Local Despotisms and the Limits of the Discourse of “Delivery” in South Africa

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Local Despotisms and the Limits of the Discourse of “Delivery” in South Africa

Richard Pithouse

The degree to which the urban question in South Africa
has successfully been reduced to the housing question is
both illustrative and symptomatic of the general success
in depoliticising urban issues in particular and the requirements
of social justice more broadly. The resolution of
the urban question is now typically seen, often through
an astonishingly hubristic use of the language of international
competitiveness, as a matter of efficient, bold
and creative management that can produce an enabling
and secure environment for investment, tourism and
entrepreneurship. Social justice is often seen as a question
of steady progress by an efficient state, partnered,
where necessary, by NGOs and overseen by human rights
organisations that can, where necessary, appeal to the
courts for oversight.

This is all nested in a consensus around a vision of
democracy as rule by unelected but enlightened experts
whose performance is managed by elected politicians
and who can enable the flourishing of the energies that
animate the market. This is hardly unique to South Africa.
Its underside – the capture of attempts at managerial
efficiency by clientalist party networks, the increasing illegality
and violence of state-driven exclusion and repression
and so on – are equally familiar internationally. And
in South Africa there is, although not to the degree in, say,
Haiti or Bolivia, also the production of real dissensus. This
emerges from both the constitutional aspirations to which
the state is formally committed and the degree of popular
mobilisation, a considerable proportion of which has been
in support of the demand for housing. At times legal and
popular activisms have developed productive synergies.

The outlines of the housing crisis in South Africa

There is general agreement on the broad outlines of
the housing crisis in South Africa. A government official,
newspaper editor, grassroots militant or academic are
all likely to agree that the post-apartheid state has built
houses at an impressive rate but that these houses have
been poorly designed and constructed and, most often,
located on the urban periphery. There is a similar degree
of agreement about the fact that, although the state has
built more than two million houses, the number of people
living in shacks, as well as the broader group of people
who cannot afford commercial housing, is escalating
rapidly. There is also no doubt about the facts that corruption
has been endemic in the provision of housing or
that concerns about housing have often been central to
the extraordinary wave of popular local protest that has
rocked South Africa since, at least, 2004 (Alexander 2010).
It’s equally clear that housing is central to the demands of
the organised poor people’s movements that, like Abahlali
baseMjondolo, the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign
and others, have engaged in sustained popular struggle in
recent years.

The depolitisation of the mass struggle and the
discourse of “delivery”

But there are a number of increasingly clear fractures in
how the housing crisis and prospects for its resolution are
understood. The African National Congress began to see
the resolution of the housing crisis in technocratic terms
in the years immediately before its ascent to state power.
This was part of a broader political shift in which a people,
constituted in mass struggle, was turned into a politically
passive population requiring management and service
provision from above. The term that has taken centre
stage in this transition is “delivery”. It has, perhaps by
sheer dint of relentless repetition, developed an extraordinary
currency across society. A woman blockading a road
with burning tyres is just as likely to frame her demand in
terms of “speeding up delivery” as is a newspaper editor,
NGO worker or campaigning politician. The currency of
the term does not only stem from the frequency with
which it is deployed. There is also a real sense in which,
despite formal constitutional commitments to liberal democracy,
many forms of entirely legal dissent are seen as
politically illegitimate by the ruling party and, sometimes,
the media and some currents in civil society. The degree
to which legal forms of dissent are tolerated narrows dramatically
from the top to the bottom of the class hierarchy.
But while it is often extremely difficult for poor people
to oppose the party or its policies they can, legitimately
and safely, raise questions about the efficiency of their
implementation – about, in the clichéd phrase of the day,
the “pace of service delivery”.

The ubiquity of the language of delivery is one symptom
of the overwhelming ideological hegemony that the ANC
was able to achieve for its deeply compromised social
programmes solely on the basis that it, rather than the
apartheid state, was administering them. But it is also one
consequence of the unstable pact forged between the
ANC and older elites in which concessions were negotiated,
formally and informally, in exchange for a cessation
of hostilities. In other words what had been rendered political
during the struggle against apartheid was rendered,
by mutual agreement between elites, as technical at the
dawn of parliamentary democracy. “Depoliticisation”,
Jacques Rancière tells us, “is the oldest task of politics,
the one which achieves its fulfilment at the brink of its
end, its perfection at the brink of the abyss” (2007:19).
But delivery also has tremendous currency amongst both
that part of the authoritarian left that sees itself as a rival
managerial class to the ANC as well as the broad constellation
of elite forces to the right of the ANC and located in
civil society, the academy, media and business that would
like to see more of the state’s social functions being managed
by appropriate NGOs and consultants accountable
to donors rather than by officials accountable to elected
politicians.

