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Liberation and Redistribution: Social Grants, Commercial Insurance, and Religious Riches in South Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 March 2011

Erik Bähre
Erik Bähre*
Affiliation:
Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology, Leiden
*
[email protected]
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Extract

South Africa's liberation, marked by the first democratic elections of 1994, ushered in an unprecedented expansion of large-scale redistributive arrangements. In the post-apartheid period, the collection of money into a central fund administered anonymously and bureaucratically has gained social and political importance, particularly for poor and lower-middle-class Africans. This is most evident in a rapid expansion of government social assistance—from 1997 to 2006 the number of beneficiaries of social grants increased from three to almost eleven million, and today at least a quarter of South African households receive welfare payments. Social assistance “has been the fastest-growing category of government expenditure since 2001, and now amounts to R70 billion [almost US$7 billion in 2006] a year, about 3.4 percent of gross domestic product.” The centrality of redistribution is clear in current debates over the establishment of a Basic Income Grant (BIG) for all South Africans. Political liberation has also brought an increase in redistribution through development projects such as the National Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) and Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) grants.

Type
Research Article
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 53 , Issue 2 , April 2011 , pp. 371 - 392
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2011

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References

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21 For a more elaborate account, see Bähre, Money and Violence.

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31 Ibid., 23.

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37 Pauw and Mncube, “Impact of Growth,” 12.

38 Seekings and Nattrass, Race, Class, and Inequality, 340–75.

39 Pauw and Mncube, “Impact of Growth,” 13.

40 See the website of the Department of Social Development: www.dsd.gov.za. The values given were defined in October 2008.

41 On mental health and entitlement of grants, see also MacGregor, H.. “‘The Grant Is what I Eat’: The Politics of Social Security and Disability in the Post-Apartheid South African State,” Journal of Biosocial Science 38, 1 (2005): 43–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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50 Other policies were the provident fund (16 percent), education policies (8 percent), car insurances (8 percent), disability policies (5 percent), the insurance of loan installments on furniture (4 percent), and investment funds (4 percent).

51 Kendall's tau_b 0,503, correlation significant at the 0.01 level, N = 110.

52 FinScope of 2003 states that almost nobody earning below R1000 a month has a policy. Because the study on which the FinScope data is based is unavailable, even though the study was publicly funded by the UK Department for International Development (DFID), the reason for this vast discrepancy remains unclear.

53 Porteous, “Access Frontier.” On marketing, see also Bähre, E., “Redes de inclusão e burocracias de exclusão: Riscos e seguros de responsabilidade civil entre os mais pobres na África do Sul,” Etnográfica 14, 3 (2010): 465–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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55 The relation was significant at the 0.05 level, with a Pearson correlation of -0,229.

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60 At: http://www.assemblies.org.za/.

61 See also Van Wyk, “Profit Prophets.”

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64 Ferguson, “Formalities of Poverty.”

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