South African People Power since the mid-1980s: two steps forward, one back

The advent and growth of a community-based democracy movement in South Africa in the late 1970s was decisive in destabilising the apartheid regime and paving the way to democracy. But in the quarter century since then progressive civil society has ebbed and flowed, reaching a peak in the early 1990s as an anti-apartheid force, retreating into a ‘honeymoon period’ with Nelson Mandela's anc government during the late 1990s, and emerging as ‘new social movements’ around 1999. These latter included the Treatment Action Campaign, which won enormous victories in cheapening aids medicines, and urban community movements which advocated improved water/sanitation, electricity and housing. Within five years these movements had either won or begun to fade; more recent people power has taken the form of disruptive – but ultimately disorganized – township insurgencies. In cases where the popular movements allied with the Congress of SA Trade Unions, they made progress, but the latter's political allegiances to the anc and the unions' ability to replace the anc president in 2007 meant continuing gridlock for social and economic change, as society remained under neoliberal public policy domination.