Class, Citizenship and its Effect on Public Participation in Rural Communities
By Thabile Sokupa
With the advent of democracy in South Africa a whole battery of discriminatory legislation was swept aside as the oppressive apartheid regime gave way to a representative and legitimate government. Consequently, the emerging conception of citizenship draws on recent developments rather than a long-standing tradition. South Africa’s developing conception of citizenship draws mainly on two ingredients: the anti-apartheid struggle and the new Constitution. The struggle against apartheid forged a highly participatory notion of democratic citizenship. Popular organisations such as trade unions and civic organisations established models of debate, consultation and accountability that remain influential. A vision of active citizenship, reflected especially in the 1980s in mass mobilisation against the old order, was later extended in the early nineties to the consultation process which the Constitutional Assembly tried to emulate in the writing of the 1996 Constitution (Republic of South Africa, 1996), (Wolfe, 1996). Drawing on this idea of active citizen, the Constitution provides a framework for a transformed citizen who will strive to overcome the past. Active citizenship will be promoted by public participation projects whose task is to provide the public with access to central and provincial government (sections 59, 72, 118).
Equally, our political equality is protected by a universal franchise and enshrined in a wide-ranging Bill of Rights in the constitution. Paradoxically, we remain one of the most unequal societies in the world. It has become clear that the current social discourse for individualisation has suffused to such an extent that class has become inappropriate to the realities of inequality and poverty in South African society. We assume that classes are real in the sense that the concept of class points to a complex variety of phenomena that are dynamically interconnected and do indeed exist in society. It is an assumption based on the observation of grinding poverty on the one hand, and excessive wealth on the other.
How are we to explain this inequality in rural South Africa?
Firstly, the dominant discourse on the new South Africa is predicated upon a declarative citizenship, not an assertive citizenship, in that elected officials (presumably) representing the citizenry declare the noble ideals of an inclusive society by representing their specific constituencies in all spheres of government, as opposed to the electorate participating directly at all levels of decision-making in all spheres of government.
Secondly, citizenship as ensconced in the Constitution is based on the premise that all humans have equal access to rights, in contradistinction to the prevailing reality that only those with financial wherewithal can have their rights enforced; even in cases where socio-economic rights have been successfully defended in a Court of Law, such as in the case of Grootboom vs. SA State (1999), (Nattrass, 2000). In this instance though, rights to adequate service delivery were not followed through by compelling local authorities to provide quality, sustainable services to affected communities in whose favour the Court ruled. This means, amongst other things, that institutional defiance militates against citizenship and also thwarts attempts to create a meaningful everyday life for ‘ordinary’ people at grassroots level.
Jeremy Seekings (2003:60) identified five classes in South Africa on the basis of the highest ranked occupation of employed household members, these are:
(1) An upper class made up of managers and professionals,
(2) A semi-professional class made of teachers and nurses,
(3) An intermediate class consisting of routine white collar workers, skilled workers and supervisors,
(4) The core working class made up of semi-skilled and unskilled workers and supervisors,
(5) The marginal working class consisting of farm and domestic workers.
He, moreover, suggests that a further three classes can be identified arbitrarily corresponding to various levels of income earned from independent entrepreneurship or assets. In the same arbitrary fashion, yet another class category is defined, that of transferee dependent households. Thus, according to Seekings, there are altogether nine classes in South Africa.
How does class relate to citizenship?
In 1949, T.H Marshall (1963) delivered a seminal lecture at Cambridge University entitled “Citizen and Social Class.” Marshall differentiated between three elements of citizenship, namely civil, political and social. The civil element represents all rights needed for individual freedom, such as freedom of speech and religion, the right to own property, the right to justice, etc. The political element refers to the franchise and right to participate in political process. The social element concerns the right to economic welfare, education, health and social services. Marshall’s main point is that citizenship is driven by the “principle of equality” while social class is a “system of inequality,” (1963:87-90).
Mamdani’s seminal book, Citizens and Subjects advances the argument further about a bifurcated colonial state in which power was organised along distinctive lines separating urban and rural, civil and traditional society, and modern and customary law. The thrust of the argument stems from an appreciation of the manner in which the colonial state sought to control large native populations through the practice of indirect rule or “decentralisation deposition” by separating citizens in urban areas from subjects in the rural areas across Africa. Accordingly, they were treated separately, placed under different administration jurisdictions, legal frameworks and land tenure regimes. One of the major challenges in the post-1994 era has been the breakdown between ethnically-defined rural subjects and racially-defined urban citizens.
