‘We are not Indians, we are the poors’ (Girlie Amod); ‘We are not African, we are the Poors’ (Bongiwe Manqele): both at a demonstration in 1999
(quoted in Desai, 2002:44).
At today's meeting in Kempton Park, the South African Local Government Association Consultative Assembly agreed to a campaign to register the poor throughout our country in the war against poverty. The aim of the campaign is to ensure that the most marginalised of our people – the poorest of the poor – receive a subsidy from their municipalities for basic services. This will go a long way to ensure service delivery to the poor, who are deprived of a basic amount of water, sanitation services and electricity because they are too poor to pay for these services rather than unwillingness to pay for services
(Media Statement, Father Smangaliso Mkatshwa, 16 June 2004).
This paper explores campaigns for free basic services in South Africa post-1994, with a constant tug-of-war between poor communities and local municipalities as the logic of commodification comes to define service delivery. It exposes how the state has responded to these struggles and, in turn, how the identity of the poor has been employed in policy discourse and state strategies for enforcing the logic of commodification in the lives of the poor.
In his book entitled, We Are The Poors, Ashwin Desai recounts how a simple retort against a government official lent force to a movement that, from 1999, had mounted resistance to evictions and cut-offs in Chatsworth, Durban:
As the Council officials retreated, a defining moment in the struggle for Chatsworth occurred. One of the designer-bedecked (African) councillors began castigating the crowd. She had once lived in a shack, she screamed. Why were Indians resisting evictions and demanding upgrades? Indians were just too privileged. One elderly aunty, Girlie Amod, screamed back: ‘We are not Indians, we are the poors’. The refrain caught on as councillors hurried to their cars. As they were leaving they would hear the slogan mutate as Bongiwe Manqele introduced her own good-humoured variant, ‘We are not African, we are the poors.’ Identities were being rethought in the context of struggle and the bearers of these identities were no respecters of authority. The particular identity congealing in this moment had no grand ideological preconditions and so could not be co-opted by government. It was organised around the primary realisation that resistance had to be offered against the hostilities being visited on the poor
(Desai, 2002:44).
The many struggles cited above have arisen outside of traditional civil society. A description of the actions and character of community and new social movements in post-1994 South Africa resonates with what Partha Chatterjee has identified as ‘political society’ through his exploration of various case studies of poor and marginalised communities in twentieth century Bengal, India. In trying to understand the persistence of the conflict between ‘the universal ideal of civic nationalism, based on individual freedoms and equal rights … and the particular demands of cultural identity, which call for the differential treatment of particular groups on grounds of vulnerability or backwardness or historical injustice, or indeed for numerous other reasons’, which he situates ‘at the heart of modern politics in most of the world’ (2004:4), Chatterjee describes how particular groups of poor, excluded and marginalised communities in Bengal, as a strategic means of survival, mobilise their status of exclusion in order to elicit certain demands from a state that already recognises their need for special redress as a result of this status as an identifiable population group. These mobilisations often take place outside of the law, but are nevertheless effective in eliciting a response from the state, often positive in the case of Bengal, that sometimes lead to paralegal re-arrangements in the collective interests of a particular group.
With the idea of political society, Chatterjee presents us with an understanding of resistance in contemporary society as a result of the changing forms that power assumes (here he draws on the work of Foucault). It is around the very existence of governmental programmes directed at ensuring the welfare of the population, that groups and communities have been able to mobilise their status as specific population groups in order to access real gains from the state (Chatterjee, 2004:74). How different identities are mobilised and to what ends, is determined by contingent factors and the strategic benefits as identified by a particular group at a particular time. Political society represents a particular form of antagonism to capital that appears with the development of governmental technologies. In Chatterjee's terms, then, Chatsworth begins to speak about the problems of government in terms of ‘the politics of the governed’. Chatterjee views political society in direct opposition to peaceful civil society, stating,
political society will bring into the hallways and corridors of power some of the squalor, ugliness and violence of popular life. But if one truly values the freedom and equality that democracy promises, then one cannot imprison it within the sanitised fortress of civil society
(Ibid. p.74).
