The Popular Rebellion in South African is about a Lot More than Just Service Delivery

The unprecedented series of road blockades, marches, riots, strikes and land occupations confronting Jacob Zuma’s new government cannot be understood if they are all presented as ‘service delivery protests’. On the contrary this label obscures the politics of the rebellion.

The language of ‘service delivery’ came to South Africa as part of the post-apartheid attempt to put an end to politics as the practice of popular contestation. Movements and community organisations were demobilised or bought under party control and development became a technocratic project, often administered by partnerships between business and the state. NGO based civil society was supposed to lobby the state and capital on behalf of the poor who were in turn supposed to become passive consumers of services.

When ‘service delivery’ has succeeded on its own terms it has often moved poor people from well located urban land occupied during the mass struggles against apartheid to badly made one roomed houses in peripheral ghettos widely derided as ‘human dumping grounds’. This process has often required forced removals that have been predicated on systemic state illegality and violence. ‘Service delivery’ has often had to be implemented at gun point.

When ‘service delivery’ has not succeeded on its own terms this has often been because local party elites have captured development and distorted it for their own interests. Because these local party elites are also the ‘correct channels’ through which people are supposed to express their views upwards there are often very limited opportunities for ordinary people to convey their concerns. It has not been unusual for local party elites to respond to dissent with intimidation and violence as well as exclusion from those services that are provided.

The protests that have reached a new peak in recent days have ebbed and flowed over the last ten years. It has not been unusual for the state to respond to protests with violence and repression even when they have been entirely legal and peaceful. There have been cases where activists have been tortured and a steady trickle of deaths at the hands of the police.

Although citizenship carries all kinds of guarantees in principle there is a very real sense in which the poor have, in practice, been systemically excluded from meaningful access to citizenship in both material and political terms. Much is made of South Africa’s constitution but it is not possible for most people to access the courts for the simple reason that legal representation costs money. Much is also made of South Africa’s vibrant NGO based civil society but it is has generally sought to improve its own status in relation to the state and capital rather than to seek the political empowerment of the poor against the state and capital.

When protests take the form of occupying land, appropriating food from supermarkets and illegally connecting people to water and electricity they are an attempt to seize what people need from the state and private power. This is hardly the same thing as a simple demand that the state deliver services.

When protests take the form of rejecting the forced removals and evictions that so often accompany ‘service delivery’ they are an explicit rejection of the state’s conception of service delivery.

When protests take the form, as they very often have, of rejecting the authority of local party elites over communities or development projects they are often an attempt to create a bottom up political space outside of top down party control. Again this is hardly the same thing as a simple demand that the state deliver services.

When protests take the form of targeting immigrants they are often an attempt to demonstrate and assert citizenship by turning on the ‘real’ non-citizens. The logic here is entirely perverse but it is still important to note that it too cannot be reduced to a simple demand that the state deliver services.

The technocratic fantasy of a post-political developmental agenda negotiated by business and government has been smashed by the ongoing rebellion. The question is how the ANC will respond.

Three broad strategies can be discerned in statements made by party leaders. Some seem to believe that more ruthless repression will establish the old consensus in which political and economic elites run the country and actively work for the political and spatial exclusion of the poor. Others seem to believe that the poor can be mobilised away from challenging elites by state support for exclusionary ethnic and national sentiment. The ANC has long displayed an atrociously xenophobic bent and in recent days has actively sought to generate anti-Indian sentiment in Durban. The third strategy is some kind of recognition that poor people will have to be allowed some right to engage the state on the nature of development outside of the ANC’s top down and often authoritarian local party political structures.

Four protestors have already been killed this month and hundreds have been arrested. But the protests have continued to gather momentum in the face of state violence. If the ANC does make a serious attempt to try and re-establish the old status quo through the exercise of force it will have to shoot and arrest many more people.

In the wake of last year’s anti-immigrant pogroms it’s clear that any attempt to channel popular anger away from elites and towards other poor people could be catastrophic.

The only acceptable solution is for the ANC to accept a return to popular politics and to accept that this will be outside of its control. An inevitable consequence of this will be that elites will be forced to abandon their monopoly over urban planning and the determination of what counts as ‘development’ and ‘delivery’.