Mamdani further argues that decolonisation did not have “an agenda for democratising customary power.” In South Africa, this is reflected in the manner in which the former reserves, Bantustans or homelands, persist despite the fact that we have a new geographic dispensation, which divides the country into nine provinces. In a sense, territorial segregation has not been dismantled since 1994, because these reserve areas remain differentiated from the rest of South Africa by a distinctive form of land tenure and by the enduring influence of traditional authorities in local government despite the efforts of the Demarcation Board to redraw municipal boundaries cutting across areas of chiefly jurisdiction.
In rural South Africa, tens of thousands of retrenched workers return to the reserves, to a safety net that no longer exists. In this respect, there are real consequences for class, since masses of people are joining the ranks of the unemployed. The official statistics reveal that the unemployment rate since 1993 has almost doubled from 15,7% in 1993 to 23,5% in 2009 of which the majority are black Africans (Bloomberg, 2010). However, Mattes (2002) notes the achievement of a transition from apartheid institutions, from conflict to common nationhood, successful elections at national, provincial and local government levels, sound management of the economy, and improved opportunities for many previously disadvantaged South Africans. But Mattes’ observations on declining levels of political and community participation, as well as lukewarm support for democratic rule, lead him to comment that the constitutional commitment to a multi-party system and to inclusive rights is threatened by limited executive accountability.
In spite of being internationally admired, the Constitution provides a framework that is flawed in the interaction it allows between political parties and voters. Most crucially, the system of proportional representation based on party lists, while achieving representation of all the diverse groups in the electorate, provides no direct means for the voters to communicate with, let alone exert ultimate control over, their elected representatives. Mattes refers to a set of public opinion indicators that suggest that the present political culture is insufficiently mature to ensure the consolidation of democratic practices. South Africans’ support for democracy is lukewarm and has not grown in any substantial way in the past since the advent of democracy. With increasingly tenuous connections between the voters and the government and increasing policy disaffection, trust in government and satisfaction with economic policy and political performance are declining sharply.
If Mattes is right, indications of a weak democratic culture accompanied by an assumption that citizenship is a matter of access to socio-economic goods suggests that this popular conception is in tension with the official interpretation of active citizenship.
What are the implications of this tension?
The elite accommodation of the negotiated transition and of the process of framing the Constitution may be remote from the concerns of the poor. It is possible that their understanding of citizenship may be in serious tension with the official version of the poor, and that the two may lie at the further extremes of the maximal–minimal continuum. This should be a cause for concern, especially if a popular preoccupation with entitlement to goods erodes willingness to engage in active participation for the common good.
It has to be accented that the South African Constitution prescribes a rights-based approach to development. Yet, rights are not natural, but conferred, and they could also be de-conferred, i.e. be withheld or abrogated. This also means that rights are mediated by unequal relations of power. And in terms of the South African social formation this structural articulation between the politics of identity and the substance of social change constitutes a problem vis-à-vis the constitutional right to equal citizenship at least for two reasons: Firstly, unequal relations of power have been inherited from the past; i.e. there has not been a clean and lasting break with the past (Bond, 2000). Secondly, though there had been a political rupture with the past, there has not necessarily been an institutional compliance with the new policies of the current regime. Accordingly, the structural inequities of the past continue in the present through the dominance and practices of functionaries from the Ancient Regime (apartheid order). Those involved in promoting citizenship would do well to heed Ramphele’s warning: “For the majority of South Africans, the social rights of all citizens, as entrenched in the new National Constitution, remains a far-off dream. The egalitarian and integrative potential of modern citizenship (as Marshall, 2001:4 defends it) remains unrealised”.
References
• Bond, P. 2000. Elite Transition: From Apartheid to Neoliberalism in South Africa. Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal.
• Mattes, R. 2002. South Africa: democracy without the people? Journal of Democracy, 13(1), pp. 22–35.
• Mamndani, M. 1996. Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism. Cape Town: David Phillip.
• Nattrass, N.2000. The Debate about Unemployment in the 1990’s. Studies in Economics and Econometrics, 24:3.
• Ramphele, M. 2001. Citizenship challenges for South Africa’s young democracy, Daedalus,130 (1), pp. 1–17.
• Republic of South Africa .1996. The Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996: Act 108 of 1996. Pretoria: Government Printers.
• Republic of South Africa. 2000. Local government: Municipal Systems Act, 2000: Act 32 of 2000. Pretoria: Government Printers.
• Wright, E. 2000. Class Counts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Wolfe, M. 1996. Elusive Development. London: Zed Books.