Challenging the language of “delivery”

There are, broadly, two lines of critique that have emerged
outside of the state and against the general consensus
that the resolution of the housing crisis is a technical
question of “speeding up delivery”. The first is rooted in
a set of discourses with Victorian roots that stress the alleged
dangers of welfare dependency and argue that the
poor need to take proactive action to pull themselves up
by their bootstraps. In the contemporary postcolony these
discourses use the language of empowerment but tend
to stress the importance of interventions such as savings
groups, microfinance and sweat equity and to actively
discourage any form of popular political empowerment,
any sort of direct confrontation with oppression or any
sense of entitlement to state support. The second set of
discourses that challenge the hegemony of the idea of
“delivery” is largely rooted in ideas of dignity. They include
a popular moral economy rooted in the imperative of
personal and collective dignity which often extends to the
view that people should be treated with respect which is
sometimes taken to mean that they should be, at least,
co-planners of their homes and communities. The experience
of popular political empowerment in the 1980s, and
the radically democratic ideas and practices that were
sometimes a key part of this political sequence, are also
central to this second set of discourses. They have also
been influenced to some degree by the ideas around
self-management, autogestion, the right to the city and
so on that are attractive to the small anti-authoritarian left
in South Africa. These discourses are all, in various ways,
committed to both popular political empowerment and
the defence and support of what the Brazilian urbanist
Macelo Lopes de Souza (2006) calls “grassroots urban
planning”.

Delivering to the “deserving” poor and
criminalising the “undeserving poor”

But there is also a third challenge to the language of
delivery that comes from within the state itself. The state
continues to present plans for ever more efficient and
less corrupt delivery as the solution not just to the housing
crisis but to the urban crisis and, indeed, the whole
social crisis in general. But, at the same time, it has, in
recent years, also made serious attempts to separate the
deserving poor, who will patiently wait for delivery, from
the undeserving poor, whose aspirations for a safe and
dignified urban life are increasingly presented and treated
as criminal. Delivery, in other words, is being withdrawn
as a universal right and the state is increasingly approaching
factions of the poor as a security problem rather than
as potential “beneficiaries” of development. This has been
accompanied by a state discourse that poses the shack
settlement not in terms of social justice or an imperfect
but still valuable popular attempt at accessing the city,
but as a problem to be eradicated by a twin strategy of
building houses and the criminalisation of squatting. The
recent return to the high apartheid strategy of building
“transit camps”, essentially government shacks often
set in semi-carceral conditions, is one response to the
presentation of the shack settlement as a social pathology
rather than as, what it is, the best available housing
option for millions of people despite its obvious imperfections.

South Africa has, by international standards, a relatively
progressive set of laws and policies relating to housing
rights, but the state acts in blatant, systemically unlawful
and often criminal violation of these laws and policies on
a daily basis. It also continues to call for their reform in
a direction that would dramatically reverse some of the
policy and legal gains made after apartheid.

The state is enthusiastically supportive of the bootstrap
versions of bottom-up empowerment and has, on occasion,
used these sorts of projects to try and separate the
deserving poor from the dangerous poor. But, to their
credit, the organisations that support these projects, and
which aim to do so, in part, via building high-level alliances
with the state, do not generally endorse the project
of criminalising that part of the poor cast as undeserving.
However some left and human rights NGOs have followed
the logic of the state and sought to actively demonise
autonomous poor people’s organisations as criminal,
violent, manipulated by malevolent outsiders and so on
when they have declined to accept NGO authority. In
some cases there has been outright complicity between
state and NGO attempts at unfairly demonising independent
poor people’s movements.

Different approaches to popular empowerment
confront similar difficulties

The partisans of popular political empowerment, like, say
Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM), and the partisans of what I
have here called bootstrap versions of popular empowerment,
like, say, Shack Dwellers’ International (SDI), tend to
operate in very different ways. For instance AbM has very
little access to money and no professional staff or technical
support NGO. It is willing to engage in mass protest
when there is no willingness on the part of the state to
negotiate, openly engages in unlawful civil disobedience,
such as the organised connection of electricity, and,
although it does not support any political party, is the subject
of deep suspicion by the ANC which sees it as a rival.
SDI is a global NGO with professional staff which works
with grassroots federations, centred around savings
groups, in a large number of countries. In South Africa, its
grassroots structures are linked together as the Federation
of the Urban Poor (FEDUP). SDI does not engage in direct
confrontation with the state, does not openly support
its affiliates in engaging in unlawful civil disobedience,
has tremendous resources and considerable technical
expertise and has enjoyed sustained high-level backing
by leading figures in the ANC, including the current and
previous housing ministers.