In struggles for free basic services in post-1994 South Africa, we see the continuation of different struggles of parts of the political society that struggled against apartheid, and the constant changing of state policy in response to their resistance. In particular, we see the increasing mobilisation of the identity of ‘the poor’ by such groups, and the growth in discourses of poverty and programmes targeting the poor by the state. The experience of Johannesburg is particularly significant as it has seen the use of targeted programmes for the poor in order to contain the growing power of political society.
Under apartheid, non-payment in the form of the rent and service boycotts (or ‘payment boycotts’), became modes through which black households negotiated their poverty and circumstances. As opposed to merely surviving in the underresourced and under-serviced ghettoes created by apartheid for its cheap labour force, township residents actively came together to boycott payment for rates and services, giving people greater scope to make use of their low apartheid wages and helping to shape the liberation movement by empowering ordinary people (of the middle and working classes) to take control of their lives and to struggle against the apartheid regime. The payment boycotts spurned a widespread network of local civic organisations and relationships in antagonism to the apartheid state. With the unbanning of the ANC in the 1990s and the widespread acceptance that they would participate in the shaping of a democratic post-apartheid state, civic organisations increasingly came under the sway of the ANC in its preparation for democratic governance. In this context, it was imagined that free basic services would be delivered by an ANC democratic state (Barchiesi, 2004; Bond, 1999; McDonald & Pape, 2002; Naidoo & Veriava, 2005).
As the realities of neoliberal ideology became more pressing, however, the state began arguing that payment for basic services should be encouraged, as basic service delivery offered a significant avenue for revenue mobilisation by local municipalities. Under this new logic, the responsibility for service provision became that of the individual paying customer, portrayed as the ‘responsible citizen’. Recognising the strong spirit of refusal on which liberation movement campaigns were built, the 1990s saw the ANC embark on a programme called Masakhane (We Are Building), aimed at encouraging people to pay for their basic services. Fundamental to this campaign was the recasting of the spirit of refusal against an exploitative system as ‘irresponsibility’ in the form of ‘a culture of non-payment’. Masakhane therefore marked a clear recognition by the ANC government of the need to change the ways in which people imagined their relations to each other and to their basic needs (means of (re)production) if it was to be successful in implementing neoliberal policies based on a logic of commodification of basic services and individualised relations between people. In order to do this it would come up against new forms of the political society that rose up against apartheid.
Over time, clear separations were made between those who could afford to pay but would not, and those who were really unable to pay as a result of their poverty. While these separations are defining features of official discourse of the time, they were not yet, at the time of Masakhane, the defining features of official policy. As struggles for free services came to be taken up increasingly by communities identifying themselves as poor and therefore unable to pay, however, this separation would come to play a bigger role in policy.
Masakhane came at a time when South Africa's embrace of neoliberal policies was beginning to take effect, with widespread job losses, the growth of precarious forms of work, and the introduction of the logic of ‘cost recovery’ in all spheres of life – i.e. water, electricity, housing, land redistribution, education, health, and welfare. In this context, non-payment for basic services continued to affect the life strategies of the poor for dealing with unemployment or lower wages, or payment became simply impossible for the majority. With Masakhane's failure, manifest in the accumulation of individual debt, came widespread cut-offs and, with them, the emergence of community movements, reasserting the right to free water and electricity, and reconnecting the disconnected to their water and electricity supplies. In Johannesburg, the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee (SECC) was formed in 2001 at the height of electricity cut-offs in the township. In these struggles, demands came to be made increasingly in the voice of ‘the poor’, those who could not afford to pay, identified as struggling, black, unemployed, sick, and largely female, those seemingly ‘forgotten’ by the transition (Fiil-Flynn, 2001; McDonald & Pape, 2002).
