South Africa has undergone a major political shift since the apartheid regime and this has also meant a concomitant alteration in how development concerns have been viewed. This section examines development and SD issues in the context of South Africa.
The ideological approaches to development during the apartheid regime shifted from a Verwoerdian model of ‘separate development’ through to more technocratic neoliberal approaches (Tapscott, 1995). The Verwoerdian model was based on national distinctiveness of ethnic groups, the linking of politics to socio-economic development and the resultant ethnic separation in the creation of Bantustan homelands to where millions of people were forcibly removed. This was based on First World, Third World dualism and discourses that see underdevelopment is a result of the backwardness of Africans. In development terms, this politically motivated separationist/dualist
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approach failed to deliver economic development to the masses. This was more of a result of political issues relating to the apartheid regime and its ability to trade due to external economic and political pressures, than the development policy (Jones and Stokke, 2005). The lack of socio-economic development in the Bantustans necessitated a change in thinking which emanated from the P.W. Botha regime in the 1980s. Development was decoupled from politics and the technocratic solutions which were offered to development problems in South Africa fitted well with the development thinking of that time. As the West moved towards neoliberalism, rejecting Keynesianism, so too did South Africa and it embraced the new discourse of development:
“The new developmentalism rested heavily on discursive efforts to depoliticise the social order, to transmute the racial characteristics of the state and to argue that social life should be governed by the market.”
Tapscott (1995, p182)
During the struggle for political freedom the African National Congress (ANC) had its political ideology in communism. By the time they became the first democratically elected government in 1994, this ideology had become more oriented towards socialism, although according to Peet (2002), the ANC was moving towards neoliberal policies well before the 1994 elections. At the time of the elections, the economy was in deep structural crisis and in need of fundamental restructuring. The ANC saw that economic growth and development/redistribution were integrated and their solution to economic restructuring was the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) (ANC, 1994). The shift towards neoliberalism emanated from both internal ANC sources and from pressure from within South Africa, mainly from large- scale business organisations and the media. It also came from outside the country from the World Bank and IMF (Peet, 2002). The World Bank argued that poverty reduction would come from job creation in private sector labour- intensive industries (World Bank 1994; 1996). The IMF stressed that development would be achieved through an export-oriented economy and
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trickle-down economics, again with growth coming from the private sector (IMF 1992).
Following the RDP, the ANC’s subsequent economic development policy was entitled Growth, Employment, and Redistribution (GEAR). GEAR argued for higher economic growth rates to be achieved through an export-oriented economy, budget deficit cutting, trade liberalisation and wage controls (Government of the Republic of South Africa 1996). In essence, these are all neoliberal policies and fit well with the neoliberal discourse from the World Bank and IMF. The ANC actually went further than the recommendations of these multilateral organisations and pursued vigorous deregulation and privatisation programmes all in the desire to achieve a business climate that was internationally competitive. National government also shifted the responsibility for socio-economic development to lower levels of government, calling for them to be strategic, visionary, influential and to take a leadership role in involving citizens and civil society in the development process. This was to build social capital and find local solutions to SD (ANC, 1994). While this was laudable, it was not without problems. Many non-white councillors had no formal education and local authorities lacked the human and financial capacity to achieve what the national government required (Binns, Dixon and Nel, 2012).
The results of these neoliberal policies have been mixed. Carmody (2002) examines the immediate post-apartheid period until the early 2000s finding that between 1996 and 2000 more than a 500,000 jobs were lost when ANC predictions stated that the 600,000 that were meant to be created. Economic growth rates dropped from 3% in 1996 to 1.7% in 1997, 0.6% in 1998, 1.2% in 1999, and 1.3% in 2000 (Statistics South Africa 2012). Since the early 2000s neoliberal policies have continued with South Africa achieving GDP growth rates of between 3 and 6%. Neo-liberal globalisation continues to enlarge the gap between South Africa and the developed countries, creating new patterns of uneven development within South Africa (Carmody, 2002). It also means South Africa is not immune to global economic forces and GDP fell 2% in 2009 following the global economic crisis, although it has since turned positive
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with growth rates of around 3% to 2012 (World Bank, 2013). Racially, the divide in income is narrowing, but average incomes for black Africans rose 179% between 2001 an 2011 and are 60,613 Rand per annum. For whites in the same period, incomes rose 88% to 365,164 Rand per annum (Statistics South Africa, 2012). As a result of the apartheid legacy, South Africa was and still is a highly unequal society, whereby migratory labour predominates. This forces many of the black population into a situation of dependence on white- controlled capitalism entrenching them as a servile proletariat (Petersson 1997).