Deserving and Undeserving Welfare States: Cash Transfers and Hegemonic Struggles in South Africa

The South African social grant programme appeared as if it might suddenly end on 1 April 2017. The potential termination of grants kicked off a significant public outcry by members of parliament, the judiciary, the treasury, the press and civil society organisations. At the time, popular explanations of this crisis contended that grants were about to stop because of corruption and state capture. Instead I argue that the 2017 grant crisis extended and amplified the hegemonic struggle within the African National Congress (ANC) between two contradictory neoliberal tendencies, which grew out of the post-apartheid transition and the global conjunctural moment of the end of the Cold War. Following Gillian Hart, I define these as a ‘liberal’, technocratic neoliberal capitalist tendency and a ‘populist’, affective neoliberal capitalist tendency. Adherents of each tendency wielded the discourse of deservedness – common in welfare discourse for centuries – both against people receiving welfare and against the political formations vying to deliver welfare. Each claimed to be more deserving of the task of delivering grants and therefore more deserving of holding state power. Ultimately, the 2017 grant crisis helped to lead to a shift in political power, shoring up South Africa’s very unequal social formation without addressing the exploitation upon which it was based.