Yet there is a real sense in which these quite different
sorts of organisations share much of the terrain on which
they operate and confront some of the same difficulties.
One of those difficulties is the enormous degree to
which housing delivery, presented in technocratic terms
by politicians and also often planned in a similar mode
by officials, often in partnership with NGOs, is routinely
subordinated to the patronage networks within the ANC.

The degeneration of a national liberation
movement into a “means of private advancement”

The pervasiveness of patronage and clientalism with the
ANC should not be seen as a simple matter of corruption.
Straight-forward corruption does occur but even then it
is often embedded in clientalism in so far as the allocation
of opportunities to practice corruption goes. Officials,
perhaps working with NGOs, may develop a project along
technocratic lines. But that project is highly likely to be
captured and distorted by party networks at every level
from the allocation of contracts to build houses through
to the provision of materials, the allocation of labouring
jobs and the allocation of houses. There is considerable
media coverage of how the ANC, sometimes acting
through its investment arm, Chancellor House, makes
developmental and other decisions that are in its own
pecuniary interest and how support in the factional battles
between the party elites is often secured, at least in
part, by access to patronage. What is less well covered is
the degree to which support is secured by access to patronage
at the party’s base. In Durban I’ve not witnessed
any development, or even disaster response, channelled
through party structures in which these dynamics were
not a decisive factor in how things actually played out.

The party has not degenerated to the point where it is
nothing but “a means of private advancement” (Fanon,
1976:136) – the trade union federation COSATU continues
to take ethical positions within party structures – but it
certainly lacks any credible sense of a collective emancipatory
vision and has largely become a means of private
advancement. In Durban, the late John Mchunu, formerly
chairperson of the ANC in the city, was awarded millions
of rands in construction contracts by the state. Local
ANC leaders in shack settlements are also given jobs,
contracts, emergency aid of various sorts (food, building
materials etc) in exchange for loyalty.

One consequence of this is that there can be no smooth
movement between technocratic planning and implementation.
This is not merely a question of friction “slowing
delivery down”. On the contrary there is often, as when
relief after a fire only goes to people who can show party
cards or when houses in a development are allocated on
the basis of political affiliation, a fundamental distortion of
the initial aims of planners.

The dominance of the ANC and its internal
networks of patronage

In most of South Africa there is no real threat to the ANC
at the polls. The real threat to leaders of the organisation
at all levels comes from the contestation within the movement.
This contestation is often acute and sometimes
violent and leaders of the party, at all levels, are generally
far more concerned with shoring up support within the
party rather than with managing dissent outside of it.
The party leadership is well aware of the popular hostility
to increasingly blatant forms of patronage and so there is
an increasingly strident anti-corruption discourse. But the
same leadership that is speaking against corruption has
come to power via networks constituted around networks
of patronage – for instance John Mchunu was a key backer
of Jacob Zuma – and it is difficult to see how they could
act against these networks without putting their own positions
at real risk. Certainly there are cases where senior
party leaders take serious action against corruption. There
is, for instance, no question that the new housing minister,
Tokyo Sexwale, has taken some decisive steps against
certain forms of corruption. However, party loyalty is built
in the shape of a pyramid and people near the top of that
pyramid are generally only aware of the precise nature of
the deals that sustain their position with regard to people
in the layers immediately beneath them. But each layer
of people is dependent on clientalist relations with lower
layers with the result that it is often impossible for senior
people to drive a project of technocratic efficiency.

In Fanon’s analysis there is, inevitably, an authoritarian
underside that accompanies the degeneration of the
party into a “means of private advancement”. He writes
that the party “helps the government to hold the people
down. It becomes more and more clearly anti-democratic,
an implement of coercion” (1976:136). A party that says
and that must continue to say that is for the people when,
in fact, it has become a means of private advancement
via complicity with domination, will inevitably collapse
into paranoia and authoritarianism as it tries to square the
circle by pretending, to itself as much as anyone else, that
private enrichment is somehow the real fruit of national
liberation.

