Summary - Die Burger of 30 September 2005 reports that in the Eastern Cape saliva of people ill with TB is up for sale. Potential buyers aim to contract the disease to qualify for a government subsidy.
This reflects desperation among the poorest of the poor. It also indicates that the state’s subsidy programme is producing unintended consequences: instead of shoring up the vulnerable and weak, it is weakening them even further.
It is one of many events that portray a breakdown in the social fabric and the loss of social cohesion within the primary social units from which society is constructed. The revolt against apartheid intensified state repression and counter mobilisation to make South Africa ungovernable – conditions of chronic social disruption that have not been overcome by ten years of democracy.
It has been a decade of sustained economic growth, but with it has come a new set of dislocating social forces. Poverty, unemployment, Aids/TB and crime are combining to lock ever more South Africans into a culture of poverty.
Social and welfare grants alone will not provide a solution. What is needed is social capital – networks of people who know one another, trust one another, treat one another as equals, and practise reciprocity.
Schools, churches, and universities allow for the emergence of informal social groupings within which social capital can emerge when the groups develop their own social dynamic, becoming mini-republics where public and private space is demarcated, public goods are recognised, and the contribution of each member to the public good is needed, requested, and acknowledged.
Networks usually form around specific interests, which, in turn, generate inherent criteria of membership. However, when criteria like race become the norm, exclusive rather than inclusive networks evolve. Unless bridged at some higher level, such networks rarely add to the overall social capital of society. We must ensure that the many racially defined interest groups that emerged with democracy do not create un-social capital.
Networks add value only when they engage with one another on the basis of the norms of civility, recognising one another as part of the same society and giving each other space to prosper within the public domain.
Although this process of capital formation must be voluntary, the state has a vital role to play but it must be strengthened so it can set rules, hold citizens to them, and obey them itself – the rule of law must pertain. In this respect there have been successes in the past ten years but some problems remain – criminal strongmen still seem to co-exist with democracy and the inability of the state to ensure that its own personnel adhere to its rules is manifest in ongoing corruption.
Secondly, the state must be able to recognise the public good as something distinct from the interests of its current managers, and/or any particular race group, social class, or private network.
Thirdly, if social capital is to be extended across society in a bridging process, individuals from networks that have had little contact with one another and were located primarily in the cultural and racially defined communities created by apartheid must find some common denominator if they are to coalesce into new, larger units of social capital. Building social capital entails strangers becoming friends and joint endeavours being identified and pursued by people who accept one another as equals. When the only identity we have in common is citizenship it is vital that the state ensure that we share a citizenship of equal value.
Under apartheid the opposite condition prevailed and we are in danger of resurrecting the same invidious ranking, this time with the tables turned.
The formation of new social capital is vital if the poor 4,3 million who exist on less than $1 (about R6,50) a day are to uplift themselves. The need for social capital is equally urgent if Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) is to succeed. White holders of vast stocks of financial capital must find new black equity partners with whom to pursue jointly the further creation of wealth. But if business is to flourish these new partners will need confidence in one another’s ability as well as trust in one another’s integrity. The state can legislate for scorecards and compel equity transfers, it cannot force people to like or trust one another. Re-capitalising society is therefore a vital ingredient for uplifting the poor as well as for the success of BEE, and with it, securing our democratic future.
Consider the following gruesome vignette. Reports are emerging from the Eastern Cape that saliva of people ill with TB is up for sale1. Potential buyers are the very poor who aim to contract the disease so as to qualify for a government subsidy. (The combined HIV/Aids and tuberculosis national health subsidies stood at R437 million in 2003, an increase of 46 per cent over the previous year.)
This is a distressing picture, and is so for many reasons. First, for buyers it is a survival strategy that reflects desperation, an option taken up by the poorest of poor people who are at their wits end, who have exhausted just about all other less destructive avenues of staying alive. Secondly, the safety net extended by the state with its subsidy programme is producing grotesque unintended consequences. The intent is to shore up the most vulnerable and weakest in society, but instead, an incentive structure is created that is weakening them even further. Thirdly, those who line up to buy this grim commodity are not only expressing powerlessness and hopelessness in a poignant way, but are also contributing to further disempowering themselves more or less permanently. As a response to the forces of adversity, it is an expression of crushing defeat.