• Seekings, J, 2003. The Politics of the Basic Income Grant in South Africa, 1996-2002’, in Guy Standing and Michael Samson (eds), A Basic Income Grant for South Africa (Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 2003),
With the advent of democracy in South Africa a whole battery of discriminatory legislation was swept aside as the oppressive apartheid regime gave way to a representative and legitimate government. Consequently, the emerging conception of citizenship draws on recent developments rather than a long-standing tradition. South Africa’s developing conception of citizenship draws mainly on two ingredients: the anti-apartheid struggle and the new Constitution. The struggle against apartheid forged a highly participatory notion of democratic citizenship. Popular organisations such as trade unions and civic organisations established models of debate, consultation and accountability that remain influential. A vision of active citizenship, reflected especially in the 1980s in mass mobilisation against the old order, was later extended in the early nineties to the consultation process which the Constitutional Assembly tried to emulate in the writing of the 1996 Constitution (Republic of South Africa, 1996), (Wolfe, 1996). Drawing on this idea of active citizen, the Constitution provides a framework for a transformed citizen who will strive to overcome the past. Active citizenship will be promoted by public participation projects whose task is to provide the public with access to central and provincial government (sections 59, 72, 118).
Equally, our political equality is protected by a universal franchise and enshrined in a wide-ranging Bill of Rights in the constitution. Paradoxically, we remain one of the most unequal societies in the world. It has become clear that the current social discourse for individualisation has suffused to such an extent that class has become inappropriate to the realities of inequality and poverty in South African society. We assume that classes are real in the sense that the concept of class points to a complex variety of phenomena that are dynamically interconnected and do indeed exist in society. It is an assumption based on the observation of grinding poverty on the one hand, and excessive wealth on the other.
How are we to explain this inequality in rural South Africa?
Firstly, the dominant discourse on the new South Africa is predicated upon a declarative citizenship, not an assertive citizenship, in that elected officials (presumably) representing the citizenry declare the noble ideals of an inclusive society by representing their specific constituencies in all spheres of government, as opposed to the electorate participating directly at all levels of decision-making in all spheres of government.
Secondly, citizenship as ensconced in the Constitution is based on the premise that all humans have equal access to rights, in contradistinction to the prevailing reality that only those with financial wherewithal can have their rights enforced; even in cases where socio-economic rights have been successfully defended in a Court of Law, such as in the case of Grootboom vs. SA State (1999), (Nattrass, 2000). In this instance though, rights to adequate service delivery were not followed through by compelling local authorities to provide quality, sustainable services to affected communities in whose favour the Court ruled. This means, amongst other things, that institutional defiance militates against citizenship and also thwarts attempts to create a meaningful everyday life for ‘ordinary’ people at grassroots level.
Jeremy Seekings (2003:60) identified five classes in South Africa on the basis of the highest ranked occupation of employed household members, these are:
(1) An upper class made up of managers and professionals,
(2) A semi-professional class made of teachers and nurses,
(3) An intermediate class consisting of routine white collar workers, skilled workers and supervisors,
(4) The core working class made up of semi-skilled and unskilled workers and supervisors,
(5) The marginal working class consisting of farm and domestic workers.
He, moreover, suggests that a further three classes can be identified arbitrarily corresponding to various levels of income earned from independent entrepreneurship or assets. In the same arbitrary fashion, yet another class category is defined, that of transferee dependent households. Thus, according to Seekings, there are altogether nine classes in South Africa.
How does class relate to citizenship?
In 1949, T.H Marshall (1963) delivered a seminal lecture at Cambridge University entitled “Citizen and Social Class.” Marshall differentiated between three elements of citizenship, namely civil, political and social. The civil element represents all rights needed for individual freedom, such as freedom of speech and religion, the right to own property, the right to justice, etc. The political element refers to the franchise and right to participate in political process. The social element concerns the right to economic welfare, education, health and social services. Marshall’s main point is that citizenship is driven by the “principle of equality” while social class is a “system of inequality,” (1963:87-90).
Mamdani’s seminal book, Citizens and Subjects advances the argument further about a bifurcated colonial state in which power was organised along distinctive lines separating urban and rural, civil and traditional society, and modern and customary law. The thrust of the argument stems from an appreciation of the manner in which the colonial state sought to control large native populations through the practice of indirect rule or “decentralisation deposition” by separating citizens in urban areas from subjects in the rural areas across Africa. Accordingly, they were treated separately, placed under different administration jurisdictions, legal frameworks and land tenure regimes. One of the major challenges in the post-1994 era has been the breakdown between ethnically-defined rural subjects and racially-defined urban citizens.