Significantly, while the civic movement of the 1980s consisted of networks between working class and middle-class individuals and communities, the movements that have arisen since 2000 at township level have remained networks of poor communities and individuals, with the boycott of payments remaining a strategy mobilised by the poor in reaction to the threat against their sources of provision for basic needs. Bricks Mkolo, Chairperson of the APF and Organiser of the Orange Farm Water Crisis Committee (OWCC), argues that the fact that recent struggles against the commodification of basic services have not been broadened to include middle-class communities and individuals is problematic, as it tends to speak of the problem only in terms of the immediate needs of the poor rather than seeing the struggle as a broad one against the logic of commodification in the delivery of basic services in society. He goes on to argue that such an approach might be playing into the tactics of the neoliberal policymakers and strategists as one of their approaches is to separate those who can pay from those who cannot pay (Bricks Mkolo, Group Discussion, Orange Farm, September 2006). A possible reason for this movement portrayal of the struggle for free basic services as a struggle of the poor could be the very fact that ‘the poor’ (those who cannot afford to pay) as a population group (produced by neoliberal governmental discourse) had already been identified as a target group requiring intervention by the state, and was therefore viewed as a means towards effecting real redress for the immediate problems being faced by poor communities.
In keeping with its arguments for responsible citizenship through payment for services, the state responded by criminalising legitimate community struggles, arresting people for ‘illegal reconnections’ and other protest actions against commodification, and painting members of new movements as ‘irresponsible’ and as ‘spoilers’ of democracy. However, with the persistence of movement struggles, the ‘dis-respecters of authority’ have managed to win certain victories. The Johannesburg municipality has periodically (at times of heightened struggle) offered people certain ‘concessions’ such as the scrapping of the collective electricity debt of R14 million in Soweto in 2001 after the growth in popularity and support of the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee,1 and its actions and protests against the Johannesburg municipality and ESKOM2 (Naidoo & Veriava, 2005).
Another significant change was introduced by the state as a result of growing national resistance but also as a response to deaths in the rural Madlebe community in Kwazulu-Natal following an outbreak of cholera after water cut-offs and resort to polluted steams (prepaid water meters had been introduced in 2001, Departmentof Water and Forestry). This led to the provision of certain free ‘lifelines’ for water and electricity – 6kl of water and 50kw of electricity per household per month. A few studies (Fiil-Flynn & Naidoo, 2004; Coalition Against Water Privatisation, 2004; Meth & Diaz, 2004) have shown how the introduction of ‘lifeline’ provisions has entrenched inequality as a defining feature of service delivery in South Africa. It has been used by the government to ‘prove’ its ‘commitment’ to free basic services for the poor without any acknowledgement of how minimal these provisions are, considering the generally large average household size in poor communities and the restrictive role that such provisions play in the lives of people, tying all that they do to the logic of the market. These studies have also exposed how much lower than the actual needs of households these ‘lifelines’ are. Research conducted by the Coalition Against Water Privatisation in Phiri, Soweto (2004 & 2006) highlighted the fact that many households include tenants occupying backyard rooms and illegal shacks. This not only results in the ‘lifelines’ having to be shared amongst more than one household, but also creates extremely unequal relationships between the different households sharing free water and electricity. These extremely low ‘lifeline’ provisions for water and electricity ensure the permanence of ‘the poorest of the poor’ as a separate group in society, unable to exercise free choice in matters of life.
A significant consequence of such concessions is that collective political demands are converted into individualised bureaucratic arrangements, forcing individuals into binding technical agreements that erase the politics. The demand for free services slowly transforms into a debate about how high a ‘life-line’ should be, or what the average household size is, issues related to how populations should be measured and managed, and how demands formulated in struggle can be converted into quantifiable ‘outputs’ and so on. In this manner, state policy and responses to political society, while they might offer some redress for population groups that demand action on their part, almost always also seek to contain political society and to capture its heterogeneity in homogeneous categories and processes.
