South Africa’s social contract is broken, let’s fix it!
(This article reflects my own views and does not represent the position of the organisation I currently work for)
In the throes of Black Lives Matter protests last year, long time BLM activist Kimberley Jones is found on the streets of Atlanta interacting with the local community alongside a fellow videographer. At one point she looks towards the camera as if responding to the unspoken yet percolating question of the validity of looting that ensued after the protests and says “…The game is fixed. So when they say, “Why do you burn down the community? Why do you burn down your own neighbourhood?” It’s not ours. We don’t own anything…You broke the contract when you killed us in the streets…. You broke the contract when for 400 years, we played your game and built your wealth.”
One can’t help but empathise with Kimberley’s impassioned statement that has the undertones of generational frustration and anguish over four centuries of systemic racism in the US and its perpetuating racial disparities, which is compounded by continued suppression of civil dissent. A sense of belonging and ownership is fundamental to be a constructively active citizen of a society. Except when unacknowledged and unresolved inequities continue to push people to the margins, resentment and retaliation is all but a natural phenomenon if we are to learn anything from history.
Kimberly Jones’ theory of a broken social contract provides a lens through which many civil protests of recent past can be understood. Whether it is the longest running farmers’ protest in India in 2020 or, the ongoing protest in Cuba, the structural inequalities — imposed internally or through extraneous factors — provide a perfect breeding ground for mass mobilisation. This may be seen as democracy in action — at least in countries where protests are not yet blatantly criminalised by law — leveraging social accountability as a time-tested tool to push for action on systemic issues. Yet, when mass protests clash with political market failures, they create the perfect window of opportunity for opportunists to exploit public resentment towards the government for personal gains.
This became evident this month in South Africa when two of the key economic centres in the country were ‘suddenly’ embroiled in what was initially termed as mass protests in response to the former President Zuma’s incarceration. Within 48 hours, the so called protests evolved into widespread looting and violence that had reverberations of a distant past. Both sides and the middle of the political spectrum have wagered their analyses of the events and why it unfolded the way it did. The privileged and elitist reflections blamed it on the delinquency of the poor, which is highly ironic given swathes of middle-class individuals who indulged in looting and violence themselves. These cultural and political theories for the anarchy that ensued do have a place in this discourse. Underpinning these, however, is the general agreement that decades of sluggish growth, rising unemployment and resource insecurity culminated at what was a critical juncture of post-democratic political and constitutional action in South Africa. But, while we are recognising the inevitability of the unrest, we cannot dismiss the crucial importance of institutional preparedness to prevent such crises, which was blatantly missing in action. Besides the structural causes of the widespread violence, there are multitude of ways in which the State Intelligence, South African Police Service and state machinery could have prevented it. There are only so many times that South Africa’s public and its institutions can be brought to the brink of devastation only to be counteracted by an 11th hour response. Something’s got to give sooner or later!
Tale of two cities
The civil unrest, laced with xenophobic and racial tensions, decimated communities and especially, small businesses. It was a major setback to recent years’ growth in parts of Durban and Johannesburg that the provincial and local governments continue to take stock of as I write this. This has understandably caused despair within the affected communities with many packing their suitcases to migrate locally or across borders. The victims and those who witnessed the chaos from their distant homes feel demoralised and helpless. In any case, the collective memory of these volatile moments should fuel the urgency for ramping up civil society efforts and force institutional accountability to address prevalent structural inequalities that led us to this point, instead of simply chalking it up to the long-list of South Africa’s tribulations.
The post-Apartheid South Africa carried over the systemic baggage from its segregationist past. The parasitic disparities that followed the country into its era of democracy are visible in both spatial and economic dimensions in major cities and towns today. The GINI index shows that both Durban and Johannesburg remain one the most unequal urban centres in South Africa nudging its contemporary Cape Town for the top place. So, it is only predictable that the political interests and instigators drew their motivation from the economic and demographic identifiers of Durban and Johannesburg. But the data sets such as GINI index are merely a partial reflection of the true measure of inequality, which is way more perverse in burgeoning South African cities. The lived experiences of majority of South Africans demonstrate a scale of socio-economic marginalisation that is often diluted in these indices. The relationship between urbanisation and sustainable development is well researched and unequivocally agreed in the urban policy circles, but the dominant approaches to urban development to achieve inclusive economic growth are often mismatched with the realties on the ground. For instance, a wealth of research shows that mass resettlements and eviction combined with ill-informed tenure security mechanisms simply transfer urban poverty elsewhere instead of systemically addressing its root causes. Yet, current trends in urban investment, housing and land reform in South Africa continue to create infrastructure gaps between poor and affluent neighbourhoods, and simultaneously, disenfranchise low-income communities from accessing opportunities. This is also evident in the convoluted barriers to inclusive urban growth such as unaffordable and poorly managed public transport, inefficient commuter distance for low-income population combined with unsustainable wages and, poor housing to name a few. The gargantuan inequality becomes crystal clear when access and affordability data for low-income earners is compared against that of the small share of middle to high-income earners. Take for example the average share of household income being spent in public transport. Low-income earners in South African cities consistently spend more than 20% of their household income on transport compared to a less than 10% share in higher-income group. Such massive disparities across social, economic and environmental aspects of quality of life begin to paint a stark picture of socio-economic inequality in South Africa. Besides the political externalities binding these issues in a complex web of problems, this reinforces the need for bridging the gap that exists in access to growth in order to remove sustainably the building blocks of civil unrest.
More than the sum of its parts
Unarguably, unsustainable urban planning is not the sole perpetrator of exclusion and inequality, and national economic growth trajectory and political systems play an equal, if not an even bigger, role in perpetuating the disenfranchisement. That said, to remove structural barriers, it is imperative to understand and unpack the interaction of urbanisation, sociology and economic theories of inequality in the context of South Africa. What was witnessed during the civil unrest in Durban and Johannesburg was an embodiment of Kimberley Jones’ assertion of a broken social contract. One need only look at the communities that defended their malls and neighbourhoods from looters to understand the implications of individual sense of ownership. Many who indulged in looting — not to justify the criminality of it all — perhaps do not see it as damaging their own assets. Why would they when the broken social contract through continuing socio-economic marginalisation ensured their exclusion from ownership. On the other hand, those who lost their livelihoods and families to the widespread destruction were also a victim of that broken contract because the responsible public institutions fell short on their duty of citizen safeguarding.
Moving forward
What is truly missing here — policy, action or systems? South African policy landscape is often hailed to be inspiringly progressive. It will be unjustified and foolhardy to ignore South Africa’s advancements to improve inclusion, reduce poverty and promote human development since the end of Apartheid. But the path to development is far from over. Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued for the malice of moral inequality in societies. In the case of South Africa, we see these moral inequalities shaping up in the form of income, wealth, racial and social disparities supported by a faulty political and governance system. Rousseau offers a solution to the challenge by putting forth the idea of ‘good government’ that holds the freedom of each citizen as its raison d’etre for greater good. What South Africans need immediately is to mobilise around the need to reform the social contract that permeates our relationship with the powers that be. The terms of this contract for service delivery, economic development and social enterprise must be revamped to embed actions that pull its majority out of poverty across racial lines, reduce their vulnerability and ensure accountability of the state. And most importantly, South African public must arrive at a shared understanding of this social contract that equitably values people at each rung of the socio-economic ladder. Who knows, may be, a bit of Rousseauian philosophy could give South Africa the nudge it needs to emerge from the trap of incessant hardships.
