The moving line between state benevolence and control: Municipal indigent programmes in South Africa

free in South Africa. Having registered as municipal indigents, the poor not only gain access to free basic services but also embark upon a voyage into a bureaucratic underworld where policies are changed and eligibility criteria and sanctions are unevenly applied. Various preconditions and limits on services, as well as social surveillance of indigent households, has turned indigency programmes into a ‘regime’. The policy has swung from hard cost recovery (mass disconnections) during the period 1994–2000 to ‘free’ basic services and, more recently, to social-shaming and criminalisation. This paper provides a thematic account of recent municipal indigent processes in order to explore the ‘moving boundary’ between benevolence and control regarding this crucial citizen–state interface. Based on recent interviews with government officials, a review of relevant government documents, and describing the administrative complexities, the paper reveals aspects of what the poor confront in day-to-day experiences of the state. It is argued that there are lessons for all municipalities seeking a more sustainable and democratic path to citizenship rather than an ongoing low-level war with poor citizens

Gender activism: perspectives on the South African transition, institutional cultures & everyday life

Digitised by Rhodes University Library on behalf of the Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER

Contradictions in municipal transformation from apartheid to democracy : the battle over local water privatization in South Africa

This paper traces the ebb and flow of municipal fiscal crises, investment strategies, pricing and related issues, political activism, and the politics of resistance. Job guarantees protected apartheid-era civil servants; white voters were given an effective triple weight in elections as well as veto power over local council decisions if they held as little as one-third of the council votes (1992,1993). Locally, for South Africa’s 843 municipalities, neoliberalism meant intensifying budget constraints, cost-recovery principles, lower levels of services (such as pit latrines in new low-income residential developments instead of flush toilets) and unprecedented cut-offs of services to those residents unable to pay municipal bills

‘This land is not for sale’: Post-1994 resistance art and interventionism in Cape Town’s precarious publics

The control, regulation and commodification of space has been fundamental in reinforcing structural racism and social identities. In a city such as Cape Town, where colonial architecture and heritage as well as apartheid racial zoning forms part of the spectacularisation of the city, racial conflict seems to have deepened. Through dis- cussing public protest, artistic public interventions and live art, we argue that young black artists in South Africa are heralding a new phase of post-1994 resistance art which exposes conflictual cultural politics of public space in Cape Town rather than a healing democracy and multi-culturalism. As protesters and activists, artists deface the myth of a reconciled non-racial post-Apartheid society by targeting officially sanctioned art. Drawing from Faranak Miraftab’s notion of ‘invited’ and ‘invented’ spaces as well as Chris Dixon and Angela Davis’ concept of prefigurative politics, we argue that precarious South African publics are experienced as a ‘battleground’ rather than a space for liberal deliberation and democracy. New resistance art, therefore, tends to be protest-centred in engaging with the conflictual nature of the city

Changing people, changing lives through public participation and social transformation: A south African case study of a rural development programme

During 2009, in what seemed to be a return to RDP-style thinking, the Comprehensive Rural Development Programme (CRDP) was adopted nationally to tackle not only underdevelopment, poverty, unemployment, and other social ills, but also to enable ‘rural people to take control of their destiny’ with the support of ‘well-structured community organisations’ called Council of Stakeholders (CoS). Most existing studies, however, tend to devalue the CRDP, describing it as ill-conceived. This study investigated three Western Cape wards in South Africa, finding that both governmental and non-governmental actors had a less negative view and were actively trying to pursue a new form of co-operation. It is the only programme that attempts to be truly intergovernmental and community-based. The study’s results suggest that the CRDP can contribute to a deep process of change and empowerment. This change, in turn, could contribute to desired larger-scale changes and concerted collective action to drive development in locally appropriate ways

Organising Somalian, Congolese and Rwandan migrants in a time of xenophobia in South Africa: empirical and methodological reflections

Xenophobic practices pervade civil society and the state in South Africa. But its victims are not passive. Academic scholarship has not sufficiently recognised the multiple roles of refugees and asylum seekers migrant organisations in a context where refugees are required to "self-settle”. The dominant methodological focus of existing research has been on the migrant as the individual. This paper’s main research objectives are to question this focus and examine evidence of the collective responses to struggles faced by foreign African migrants and refugee groups in Cape Town. Eleven refugee and asylum seeker associations formed by Somalians, Congolese and Rwandan asylum seekers and refugees were investigated, based on extensive interviews with 11 leaders of refugee organisations. These organisations not only strongly defend migrant interests but also project a long-term view of integration into South African society. In addition, the paper concludes by arguing for a shift in the focus of research in order to show that migrant organisations are crucial in an individual’s collective security concerns, in advocacy with government institutions and in initiatives to build relationships with South Africans

Understanding successful alternative delivery models in health, water and electricity : Sub-Saharan Africa, Asia and Latin America; final joint technical report (November 1, 2008 - Oct 31, 2014)

Appendices not includedThe project fosters evidence-based dialogue on policy options for better access to quality public services in three interrelated sectors: health, water/sanitation, and electricity, towards equity-oriented development in the global South. Thematic focus has been on governance of basic municipal services, primarily water, sanitation, electricity and waste management. This includes research looking directly at the primary healthcare sector, with particular attention paid to the impact of the commercialization of these sectors on equity and health. The Municipal Services Project (MSP) produced a body of work that has received widespread recognition and acclaim

The Southern African Working Class: Production, Reproduction and Politics

Southern Africa is probably the world's most extreme site of uneven capitalist development.1 Inequality within and between the region's countries is severe, with race and gender domination largely undisturbed by the post-colonial experience, with the environment taking enormous strain, and with South Africa-and its 40 million of the region's 102 million citizens-responsible for $130 billion of Southern Africa's$160 billion in 1998 output. Yet, while it is logical to anticipate an uneven, fragmented evolution of working-class power and political strategy, given the area's different modes of class struggle, levels of consciousness, organizational capacity, militancy, and relations with political parties and other social forces, developments in one country do act as major reference points for others. Southern Africa's rich radical traditions-including once-avowed 'Marxist- Leninist' governments in Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Angola, and mass-movements and powerful unions-owe much to revolutionary socialism and nationalism, yet this never gave rise to an explicit regional class project

TRANSFORMATION IN INFRASTRUCTURE POLICY FROM APARTHEID TO DEMOCRACY:

Policy associated with basic infrastructure investment-- water and sanitation systems, new electricity lines, roads, stormwater drainage, and other services provided at municipal level-- has been one of the most troubling aspects of the first five years of African National Congress rule. Enormous challenges were offered by the infrastructural backlog and ecological inheritance. Notwithstanding rhetoric (and Constitutional provisions) to the contrary, government quickly retreated from its original electoral mandate. Following a section that provides brief historical context, this paper offers a reminder of infrastructure policy directives in the Reconstruction and Development Programme, continuities in ideology represented in the government's main housing/infrastructure policy documents (especially those finalised during 1996-98), an