Debating Ideas reflects the values and editorial ethos of the African Arguments book series, publishing engaged, often radical, scholarly, original and activist writing from within the African continent and beyond. It offers debates and engagements, contexts and controversies, and reviews and responses flowing from the African Arguments books. It is edited and managed by the International African Institute, hosted at SOAS University of London, the owners of the book series of the same name.
Over the past eight months, the Premier of the Eastern Cape Province in South Africa has been at loggerheads with the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) over how best to manage the hunger crisis in his province. The Premier has argued that existing policy frameworks, especially the welfare grants system, are adequate to deal with the crisis, while the SAHRC insists that normal policy responses are failing the poor.
This article reviews the debate and reflects critically on the rise of ethnic nationalism and the limits of the state's responses to rural poverty in South Africa through targeted welfare distribution. It also reports on key action findings from the Women-RISE project in the rural Eastern Cape and what insights they offer for how the state might better manage the crisis.
Debating the hunger crisis
In his book Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Nixon (2011) refers to "slow violence" as "a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all".[1] In Africa, hunger is often regarded as the slow violence associated with rapid onset disasters like famine, floods or disease. It is not usually considered the basis for a declaration of a "state of disaster".
In South Africa, hunger has never been declared a disaster. Instead, it has been viewed as part of the natural tidal movements of poverty in urban and rural areas. In this sense, it has been seen as an endemic problem, especially in rural areas, better managed through targeted welfare assistance than rapid response approaches.[2] Indeed, since the end of apartheid, various types of social grants have been introduced to contain hunger in rural areas. Many now claim these measures are inadequate and should be replaced by a Basic Income Grant. The new grant would have wider coverage and offer greater support to the poorest of the poor. The relative success of these measures has been punted as one of the major achievements of the African National Congress (ANC), replacing apartheid-style migrant remittances as a means of keeping the lid on rural hunger in a situation of mass unemployment and stagnant urban growth.[3]
In its call for hunger to be declared a "state of disaster", the SAHRC argued that the management of poverty through the grants system is no longer working and that localised interventions were necessary to address acute vulnerability to patch the system together. They call for greater coordination through a provincial "war council" that would identify the places of greatest need and ensure that coordinated support was provided to hold back the tide.
In responding to the SAHRC report of November 2023, the Premier claimed that the report was alarmist because the ANC already had all the necessary policies in place to manage the crisis. In his State of the Province address in February 2024 he stated that ANC policies had ensured a general reduction of severe acute hunger in the province between 2017 and 2022. He acknowledged the current crisis but said in the media that the blame rested largely with government officials for not doing enough to ensure the policies were implemented. He urged them to work harder but also allocated R60 million for emergency relief in wards with high levels of severe acute child malnutrition. In June 2024, the SAHRC stated publicly that they were not satisfied that the Premier had done enough to address the crisis and returned to their call for a "war council" that could produce coordinated local action to manage the situation.
Modernising poverty and absentee welfarism
To appreciate the challenge faced by the Premier and his government it is necessary to understand how state formation has changed in the Eastern Cape since democracy. In the first decade after apartheid, the ANC placed a strong emphasis on the need for participatory development in rural areas and an enlarged state presence to eradicate the legacy of homeland development. Anti-poverty projects and programmes were brought to poor communities, especially in remote rural areas.
Place-based development nodes and corridors were declared with an emphasis on integrated development initiatives to rebuild local economies and homesteads ravaged by colonialism and apartheid. Many of these initiatives enjoyed strong support from international donors precisely because they emphasised local beneficiation. Donor organisations used a "livelihoods framework" that approached rural development from the point of view of building social, human, physical and human capital at "the base" of the community or rural homestead level.[4]
In rural areas, the focus was on small-scale farming and resilience against poverty and hunger through self-reliance. The development discourse in the 1990s and early 2000s in the province aimed to capacitate and service rural communities with basic services, including clinics, sanitation, tapped water, better roads, electricity and land restitution. The aim was to bring a developmental state to the people to reverse the adverse effects of ethnic nationalism, migrant labour and underdevelopment. Some of these initiatives failed because of poor planning, bureaucratic delays, lack of capacity, corruption, and competition between traditional leaders and elected officials. But basic services were greatly improved, and people remember that. What failed to gather momentum was participatory development that created new institutions and local-level infrastructures to drive development from below. The effect of the ANC programme was thus largely to modernise poverty rather than eradicate it.