In contemporary South Africa, it is not at all unusual to
find that people live in fear of local councillors and their
ward committees and the Branch Executive Committees
of the local party structures. In fact, it is no exaggeration
to say that we have developed a two-tier political system
with liberal political rights for the middle classes and
increasingly severe curtailment of basic political rights for
the poor.

Much of this is made possible by the simply hostility that
middle-class society, including influential streams in the
media and civil society, display towards poor people when
they do not present themselves, or are not presented, as
passive victims patiently waiting for help. There is a rather
extraordinary silencing (Trouillot: 1995) of the present at
work in the name not just of international competitiveness
and efficiency but also in the name of human rights,
social justice, civil society (and the various sects of the
vanguardist left – all as stridently vociferous as they are
alienated from any popular support). But the ongoing entrenchment
of the two-tier political system also has a lot
to do with the nature of informality as a subject position.

Informality and local despotism

As Partha Chatterjee (2004) has shown the urban poor,
often living and working informally and therefore outside
of the law, have a tenuous relationship to civil society. An
existence in legal limbo can, as, for instance, Asef Bayat
(1997) has shown with regard to Tehran, open up opportunities
for the quiet encroachment of the poor. It can
also enable more direct forms of confrontation with the
power of state and capital. There are a number of studies
illustrating this in the Latin American context (e.g. Fernandes:
2010, Zibechi: 2010). However informality can also,
as Ananya Roy (2003) has shown in her study of Calcutta,
produce systemic insecurity which can in turn result in
profound dependence on clientalist relations with political
parties as people are only protected from eviction, and
are only able to access development, for as long as they
continue to demonstrate loyalty to party structures.
Of course party political systems of clientalism and
patronage are not the only forms of local and often microlocal
despotism. It is not unusual for NGOs to secure their
turf with very similar strategies to parties and with similar
results including, on occasion, the violent horizontal
defence of individualised relations of vertical patronage.
There are also, in some cases, real authoritarianisms within
community organisations that have been developed
outside of party structures. I’ve never encountered a community
in South Africa that is effectively run by criminal
networks as can happen in Brazil (Souza: 2009), but there
certainly are alliances between criminal networks and
various kinds of local organisations, be they constituted in
alliance with parties or NGOs.

Much of the debate around the housing crisis in South
Africa, and many of the attempts to make some inroads
into resolving that crisis, does not take these local forms
of despotism and their ability to capture and distort developmental
projects seriously.

The experiences of shack dwellers’ movements
in Durban

In Durban, in the years in which I was doing full-time
research on housing and spending much of my time each
day in shack settlements (2005 to 2008), I was aware of
two attempts to generate innovation from outside of the
ANC and the model of development in which “beneficiaries”
patiently wait for “delivery”. The first was that of SDI
and the second was that of AbM.

The SDI strategy included organising on the ground via FEDUP
as well as high-level deal making between its professional
staff and the municipality that included deploying
an SDI staff member to the housing department. But while
there was high-level political and official support for SDI,
this support did not translate into meaningful progress
on the ground. There seemed, at the time, to be broad
agreement between SDI and officials in the city that
the chief reason for this was political suspicion by local
party elites (despite the fact that SDI membership often
overlapped with ANC membership and structures) and
attempts to capture housing projects for the purposes of
patronage.

AbM did not start with a thought-out strategy to achieve
what it wanted – participatory in-situ upgrades rather
than forced removals to peripheral sites, termed “human
dumping grounds” by the movement. In its first
mobilisations in 2005, the movement was certainly acting
independently of party control but it did not see itself as
hostile to the party. Most activists were convinced that
the real problem was the local party leaders and that if
they could raise their voices enough senior party leaders
would respond to them.

But the response of the state and the party to independent
organisation was so hostile that, in the end, the movement
had no real choice but to organise independently of
the party. This entailed replacing party structures, which
are accountable upwards, with movement structures that
were accountable downwards.

This organisation was democratic, public and determined
and therefore able to sustain itself in the face of fairly
relentless attempts at delegitimation, co-option, personal
intimidation and outright state repression including public
displays of state violence. The result of this independent
organisation with outside solidarity – from church leaders
and, when there was blatant public state repression,
also international human rights organisations – was that,
after two years of sustained struggle, the movement
was invited to enter into negotiations with the city. These
negotiations were conducted between AbM and city
officials and a planning NGO working with the city. They
were, in the end, successful. Settlements that had entered
the movement were able to negotiate participatory in situ
upgrades and to do so in a manner that committed
the state to use the progressive provisions, hitherto left
fallow, from amidst its policy options. This was a breakthrough
of national significance (Pithouse: 2009). A key
reason for the success of these negotiations was that
local party structures had been expelled from the process
and a democratic community organisation had been able
to negotiate directly with city officials.

