South Africa's Suspended Revolution: Hopes and Prospects

5. The evolution of state–civil society relations

139 5 The evolution of state–civil society relations Two very different visions permeate public discourse on state– civil society relations in South Africa. The first is well illustrated by the words of Zola Skweyiya who, when he was minister of social development, responded to a question about government’s expectation of NGOs as follows: The basic twin expectations of government are that NGOs will firstly, continue to act as monitors of the public good and safeguard the interests of the disadvantaged sections of society. This performance of this social watch role requires both transparency and accountability on the part of NGOs. The government’s second expectation is that NGOs will assist in expanding access to social and economic services that create jobs and eradicate poverty among the poorest of the poor. This requires cost effective and sustainable service delivery. (Zola Skweyiya quoted in Barnard and Terreblanche, 2001: 17) The second vision is succinctly captured in the words of Ashwin Desai, an academic at the University of Johannesburg and one of the more prominent public intellectuals within the new social movements that have emerged in the post-apartheid era. For many of the activists … working in different spaces and having different strategies and tactics, there was a binding thread. There was unmitigated opposition to the economic policies adopted by the ANC … Activists 140 South Africa’s Suspended Revolution spoke of how the right-wing economic policies lead to widespread and escalating unemployment, with concomitant water and electricity cut-offs, and evictions even from the ‘toilets in the veld’ provided by the government in the place of houses. More importantly, there was general agreement that this was not just a question of short-term pain for long-term gain. The ANC had become a party of neo-liberalism. The strategy to win the ANC to a left project was a dead end. The ANC had to be challenged and a movement built to render its policies unworkable. It seems increasingly unlikely that open confrontation with the repressive power of the post-apartheid state can be avoided. (Desai, 2002: 147) Both statements draw attention to some of the key problems in post-apartheid South Africa and express a wish to enhance the empowerment and living conditions of the poor. Both statements also reflect the institutional locations – in government and in civil society – of those who articulated them. But the absolute and categoric nature of what they envisage makes both statements unhelpful in conceptualising and understanding contemporary state–civil society relations. Implicitly, the statements portray South African civil society as homogenous; that is, they project a single set of relations onto the whole of civil society. But is civil society not plural by its very nature? And, should this plurality not infuse current understandings of state–civil society relations in postapartheid South Africa? The suggestions put forward in this chapter take as their starting point a definition of civil society that celebrates plurality. In other words, I recognise that the set of institutions within civil society reflect diverse and even contradictory political and social agendas and that state–civil society relations necessarily reflect this plurality. That is, some relationships between civil society actors and 141 The evolution of state–civil society relations state institutions will be adversarial and conflictual while others will be collaborative and collegial. In my view, this state of affairs should not be lamented. Indeed, it is cause for celebration since it signifies the political maturing of South African society. Under apartheid, the adversarial–collaborative divide largely took a racial form. The bulk of ‘white civil society’ established collegial relations with the state, while the majority of ‘black civil society’ adopted a conflictual mode of engagement. This racial divide began to blur in the transition period as significant sections of the white community began to distance themselves from the apartheid regime. In the contemporary era, adversarial and collegial relations extend across the entire ambit of civil society so that, in this arena at least, the overt racial divide has all but disappeared. Elsewhere I have defined civil society as ‘the organised expression of various interests and values operating in the triangular space between the family, state and the market’ (Habib and Kotze, 2003: 3). This definition conceptualises civil society as an entity distinct from both the market and the state. Of course, traditional Hegelian definitions of the term include the market, but Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato’s...