Over time the diverse economy of the Eastern Cape flattened out and lost vitality in favour of a two-pronged approach where the state subsidised the auto industry in the two major cities and focused on welfare province for vulnerable households in rural areas. As time passed, corruption grew and budgets shrunk, the place-based development agenda was increasingly abandoned. And, after 2010 without foreign donor support and state capture in full swing, the visibility of the local state as development agents in rural areas gradually disappeared.[5] In the meantime, the national treasury took charge of rural poverty through its tidal model of poverty management by focusing on direct welfare distribution to vulnerable groups that cut out a bureaucratic interface. Cutting out the regional bureaucracy minimised the potential for corruption and placed more money directly in the hands of the poor.
According to officials from the South African Social Security interviewed by Women RISE, today there are over 4 million welfare recipients in the Eastern Cape. Half a million people receive pensions, 250,000 disability grants, 1.8 million Child Support Grants of R500, and since 2020, another 1.5 million Special Covid Relief (SRG) grants of R350 a month. The welfare budget for the rural Eastern Cape is enormous and has greatly increased since the pandemic in 2020 with the SRG.
The shift from place-based participatory development, through a focus on basic services delivery to centrally managed (anti-poverty) welfarism has effectively decommissioned the local state and the rural economy. Officials now manage online portals with targeted packages to mitigate poverty or stimulate markets. As resources chase abstractions like agro-processing, niche markets, and severe child malnutrition, the complex challenges and opportunities in local places are airbrushed out of the picture. But the data on the Eastern Cape is poor and unreliable. Since few on-site community profiles have been created for a decade, the local state is largely unaware of what is happening in rural particular communities. Hence departments find it difficult to put their finger on hunger hotspots and determine its extent in the rural Eastern Cape. Even the SAHRC has no idea of what lies behind the visible tip of the iceberg, seen in media reports (like those of the Daily Maverick) or accounts from organisations like Gift of the Givers. They are mostly shooting in the dark.
The Women RISE project and DIY ruralism
In 2023, the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC), in partnership with the University of McGill in Canada, secured funding from the global Women RISE programme of the Independent Development Research Centre (IDRC) in Canada to investigate recovery and rebuilding after Covid. To address the challenge in the rural Eastern Cape, and the scarcity of reliable data, we decided to place researchers in eight communities, mainly in the former Transkei. The research team has been in the field since March 2023 and the results document the consequences of state policy effects and economic marginality in detail.
Space here will not permit a thorough account of what we have found, but it is abundantly clear that since the pandemic shutdown of 2020, there has been very little state-led rebuilding in rural areas outside the extension of social grants. Officials acknowledge this and complain of limited budgets, the absence of place-based development projects and a lack of equipment, like vehicles, to service the villages.
In this context, rural development is a matter of auto-construction and takes the form of DIY ruralism and a deepening dependency on grants. The central node for rural recovery is the house or homestead, which was altered during the pandemic by return migration from the cities, especially of unemployed youth and scholars. This resulted in a boom in unplanned teenage pregnancy during 2020 and 2021, which is now seen in the rising levels of child malnutrition as families are dealing with the impact of additional mouths to feed. The lack of a state presence has seen a growth of cultural sentiment and the rise of ethno-populism as seen in the recent 2024 elections. But absence is not the same as neglect. The ANC did not ignore the rural poor during and after the pandemic. They created the Social Relief of Distress grant in March 2020, which has reached over 1.5 million individuals in the Eastern Cape and is still in place. They also announced special funds or measures to support the poor which could be accessed online. Many were not fully utilised because rural folks were unaware of them or lacked the compliance documents.
The political will to assist was there, but it came without presence and a situated sense of obligation and care.[6] In rural areas, the state has not created mechanisms for local engagement and dialogue, but a centralised system of bio-metric poverty management - the impact and consequences of which are not clearly understood. How these grants land in rural areas has not been monitored. Our research shows that against the backdrop of efforts to effect social cohesion through customary practice at the community level, households have become more fractured as competing interests vie for available resources. Some in the household seek to defray debts, others want to convert all income into food, yet others (like the youth) now claim the right to spend their grants on themselves or their networks. For struggling mothers, child grants can often go on alcohol, while others might prioritise buying bricks to refurbish the house.
Absolute rural poverty is real and widespread, but competition over resources in homes without local opportunities for investment creates tension, wastage and conflict. Social reproduction, it bears repeating, is never simply a biological process since it always involves the need to reproduce people with aspirations. Bio-metric poverty reduction models tend to forget that people living in rural areas are also cultured human beings. Policies that speak to food alone fail to appreciate the connection between citizenship and the changing definitions of basic needs. Without hope and the infrastructures to support it, grant dependency can become a toxic and debilitating force that individualises vulnerability, especially for the youth who are often suspicious of a return to customary power and gerontocracy.[7] Many now turn against their bodies due to growing drug and alcohol addiction in rural areas. The prevalence of suicides amongst young unemployed men in rural areas is another aspect of this process of embodiment and individualisation as are the growing reports of maternal filicide where rural mothers commit suicide after killing their children.