A democratic model of development brought
under control of the local party

AbM had developed some innovative strategies to secure
their commitment to a democratic model of development.
For instance, in an earlier concession from the state, the
repair of the toilets in the settlements, the movement did
not, as the ANC does, allocate the jobs to its supporters.
Instead, everyone in the community who aspired to those
jobs was invited to put their name forward and a blind
lottery was held. Of course, any movement or organisation,
no matter how democratic, will, inevitably, find itself
under increasing pressure to conform to patronage-based
modes of operation as it comes closer to being able to
exercise real power over real rescores. New tendencies
can emerge within a movement and new people can seek
to enter it with new agendas.

But AbM didn’t get the opportunity to test the tenacity of
it democratic mettle through a full-scale upgrade. Before
the fruits of the deal that had been negotiated could begin
to be realised, the movement was attacked, removed
from its original base in the Kennedy Road settlement,
and replaced with an unelected Community Policing Forum
under the control of the local ANC (Chance: 2010).
There were various factors that enabled this attack. One
of these factors was that the movement, which was and
remains multi-ethnic, lost considerable support in the
Kennedy Road settlement as ethnic sentiment escalated
in the wake of the Zulu nationalism that surrounded the
ascent of Jacob Zuma to the presidency. This was accompanied
by an extraordinary campaign of slander against
the movement and its leading members by ANC structures
and certain kinds of government officials including
some police officers. Allegations were made of everything
from witchcraft to corruption, but the most consistent
theme, often backed by senior police officers and politicians,
was that AbM was being paid by foreign NGOs that
were, in turn, in the pay of foreign governments determined
to “stop development” and “keep African people
poor”.

Local party leaders and the local business class were
also promised access to the development that AbM had
negotiated. That development is still scheduled to go
ahead, but if the settlement is not returned to democratic
governance before it begins, it will certainly be captured
and distorted by the local party structures. Already disaster
relief after fires has been distorted in the usual ways.
Both the AbM and SDI strategies, whatever their other
merits and limits, have failed to realise the material
change that they had hoped to achieve in Durban. Lessons
must be learnt from this experience.

Perspectives

While meshing state and NGO elites can, on occasion,
result in shifts in policy, it does not appear to the current
writer that any strategy of meshing state and NGO elites
will be able to challenge the clearly worsening degree to
which local party structures are operating in a despotic
manner on the ground. The AbM experience has proven
that sustained popular mobilisation can democratise settlements
at the local level. But it has also shown that, certainly
in Durban, the ANC is willing, when an appropriate
constellation of circumstances creates the opportunity, to
sanction the use of police-backed horizontal violence to
return a dissident territory to their control.

It may be that there is no realistic possibility of resolving
the housing crisis without some sort of fundamental political
change in South Africa. But when millions of people
are living in literally life-threatening conditions, attempts
must be made to do what can be done. And when gradual
change in the fissures of the present takes a democratising
form it can, as well as winning material concessions,
enlarge the possibilities for more fundamental progress.
But in view of the fragility of the positive innovations
that have been developed, and the fact that no one has
decisively solved either the problem of local despotism
or the general slide amongst elites into a security rather
than rights-based response to the housing crisis, there is
a pressing need for organisations committed to housing
rights to avoid damaging turf wars.

If any realistic chance of progress does require a popular
challenge to local party structures, and if there is a
decreasing tolerance for such challenges, then what is
required from all the organisations committed to housing
rights is, at a minimum, something like the following:

1. A clear and public recognition by all actors that poor
people have an unqualified right to organise outside of
the control of the ruling party and its local representatives
if they so choose.
2. A clear and public recognition by all actors that poor
people have the right to assert themselves politically
and in opposition to the programmes of the state if
they so choose.
3. An agreement between all organisations that any
repression of any organisation will be vigorously and
publicly contested by all organisations.
4. An agreement between all organisations to work together
on issues of common concern while accepting
differences and the right for all organisations to, should
they so wish, retain their autonomy.
5. A commitment by all organisations to organise in a
genuinely democratic manner at the local level. This
must include, at a minimum, all positions being subject
to regular election.
6. A recognition that while different organisations are
pursuing different strategies these are all experiments
and that no one has any sort of final answer to the
challenges that need to be confronted and so a degree
of mutual humility is required.