And this picture resonates with events in the wider national frame. The big picture is one of a breakdown in the social fabric, and of the loss of social cohesion within the primary social units from which society is constructed: nuclear families, extended families and communities. The driving forces of this process in our recent history are well known: rapid industrial modernisation and urbanisation, apartheid, and especially the forced re-location of people in urban areas, the pass laws and influx control. The revolt against apartheid created a new set of destabilising forces: state repression and counter mobilisation to make South Africa ungovernable. These all combined to create conditions of chronic social disruption. Yet we dared to hope that ten years of democracy would turn this momentum around. But has it?
Democratic South Africa yielded a decade of sustained economic growth, but with it a new set of dislocating social forces became salient. Poverty, unemployment, Aids/TB and crime are fast-forwarding one another and combining to lock ever more South Africans into a culture of poverty, from which it is becoming increasingly difficult to escape. For many Africans, coloureds and especially Indians, the decade of growth meant upward movement into the middle and higher income groups. For some whites it meant movement downward into abject poverty, for others upwards into even more wealth. Within every racial category however, a large and growing number of households (more than 23,5 million people in 2004) live in relative poverty.
How are we going to get them out of it? Social and welfare grants alone will not do it, and may even worsen matters, as our example shows so vividly. Throwing money at people who feel powerless, utterly defeated and despondent will not empower them. The vital (and missing) ingredient in strengthening the weakest of society is social capital. This comprises networks of people who know one another personally, who trust one another, treat one another as equals, and who practise reciprocity: helping others in the network cope with the hardships of poverty, with the expectation that the helping hand will be extended to them should they, in turn, also stumble. To re-empower the poor we need to re-capitalise society.
Social capital is an invisible, but indispensable resource with which to help individuals cope with adversity. Very often conditions of hardship help create social capital. Conditions of warfare, prison, and being subjected to extreme physical stress often generate lasting bonds of friendship between individuals. We have some very famous examples to refer to. Consider, for example, Nelson Mandela’s description of how the “Rivonia network” served as a resource for coping with prison life on Robben Island: “… the authorities greatest mistake was to keep us together, for together our determination was reinforced. We supported each other and gained strength from each other. Whatever we knew, whatever we learned, we shared, and by sharing we multiplied whatever courage we had individually… the stronger ones raised up the weaker ones, and both became stronger in the process”2.
To suggest that equivalent conditions of adversity be contrived for the poor as a way to build social capital is, of course, absurd. They already experience desperate hardship. But, luckily, social capital can also be generated under different, more benign conditions. Working together in order to achieve joint goals, especially goals that seem, at first, to be beyond reach, is a powerful social glue that can create new networks, build trust, reinforce reciprocity, and establish norms of equality between hitherto strangers.
The informal dynamics within the formal institutions of civil society is where this most often takes place. Schools, churches, and universities are formal institutions that allow for the emergence of informal social groupings such as choirs, soccer teams, rock-music bands, residences, and other such interest formations. Within these units social capital can emerge. This will occur when such informal groups develop their own social dynamic with informal rules of induction, rules for the distribution of work and the assignment of tasks to sub-groups, with the election of leaders, spokespersons and representatives, and so on. In short, when they themselves become mini-republics, where public and private space is demarcated, public goods are recognised, and the contribution of each member to the public good is needed, asked for, and acknowledged when contributed.
Not all networks add value to the stock of social capital in a society. Some may even contribute to the formation of un-social capital. Three conditions apply. The first relates to the objectives pursued by the network. Only those compatible with a democratic society where the public good is advanced, (or at least not damaged) builds social capital. If, for example, a tight circle of friends use their pooled resources to buy and re-sell Mandrax in the neigbourhood, they may profit hugely, but the community and society are very much worse off. Criminal networks, with the Mafia as the quintessential example, just do not contribute to the social capital of civil societies. Romantic notions that criminal bosses who sponsor soccer teams on the Cape Flats are “building communities” need therefore to be swept off the table.
Secondly, the criteria of membership are of vital importance. Networks usually form around specific interests that are pursued, which in turn generate inherent criteria of membership. Only people with good voices can join a choir, only physically talented athletes can join soccer teams, and so on. However, when prescriptive criteria like race become the norm, exclusive rather than inclusive networks evolve, bonding people within communities ever tighter, and insulating them from wider society. The Broederbond is an infamous South African example. Unless bridged at some higher level, such networks rarely add to the overall social capital of society. We need to ensure that the many racially defined interest groups that emerged with democracy, such as the Black Accountants of South Africa, do not go the same way.