There are limits to what can be achieved through welfare grants and DIY ruralism in South Africa without a state presence and plans for local development outside of the recovery of custom. One of the great virtues of disaster management response systems is that they acknowledge the importance of place, even though they only offer emergency short-term support.
Making contact: pop-up engagements
Given the above, we chose the need for "presence" in the action component of our Women RISE project. In the past months, we have organised engagements with different government departments and followed these up with pop-up community engagements, where we invited multiple government departments to attend. The results have been encouraging.
At the government engagements, we felt a strong commitment especially among senior officials for greater direct contact with rural communities. This is partly a response to the growing criticism they feel (from above and below) that questions their role as public servants. Many lamented how much the central government now dictated their work and how the online systems and budget cuts kept them out of the field. They say their daily jobs are dominated by compliance issues rather than situational assessments and direct engagement with communities.
In the Department of Agriculture, officials spoke of having to roll out new programmes for emerging farmers structured around online applications which involved no interaction with actual farmers. They said that agricultural extension work had been cut to a bare minimum because vehicles were broken, and budgets did not cover the cost of field visits. In the Department of Social Development, we heard that officials were frustrated at having to work with statistics on where hunger exists rather than making in-person field visits to sites to assess the situation for themselves to test hypotheses, such as the connection between teenage pregnancy and hunger.
The South Africa Social Security Agency (SASSA) officials said they felt frustrated at not having access to rural residents in person to educate them on civic compliance so that they could access grants. The engagement with the Department of Health highlighted how frustrated doctors and nurses are at occupying rural clinics and hospitals without having the medication needed to treat patients. The massive imbalance between budgets for wages compared to those for basic equipment, maintenance and consumables was raised at all the engagements. To address these concerns, we invited government officials to community engagement workshops. Our invitations were well received, and officials turned out in numbers. They came with forms and information and a genuine enthusiasm to reactivate a connection with remote and marginalised rural communities.
We have found that pop-up engagements that deal with several place-based issues at the same time are highly productive, as are periodic markets where residents can interact and exchange information and goods. After the Covid pandemic in 2021, the Eastern Cape Premier led a highly successful vaccination campaign in rural areas by creating pop-up vaccination centres across the rural areas. The initiative involved partnerships with civic bodies, media personalities, business entities and the government. The mere presence of these pop-up clinics generated hope and optimism, which evaporated once statecraft returned to normal after the fear of infection subsided.[8]
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Conclusion
This article has attempted to highlight some of the limitations of absentee welfarism as a form of state formation in rural areas in a context where ethnic nationalism is on the rise. We have suggested that the shift away from place-based service and participation and its substitution with remotely delivered, individual welfare grants has intensified dependence, reconstituted custom and undermined local capacity to build from below. It has left many rural places bereft of hope and a sense of agency, which fuels involution, envy and intimate and gender-based violence.
The prevailing poverty management system of absentee welfarism principally addresses the vulnerabilities of people with rights rather than places with potential. And with the virtual suspension of rural service delivery in recent years it creates little basis for bottom-up rural development outside of a return to ethnic nationalism. Skilling people without infrastructures that translate skills into livelihood opportunities is a waste of time and money. The decommissioning of the local state has resulted in a return to custom amidst growing social and economic differentiation in rural areas that has been largely family-led not community based.
To return to the hunger debate, we would urge the Premier of the Eastern Cape to seriously consider adopting the recommendation of the SAHRC and declare hunger a state of disaster in his province. He should use the limited resources available for such an exercise to facilitate coordinated community engagement across the province where government officials and traditional authorities are present to listen to community concerns and sign rural citizens up for available welfare assistance, as well as co-producing more effective local responses to poverty.
References
[8] Bank, Leslie. 2024 (forthcoming). "Life after plastic-wrapped bodies: COVID, the state and the crisis of social reproduction in rural South Africa", Anthropology Quarterly. Summer Issue, 97 (3): 335-63.
Leslie Bank is an Extraordinary Professor of Anthropology at Walter Sisulu University. Zipho Xego is a lecturer in Sociology and an engagement specialist at Walter Sisulu University. Rebecca Bank is a graduate student and disaster management specialist at the University of Cape Town. They all work on the IDRC-funded Women-RISE research project Ukuvula Isango on Covid recovery and reconstruction in the rural Eastern Cape in South Africa.
