government, and high paying in enterprises controlled by the state. Moreover, whether an aspirant black business person got access to the magic circle of Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) and the instant wealth such

157 access entailed depended on the relationship with the political elite led by President Mbeki.

The absence of voices challenging government policies should therefore be understood in this context, which meant that political dissent was materially costly. The safest and career rewarding path for most labor leaders and politicians within the ANC was to collaborate with rather than to challenge the government.

The collective impact of all these changes on COSATU was to weaken it, which had the effect of decreasing its leverage on its engagement with the ANC. In accusing the ANC government of having sold out the cause for progressive social reform, the leadership of

COSATU and other leftwing organizations often omit the contribution of their organizations’ weaknesses to the conservative turn that the ANC has taken. And this omission is significant because comparative experience, as will be seen in the next section, shows that weaknesses of working class organizations tend to enable populist parties to easily implement anti-poor policies.

Labor-populist party alliances in comparative context

The abandonment of COSATU and other pro-poor organizations by the ANC in government has precedents in other countries in the world. The most instructive and comparable experiences are from Latin America, and the Argentine and Mexican experiences are often considered paradigmatic. There emerged in most Latin American countries in the early 20th century mass populist parties that forged strong links with working class organizations such as trade unions (Collier and Collier, 1991). They were bound by a compact according to which ruling populist parties implemented social and economic policies that benefited their working class allies in exchange for political support. This historic political pact began to unravel in the 1980s when populist parties abandoned pro-working class policies in

158 the face of adverse of economic conditions. Those conditions included debt crises, changing trade and production patterns and increased capital mobility, to mention a few. On the political front the working class constituency itself was becoming increasingly heterogeneous and fragmented, which compromised the capacity of labor unions to deliver the votes, resources, and social peace that had been the foundation of their relationship with their populist -party allies (Katrina Burgess and Steven Levitsky, 2003:882).

The relationship between the Justicialista Party (or the Peronist Party as it is famously known) and the General Labor Confederation (CGT) in Argentina followed the same trajectory. For the large part of its history the Peronist Party was anchored in its working class and poor people’s base. The social program it implemented in its long period in government benefited its labor allies, and in turn the labor unions provided votes and resources to the party

((Levitsky, 2003:4). Faced with rapidly changing and hostile economic conditions the Peronist party did not only abandon the statist economic program that it had become known for, but it also radically transformed its relations with labor. Levitsky (2003:4) notes that beginning in

1983, “Peronism underwent a far-reaching process of de-unionization. Reformers dismantled

Peronism’s traditional mechanisms of labor participation, and clientelist networks gradually replaced the party’s union-based linkages to the working and lower classes”. By the early

1990s, Levitsky observes, the Peronist Party had transformed from a labor dominated party into a “machine party in which unions were relatively marginal actors” (ibid). It henceforth implemented a program of economic liberalization which included the elimination of various labor laws, subsidies, and price controls; privatized almost all state owned enterprises; and retrenched thousands from the federal bureaucracy (Burgess and Levitsky, 2003:890).

Further north in Mexico the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) was also undergoing a transformation of its own. Long known for its historic relationship with the

159 Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM) that had been forged in the 1930s, and also for its reliably pro-labor policies, the PRI started implementing neoliberal economic reforms in the

1980s and 1990s which proved quite costly to its labor allies (Burgess, 1999). These reforms included fiscal and wage austerity, trade liberalization, price deregulation, flexibilization of the labor market, industrial restructuring, to mention just a few. The impact of reforms on workers and the poor included cuts in social services, declining incomes, decreased job security and rising unemployment (Burgess, 1999:106).

The abandoning of labor by their party allies was however not limited to the two cases mentioned above. Similar experiences occurred in Venezuela, Peru, Spain and several

European countries. In Spain, for instance, the adoption of neoliberal policies by the Socialist

Party (PSOE) under the leadership of President Felipe Gonzalez led to the split of the alliance between the PSOE and the its labor ally, the General Workers Union (UGT)—bringing to an end a relationship that had begun in the 1880s. Similarly in Venezuela, President Carlos Perez implemented a neoliberal set of economic policies, which he dubbed “The Great Turnaround” upon taking office. That program was of course antithetical to progressive policies that

Democratic Action (AD) had implemented for years and had been a bond that tied AD to its labor allies in the Confederation of Venezuelan Workers (CTV) (Burgess and Levitsky,

2003:893).