This is clearly evident in the most recent strategies announced by the Johannesburg City Council for basic service delivery and revenue collection which clearly target the poor. They are contained in the City's latest indigency management policies, entitled the Municipal Subsidies Scheme (MSS) and the Reathusa (‘We Are Helping’) Municipal Account Scheme. Most striking about these strategies is how they represent responses to the struggles of political society, with the poor being a specific target group of policy changes, and with the fact that the central issue being fought for by the poor (basic services) has come to form the cornerstone of new management policies. It is also significant how the status of poverty is being used by the state to try to contain the strength and power of political society, with the MSS and Reathusa using the language of political society to enforce its own logic of commodification.
But the path towards the MSS and Reathusa are equally significant in highlighting just how municipal policy has mutated as community struggles have grown. The introduction of prepaid technology at the height of protests against water and electricity cut-offs in Johannesburg and the growth in illegal reconnections, is evidence of this. With cut-offs, one is punished for non-payment after receiving a service, whilst with the prepaid meter, you have to pay before you receive a service – you are cut off until you can pay. The prepaid meter also removes any responsibility for delivery from the state and the private service provider, making the individual responsible for gaining access to basic services. In a context of high unemployment and low household incomes, part of the life strategies developed under the practice of cut-offs – i.e. reconnections – have come under attack, with prepaid technology developing ways of preventing any collective acts of resistance to the system of commodification and completely individualising the relationship of people to the resources necessary for life (Coalition Against Water Privatisation, 2004 & 2006; Harvey, 2005; Ngwane & Veriava, 2004). Enforcing the logic of prepaid has become the terrain on which the struggle for free basic services is being waged currently.
In May 2005, after years of struggle, the Johannesburg municipality announced that it would write off all service arrears for the indebted. In an interview with The Star newspaper, Roland Hunter, acting chief executive of the city's revenue shared services centre, explained that this move was necessary despite its cost to the municipality, stating, ‘Last year we took action against everybody who owed. This resulted in a push-back from very poor customers’ (The Star, 9 June 2005). In one move, the municipality seemed to give in to the demand that has been the focus of community movements since their inception.
But lurking behind the media splashes of debt write-offs was the stipulation by the scheme that in order to qualify for a write-off, one would have to sign onto prepaid systems of delivery for water and electricity and sign a binding agreement to pay for services from then on. Mobilising a new discourse of commitment to the needs of the poor (‘those who cannot afford to pay’), the Municipal Subsidy Scheme represented an innovative means of enforcing the logic of prepaid technologies on poor people in a manner that seemed to speak directly to the demands being made by poor people's movements in political society. In particular, the City and service providers have attempted to build individual relationships with customers that encourage payment through the creation of ‘incentives’ for the client, and through proactive mechanisms aimed at ‘rehabilitating’ those in debt. In this manner, poor people refusing to pay for services have been targeted as a population group requiring ‘rehabilitation’ through education and ‘incentives’ that draw them into the logic of commodification. Re-emerging in this new language of ‘incentives’ and ‘rehabilitation’ is the overarching aim of ‘creating a culture of payment’ (Amos Masondo, quoted in Cityof Johannesburg press releases, 30 January 2006 and 6 April 2006; Councillor Parks Tau, quoted in City of Johannesburg press release, 9 December 2005). The City described the MSS as ‘a major incentive to poor communities in Johannesburg to relieve their burden of debts, but at the same time create a new culture of payment, and is intended to ease the burdens of those on a pension, child-headed households, HIV and AIDS breadwinners or orphans, low income earners, the unemployed and the disabled’ (press release, 6 April 2006). Responding to the specific problem of basic services as raised by groups of poor people, the MSS is an example of how governmental strategies are shaped by political society in South Africa today.