Mamdani further argues that decolonisation did not have “an agenda for democratising customary power.” In South Africa, this is reflected in the manner in which the former reserves, Bantustans or homelands, persist despite the fact that we have a new geographic dispensation, which divides the country into nine provinces. In a sense, territorial segregation has not been dismantled since 1994, because these reserve areas remain differentiated from the rest of South Africa by a distinctive form of land tenure and by the enduring influence of traditional authorities in local government despite the efforts of the Demarcation Board to redraw municipal boundaries cutting across areas of chiefly jurisdiction.
In rural South Africa, tens of thousands of retrenched workers return to the reserves, to a safety net that no longer exists. In this respect, there are real consequences for class, since masses of people are joining the ranks of the unemployed. The official statistics reveal that the unemployment rate since 1993 has almost doubled from 15,7% in 1993 to 23,5% in 2009 of which the majority are black Africans (Bloomberg, 2010). However, Mattes (2002) notes the achievement of a transition from apartheid institutions, from conflict to common nationhood, successful elections at national, provincial and local government levels, sound management of the economy, and improved opportunities for many previously disadvantaged South Africans. But Mattes’ observations on declining levels of political and community participation, as well as lukewarm support for democratic rule, lead him to comment that the constitutional commitment to a multi-party system and to inclusive rights is threatened by limited executive accountability.
In spite of being internationally admired, the Constitution provides a framework that is flawed in the interaction it allows between political parties and voters. Most crucially, the system of proportional representation based on party lists, while achieving representation of all the diverse groups in the electorate, provides no direct means for the voters to communicate with, let alone exert ultimate control over, their elected representatives. Mattes refers to a set of public opinion indicators that suggest that the present political culture is insufficiently mature to ensure the consolidation of democratic practices. South Africans’ support for democracy is lukewarm and has not grown in any substantial way in the past since the advent of democracy. With increasingly tenuous connections between the voters and the government and increasing policy disaffection, trust in government and satisfaction with economic policy and political performance are declining sharply.
If Mattes is right, indications of a weak democratic culture accompanied by an assumption that citizenship is a matter of access to socio-economic goods suggests that this popular conception is in tension with the official interpretation of active citizenship.
What are the implications of this tension?
The elite accommodation of the negotiated transition and of the process of framing the Constitution may be remote from the concerns of the poor. It is possible that their understanding of citizenship may be in serious tension with the official version of the poor, and that the two may lie at the further extremes of the maximal–minimal continuum. This should be a cause for concern, especially if a popular preoccupation with entitlement to goods erodes willingness to engage in active participation for the common good.
It has to be accented that the South African Constitution prescribes a rights-based approach to development. Yet, rights are not natural, but conferred, and they could also be de-conferred, i.e. be withheld or abrogated. This also means that rights are mediated by unequal relations of power. And in terms of the South African social formation this structural articulation between the politics of identity and the substance of social change constitutes a problem vis-à-vis the constitutional right to equal citizenship at least for two reasons: Firstly, unequal relations of power have been inherited from the past; i.e. there has not been a clean and lasting break with the past (Bond, 2000). Secondly, though there had been a political rupture with the past, there has not necessarily been an institutional compliance with the new policies of the current regime. Accordingly, the structural inequities of the past continue in the present through the dominance and practices of functionaries from the Ancient Regime (apartheid order). Those involved in promoting citizenship would do well to heed Ramphele’s warning: “For the majority of South Africans, the social rights of all citizens, as entrenched in the new National Constitution, remains a far-off dream. The egalitarian and integrative potential of modern citizenship (as Marshall, 2001:4 defends it) remains unrealised”.
References
• Bond, P. 2000. Elite Transition: From Apartheid to Neoliberalism in South Africa. Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal.
• Mattes, R. 2002. South Africa: democracy without the people? Journal of Democracy, 13(1), pp. 22–35.
• Mamndani, M. 1996. Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism. Cape Town: David Phillip.
• Nattrass, N.2000. The Debate about Unemployment in the 1990’s. Studies in Economics and Econometrics, 24:3.
• Ramphele, M. 2001. Citizenship challenges for South Africa’s young democracy, Daedalus,130 (1), pp. 1–17.
• Republic of South Africa .1996. The Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996: Act 108 of 1996. Pretoria: Government Printers.
• Republic of South Africa. 2000. Local government: Municipal Systems Act, 2000: Act 32 of 2000. Pretoria: Government Printers.
• Wright, E. 2000. Class Counts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Wolfe, M. 1996. Elusive Development. London: Zed Books.
• Seekings, J, 2003. The Politics of the Basic Income Grant in South Africa, 1996-2002’, in Guy Standing and Michael Samson (eds), A Basic Income Grant for South Africa (Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 2003),