Breaking historical relationships in pursuit of neoliberalism is of course a quality that is not exclusive to populist parties from developing countries. In his analysis of 16 developed countries in which there has existed a historical alliance between labor unions and a left of center party, Piazza (2001) observes that almost all of the center left parties have substantively abandoned their labor allies. This is equally true for such historical mainstays of social democratic politics such as Sweden, Denmark and Finland as it is true for such countries as

160 France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy and Australia.

So what is striking about the neoliberal path followed by the ANC is not that it happened under the watch of COSATU and other pro-poor organizations, for experiences from other countries in both the developing and the developed worlds show that the presence of an alliance with labor does not prevent a historically left of center party from following a socio- economic path that is largely anti-poor and detrimental to the interests of the working class.

What is however fascinating about the experiences from other comparable cases is not what is common among them—that left of center parties in alliance with working class organizations implemented anti-poor policies—but what is different. Various studies show that in the cases where the organization of the working class has been weak and civil society generally less powerful, left of center governments have been successful in implementing neoliberal policies.

The study by Levitsky (2001) for example shows that the successful implementation of the neoliberal project by President Carlos Menem in Argentina was made possible by serious weaknesses in the CGT, which had started even before Menem became president. The opposite is also true: in cases where labor unions remained powerful and independent, be it in

Venezuela, Peru or Spain left of center parties found it difficult to successfully implement their conservative agendas. In Venezuela, for example, the CTV mobilized aggressively against the neoliberal project of President Perez and joined forces with the anti-Perez faction inside the

AD to defeat him and his program at the party’s congress in October 1991 (Burgess,

1999:129). Similarly in Peru the strength of the left ensured that APRA under the leadership of

Alan Garcia bucked the neoliberal trend when it took over power in 1985 (Roberts, 1996:93;

Burgess and Levitsky, 2003).

In Spain the General Workers Union fiercely resisted the neoliberal project introduced by President Gonzalez. When everything else failed the union confederation chose to cut its

161 ties with the PSOE rather than to succumb to its neoliberal project. The explanation that

Burgess (1999) provides for this radical stance taken by the UGT in Spain is that the federation was facing serious mobilization of its worker constituency by other labor unions. In other words, it was the strength of the labor movement as a whole that ensured that the labor federation fought fiercely against the implementation of neoliberal policies by the PSOE government. The countries on the other hand in which labor unions and civil society generally were weak saw left of center parties implementing conservative economic and social policies that proved costly to the working class and poor people in general. What all these experiences from the countries with vastly different histories and institutions surveyed here point to is the centrality of a strong civil society for progressive social reform.

Thus situated in this comparative context, the neoliberal social reform path the ANC government has followed does not seem so odd after all. What has often confused about the

South African case is that COSATU and other working class organizations appear so strong when looked from the outside. The source of confusion is partly historical: civil society organizations played such as a central role in bringing about democracy in South Africa in such way that this historical strength is assumed to have continued even after the democratic transition. What is sometimes overlooked is that the democratic transition actually transformed working class organizations such as COSATU and SANCO; because of a variety of factors, they became weak.

While the collective impact of the ANC government’s strength and the weaknesses of working class organizations as well as the exclusion of the poor from policy making bodies has been a turn towards neoliberalism, progressive reforms in education have actually shown that where civil society is strong and independent its influence on shaping government policy tends to be significant.

162 The health sector where working class organizations have historically been weak has experienced the most regressive policies implemented by the ANC government. Its policy on

HIV/AIDS in particular, which is the focus of this dissertation, is the best illustration of this.

As I showed in chapter 5 the consequences of bad HIV/AIDS policies have been devastating.

The government’s own Department of Health estimate the number of people infected by the

HIV to have been 5.3 million in 2002—the largest number of people living with HIV/AIDS in any country in the world (Department of Health, 2002). Of the 5.3 million infected, 2.9 million are women and 230 000 are children. The Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS

(UNAIDS) 2004 Report on the Global AIDS Pandemic further estimates 1.1 million children are orphaned as a result of HIV/AIDS in South Africa, and moreover, this report estimates that

370 000 adults and children died from HIV/AIDS in South Africa in 2003 alone—more than 1

000 deaths a day (UNAIDS, 2004).

The government’s policy on HIV/AIDS only changed with the formation of the

Treatment Action Campaign in 1998, which mobilized poor people—the major victims of the

AIDS pandemic—to demand a sensible policy to combat the pandemic. Any progress that has been achieved in the area of HIV/AIDS, however belated, is almost exclusively because of the mobilization by the TAC. This supports once again the central thesis of this dissertation which is that the strength of civil society organizations mobilizing the working class and the poor generally is critical for progressive social reforms.

