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Chapter 13 - Low-hanging Fruit or Deep-seated Transformation? Quality of life and governance in Gauteng, South Africa

from PART II - SECTORS AND LOCATIONS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 October 2019

David Everatt
Affiliation:
University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg
David Everatt
Affiliation:
Wits School of Governance.
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Summary

INTRODUCTION

The core challenge facing South Africa after the transition to democracy in 1994 was to meet the basic needs of the majority denied by apartheid, and simultaneously restore people's dignity by undoing the psychosocial damage through more deep-seated transformation. In engaging these imperatives, could the new democratic state offer to focus overwhelming attention on service delivery and ignore the precarious social fabric? Did the state have the capacity needed to repair the social fabric, even if only under the rubric of building a ‘rainbow nation’ or the ‘new South Africa’? Substantively, could the state afford not to prioritise visible and tangible delivery over more opaque social transformation initiatives?

The state needed to be democratised, laws repealed, new structures put in place, together with meeting the massive delivery backlog of the decades-long denial of basic needs for the majority of citizens. These were primarily bricks-and-mortar matters, and hence the low-hanging fruit of post-apartheid liberation where important and visible gains could easily be made. With respect to people's dignity, continuing racial and ethnic animosities and their accumulated pain and anger, the focus was primarily on establishing a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), and putting in place affirmative action measures for better economic and institutional representation. Underlying the dominant approach was the hope that people's dignity would be restored by service delivery: by giving people decent houses, sanitation, tarred roads, potable water, health services, education, and so on. The logic was that the rest of the complex, distinctly human mess left by apartheid would somehow self-repair. Services would restore dignity, as would the (expected) availability of jobs and opportunities. Expressed bluntly, there was little reflection or action related to what to do with the messy stuff of ‘ordinary’ people and their psychosocial make-up, behaviours and interactions.

Using data from the ‘Quality of Life’ surveys conducted by the Gauteng City- Region Observatory (GCRO), this chapter argues that the ‘low-hanging fruit’ or ‘bricks-and-mortar’ approach represented a significant failure of the postcolonial imagination, compounded by failures of governance.

Type
Chapter
Information
Governance and the Postcolony
Views from Africa
, pp. 283 - 306
Publisher: Wits University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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