BACKGROUND: THE ONGOING POPULATION DEBATE

Population policy in South Africa has had quite an unfortunate history. For a long time population policy under the auspices of the apartheid regime was used as a political instrument to achieve certain apartheid ideology aims, including inter alia reducing population growth among black people to limit the swart gevaar (i.e. ‘Black Peril’). Even today, many population theorists inside and outside South Africa still claim that the population growth rate among blacks is too high and that there should be a concerted effort to reduce it (Barker 1995; Jordaanet et al. 1991; Mostert etal. 1991). By focusing so strongly on population growth among blacks, serious population problems in respect of whites are ignored and unaddressed, i.e. that whites in general over-consume and take up a disproportionate area of land in South Africa to the detriment of the advancement, empowerment and development of other population groups (Government of South Africa 1995: 19-20).

In the past there have been several endeavours to formulate suitable population policies and programmes for South Africa. Such programmes mostly focused on a single population aspect, namely fertility. In so doing, other population aspects such as mortality and migration have received comparatively little attention. The Population Development Programme (PDP), which was instituted during 1984, emphasised a broad range of policy measures and programmes to improve the quality of life of people, but stressed that the main demographic objective of the PDP remained the realisation of a total fertility rate (TFR) of 2.1 by 2010 (Government of South Africa 1993: 23). Because the TFRs of the Asians and the whites are already at or near the population replacement level of 2.1, PDP programmes were mostly targeted at coloureds and blacks whose TFRs are still higher than the population replacement level (1995 black TFR projection was 3.7).

With the political transition during the first half of the 1990s came the realisation that existing population policies and programmes needed to be adapted or replaced to cater for new social and political realities. To start this process, a discussion document on population policies and programmes was drafted by Klugman (1994) and distributed for discussion by the stakeholders in the population debate.