Theoretical conclusions from the South African case

My interest in studying the trajectory of social reform in South Africa owes its origins to the academic literature on the development and retrenchment of social welfare regimes. The explanations that various theories provide for either the development or the retrenchment of

163 social welfare policies seemed to be at odds with the social reform path that the post-apartheid state has followed. This was puzzling because the conditions that are generally considered conducive for progressive social reform appeared to exist in South Africa and yet there was no progressive social reform. The objective of this doctoral study therefore has been to unravel this puzzle.

There are several findings from the South African case that have a theoretical bearing.

The first concerns competing arguments made by advocates of the two dominant schools of thought on the development of social welfare regimes: the power resources theory and the institutionalist theory. The finding from the South African case seems to suggest that the power resources of poor people are probably more primary (and perhaps more significant) in shaping the trajectory of social reform than the structure of political institutions. This has proven to be true in education as it has been true in the economic and health areas. The South African case seems to support the claims of the power resources theory, which emphasizes the significance of strong organization of the poor as a condition for progressive social reforms.

The findings from the South African case draw attention to what appears to be two blind spots of the power resources theory. The first concerns how advocates of the power resources theory treat the working class. There is a tendency to treat it as one monolithic group.

I have shown that the working class in South Africa is actually varied: there are those who are employed in the formal sector (and mainly organized by labor unions) and those who are either employed in the informal sector or simply unemployed. Those who are not employed in the formal sector tend to be poorly or not organized at all. Considering the important of organization for social reform, it is important to pay attention to this differentiation because what is good for organized workers in the formal sector is not necessarily good for the employed or those in the informal sector.

164 The second point of departure concerns the relationship between the working class and political parties. It is often claimed that a closer relationship between working class organizations and the left of center ruling parties is critical for the development of progressive social reforms. While this claim is supported by the South African case, the findings from my case and experiences from other comparable countries suggest that there is much more to such relationships than what is generally claimed. While a close relationship is beneficial, equally important is for working class organizations to be political independent from their political party allies. Dependent relationships (such as those between the national leaders of SANCO and the ANC) often lead to the development of clientelism. Too often leaders of populist parties use their alliances with labor unions and other poor people’s organizations as the mechanism of enforcing acquiescence to anti-poor policies. Comparative experience from countries such as Argentina and Mexico, for instance, shows that close and less independent relationships between populist parties in those countries and labor unions did not serve the unions and the poor well. Where working class organizations were more independent such as in Spain, Peru and Venezuela populist party ruling elites found it less easy to impose anti-poor policies without paying costly political penalties.

What these experiences suggest is that for the power resources of poor people to bring about pro-poor policies what is required is not just a relationship with a ruling left of center party. Organizations of the poor also need to maintain a fair degree of political independence from their party allies. This is probably one of the major findings from the South African case: that it is not just a close relationship with a left of center party that matters; a fair degree of political independence is also critical. It is inconceivable, for instance, to imagine that the leadership of the ANC would have imposed GEAR to COSATU in the manner it did (see chapter 2 for details) had COSATU and other left organizations been fairly independent from

165 the ANC. Further difficult to imagine is the ANC government’s disastrous policy on

HIV/AIDS with a strongly independent COSATU and other pro-poor organizations.

The South African case has also shown that access to policy making networks in the political party and the state is also crucial for shaping public policies to favor the poor and the working class. As was shown in the chapter on education it was not only the organization of the working class and the poor that propelled education policies towards the progressive direction. It was also the access of working class organizations to policy networks in the ANC and the state.

Conclusion

The purpose of this dissertation has been to explain the trajectory of social reform that the ANC in government has followed since the advent of democracy. This trajectory has been puzzling because the social and political conditions that have existed in South Africa appeared ideal for the implementation of largely pro-poor social and economic policies. What has happened instead is that the ANC government has implemented policies which are generally considered anti-poor.

I have explained the policy direction that the ANC government has implemented by arguing that it can be traced to the weakness of organizations mobilizing the poor. I have shown that in cases where poor people have been strongly organized the policies that the ANC government has implemented have tended to be pro-poor, while in areas where there is weak organization of the poor the policies have been regressive. This finding largely confirms the argument of the power resources theory which suggests that the power resources of poor people are critical in shaping the trajectory of social reform.

166 I have also argued that working class organization is also important because it shapes the relationship that the organizations of the poor have with their ruling party allies. If the organizations of the working class are strong and political independent, their access and influence on their political party allies tend to be greater. That in turn opens up access to policy making networks in the state and their influence on public policy. In other words, there is an interrelationship between working class organization, relationship with the ruling political party, and access to the state and influence on public policy. Social reform has been anti-poor in South Africa, I have argued, not because the ANC elite sold out, or because it had no alternative. The poor have not enjoyed the democratic dividend because their power resources are weak, which in turn has led to their exclusion from policy making networks in the ANC and the state.

167

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