Thirdly, networks add value only when they engage with one another on the basis of the norms of civility. This entails that they recognise one another as part of the same society, that they acknowledge that this inclusive society is held together by the public good, and that each network can and should be given space to prosper within the public domain. Rival taxi groups that try to shoot their competition off the playing field epitomise the very opposite, and represent the building blocks of an un-civil society.
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This process of capital formation can rarely be micro-managed. In the final instance, it has to be voluntary. Neither the state, nor any other authority outside of the informal gathering can dictate who becomes friends with whom, who trusts one another and who not, and who are prepared to accept one another as equals and who not.
But the state does have a vital role to play in the recapitalisation of society. The capital-generating state must, however, meet three criteria. First, the state itself must be strengthened. A strong state is one that can set rules, hold its citizens to them, and obey them itself. In short, one that is able to establish a society where the rule of law pertains. We have recorded noteworthy successes in this regard over the last ten years of democracy. But some worrying problems remain. Rivals to the state, in the shape of private armies, and the Kwa-Zulu Natal warlords, had been very effectively dismantled just after 1994, and in some instances even before that. Criminal strongmen, however, still seem to co-exist with democracy. The inability of the state to ensure that its own personnel adhere to its rules is manifest in corruption, an ongoing feature of our political landscape, and one that will become ever more salient as the Jacob Zuma trial proceeds.
Strong-arm tactics are no substitute for the real thing. Reports of traffic officers who storm restaurants in Norwood, Johannesburg, demanding driver’s licences from customers, in order to issue warrants of arrests for unpaid fines3, really highlight the brittleness of our state, and typify the very opposite of true strength.
Secondly, the state must, like the units of social capital in society, be able to recognise the public good as something distinct from the interests of its current managers, and/or any other particular race group, social class, or private network. The appallingly weak service delivery of the state at the local level, visible in the recent typhoid outbreak in Delmas, housing backlogs everywhere, and chronic electrical power cuts, is not conducive to serving the public good. Instead, it motivates people to invest their social capital inwards, to take care of themselves if the state is not going to, and thus prevents the bridging stage we need now in the expansion of social capital.
Thirdly, if social capital is to be extended across society in a bridging process, individuals from networks that had hitherto very little contact with one another, and were located primarily in the cultural and racially-defined communities created by apartheid, have to find some common denominator if they are to coalesce into new, larger units of social capital. Given our immediate past history, we have very little that is shared by all to build on, save the new and precious status of democratic citizenship. Building social capital entails that strangers become friends, and trusted ones at that, and that joint endeavours be identified and pursued by people who accept one another as equals. When the only identity we have in common to start with, and from which to build on, is a common citizenship, then it is vital that the state ensure that we share a citizenship of equal value.
Under apartheid the very opposite condition prevailed: racially-defined communities were ranked into status hierarchies defined by severe inequality, with whites as first-class citizens, and everybody else as second or third-class citizens. We are in danger of resurrecting the same invidious ranking, this time with the tables turned. In one of his famous speeches Martin Luther King expressed his yearning for an equal society as follows: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character”4. Current affirmative action policies, if not legislation, already create perceptions among whites that they have been reduced to second-class citizens, with diminished life chances derived from skin colour. Perceptions of inequality are not the basis of friendship, nor of trust, but only promote increased “inward bonding”.
The formation of new social capital is of the utmost importance if the poor 4,3 million who exist on less than $1 per day are to uplift themselves. At the very opposite end of the socio-economic scale the need for social capital is equally urgent if we are to succeed with our latest and most ambitious programme of social engineering, Black Economic Empowerment (BEE). White holders of vast stocks of financial capital are tasked to find new black equity partners with whom to jointly pursue the further creation of wealth. But if business is to flourish then these new partners will need ample confidence in one another’s ability, as well as trust in one another’s integrity. New networks can only function if the norms of equality and reciprocity are also present, or can be created as we go along. As mentioned above, the state can legislate for scorecards, and can compel equity transfers, but it cannot force people to like one another, to trust one another, to help others, and to reciprocate help from others. Re-capitalising society is therefore the most vital ingredient for uplifting the poor as well as for the success of BEE, and with it, for securing our democratic future.
Endnotes
1. Die Burger, 30 September 2005.
2. Mandela, N. Long Walk to Freedom. MacDonald-Purnell, Randburg,
1991.
3. The Star, 30 August 2005.
4. Partington, A (ed). The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (revised
fourth edition), Oxford University Press, 1996.