In January 2006, the City launched Reathusa, billed as the second phase of its indigency management policy (press release, 30 January 2006). It targets municipal account holders with a gross monthly income of R6,500, allowing them to have half their municipal debt erased if they enter into a formal agreement to pay off the remaining half, and sign onto prepaid water and electricity meters; good repayments also offer the chance of having the remaining debt erased. While the basic principles behind the MSS and Reathusa are the same, the fact that a separation has been made between two levels and categories of poverty is significant. In discussions and descriptions of these policies there is now a separation between those ‘who can pay but will not pay’ from those who are ‘genuinely poor’ (Nomasonto Radebe, Bongani Nkosi, interviews, 20 November 2006). This has the effect of enforcing a distinction between ‘responsible’ (paying) citizens, and those individuals who are portrayed as ‘irresponsible’ and ‘criminal’, and thereby the attempted criminalisation of political society.
While the promises of debt write-offs may be winning some people over to the logic of commodification, community activists are adamant that they will continue to encourage people not to buy into the ‘trap’. In the words of Bricks Mkolo:
We will continue to tell people that this indigent policy is a trap. It is a way of forcing people to accept that they have to pay for water and electricity. By not paying we have said that we do not believe that we should be paying for these basic services. Now they want the poorest of the poor to sign that they will pay – where will they get the money to pay when they are not working? This is nothing but a trap. Reathusa is just a lie – how are they helping the poor when they expect them to pay for what they need to live?
(Bricks Mkolo, conversation, February 2006).
Three years since the launch of Operation Gcina manzi, and the start of resistance against the installation of prepaid water meters in Phiri, our findings suggest that residents have had no choice but to accept the prepaid system, and have begun internalising the logic of payment for water. For the few who have chosen not to sign onto the prepaid system, life has become more difficult, with access to water made possible only by walking to standpipes outside one's yard, and living without flush toilets. For the majority, life has come to mean finding ways of accessing water through the prepaid system. While the PCRF argues that a majority of Phiri residents are bypassing their water meters, our findings suggest that residents have begun to speak the language of ‘saving water’ and ‘budgeting efficiently’ in order to meet their basic water requirements within the prepaid system
(Coalition Against Water Privatisation & APF, 2006:26).
Earlier this year, the Coalition Against Water Privatisation launched a constitutional case against the Johannesburg City Council, challenging its roll-out of prepaid water meters in Phiri, in the hope that some of the losses made in struggle could be won through the courts. However, recent changes in the indigent management policy would have to be considered in the event of a victory for the Coalition, as it is unclear whether it would apply to current policies. Significant is the fact that this battle will be waged on the terrain of political society where a range of strategies and tactics will be mobilised over the coming months by both the state and movements.
Chatterjee argues that the value of political society lies in its ability to expand existing practices of democratic political participation, and to transform the ways in which people choose to be governed. This might mean celebrating the self-reliance or self-government of the excluded and their capacity for collective decision-making following experiences and moments in the struggles of communities that make demands on the state but shun participation in it.
Following this path would mean accepting the mobilisation of the identity of ‘the poors’ by Girlie Amod (followed by Bongiwe Manqele) as a strategic act that occurred as the result of a number of contingent factors, and its subsequent mobilisations in various struggles and acts in the building of movements in postapartheid South Africa as the coalescence of contingent modes of suffering and struggle that individually and collectively disrupt the homogeneous rainbow nation, but without any prior conception of how these problems would be addressed or what political form their engagement with institutional power would take. In his account of a movement of squatters in Bengal, Chatterjee writes,
Although the crucial move here was for our squatters to seek and find recognition as a population group, which from the standpoint of governmentality is only a usable empirical category that defines the targets of policy, they themselves have had to find ways of investing their collective identity with a moral content. This is an equally crucial part of the politics of the governed: to give to the empirical form of a population group the moral attributes of a community
(Chatterjee, 2004:57).
In this way, ‘the poor/s’ that arise to resist the logic of capital and to reassert their belief in a society free from relations of domination and exploitation constantly produce resistance, struggle, antagonism and crisis, that, in turn, come up against the homogenising force of capital through the neoliberalising organs of the state.
This allows us always to see ‘the poor’, represented both in state and struggle discourse, as a reminder of capital's internal limit.