It is one of those sunny March mornings in 2021 when the sky is clear and the air is crisp, but not here. There is a stench from the heavily polluted Jukskei River nearby and sulphur and dioxide from paraffin-fired stoves. The atmosphere, like the stench, is constant. Through the smoke and haze, a jumble of disfiguring scrap tin, wooden planks and cardboard and plastic sheets in which whole families live, crowds the eye; it is the same on the embankments, where heaps of rubbish fester in stagnant pools. To the naked eye, the sprawl is a study in monotony. Endless squalor joins endless squalor in a parade of human deprivation and environmental ruin.
This is London Road, one of the main entry points to Alexandra in Johannesburg, and I am driving with my guide, King, a Ghanaian South African who has lived in the township for well over a decade. When I arrive in Alexandra, in early March 2021, and first encounter the squatter settlement, I assume it’s been there all along — one of the township’s labyrinths of settled slums that have come to mark its social typography and economic status since the end of apartheid in 1994.
But the story, told to me by King, is that for many years the area, covering about a square kilometre, was a red line between the township and the “formal” economy. A handful of businesses settled there because property values were low and the supply of cheap, casual labour from the township was plentiful. Every day, men and women would gather on the embankment outside the construction and car-repair plants on one side of the road. Most were job seekers; others were informal street vendors and hustlers.
A new poverty arose as businesses abandoned their workforce. The unskilled, especially, had been marooned
Like supplicants to the village chief, locals brought their desperation and hopes directly to the front gates of the factories. Many would gesture and try to explain why they needed to get in; on the other side stood security guards doing 24-hour shifts, keeping them out.
Now something extraordinary was happening. It was a story of how the closure of factories during the “hard” Covid-19 lockdown, between March and June 2020, led to the occupation of the buildings by destitute families, and of how business owners, outraged by the “invasion”, ordered their closure later that year. “All these shacks and people are very recent arrivals to Alex,” King says to me, looking out towards the horizon.
At midday, the sun is a flaming ball, bouncing off the tiny tin shacks, the imikhukhu. They appear to “invade” the physical landscape as far as the eye can see before disappearing on the horizon. Above them is a tangled knot of cables drawing electricity illegally from the main grid. Along the embankment on one side, a wall of squat mobile toilets offers inhabitants a semblance of personal dignity. The local residents refer to the slum dwellings by a name that comes straight out of the Old Testament. They call it Gomorrah.
Like the biblical myth, the name has become a metaphor for hell on earth. It did feel like hell. In early March 2021, the slums on London Road had the vivid, confused quality of a nightmare in the blinding sunlight. Anxiety mingled with a thickening despair that led straight to a living hell.
Even before the pandemic, the manner in which the country argued with itself seemed wholly inadequate to the causes and scale of the economic crisis. Where, I wondered, do places like Alexandra lie, between the official definition of growth and the collateral costs in the metric of social justice?
As the chaotic climax of Covid-19 began its tortuous descent into something close to normalcy, it was clear to see where the government was looking for solutions.
A year after I visited Alexandra, President Cyril Ramaphosa came to the podium of the Cape Town City Hall to deliver his 2022 state of the nation address (Sona). It is the tradition of parliament that the Sona speech provides a phrase or slogan that defines the major themes of the upcoming campaign and marks them with a presidential imprimatur — marching orders for the year ahead.
This occasion carried an unusual blot. The fire that gutted parliament’s National Assembly may have carried the odour of a failing state, but the Sona speech was symbolic for a larger reason: Ramaphosa was facing a tangled, atrophying web of social and financial imbalances that had been amplified during the pandemic.
Throughout the previous two years there had been a barrage of media reportage about poor families struggling to access the unworkable mess of public health care during Covid-19; of an endless bazaar of informal traders and street hustlers trying to get by; and of small business owners agonising over insurmountable debt.
These indelible images were not confounded. Despite government rhetoric aimed at “humanising” impoverished townships like Alexandra and providing a self-flattering version of growth and development, beneath the township’s impoverished face was a faltering social security and health-care system that sagged under the heavy calumny of elitism. The great weariness of the poor began to show in a new poverty that had arisen as businesses abandoned large numbers of their workforce. The unskilled, especially, had been marooned. Many of those remaining were put on part-time employment contracts, and still others began “remote” working in a growing army of labour known as the precariat.
What has distinguished Ramaphosa’s presidency has been a temporal policy void, wherein emergency welfare interventions during the pandemic were universally accepted measures to cushion the impact of lockdowns on livelihoods.
In this default of action, the signature Ramaphosa settled on for 2022 was the “mixed economy”. It seemed an odd choice for a man identified with the interests and ideological concerns of business. Mixed-economy allusions invoked traditions that seemed better suited to the long-discarded Reconstruction & Development Programme, or RDP, which advocated Keynesian countercyclical spending and investment in redistributive outcomes.
The growth-at-all-costs doctrine is the strategy of ruling elites 'to normalise the unthinkable for the general public'
In his essential instincts, Ramaphosa’s speech showed a relish for the growth-at-all-costs doctrine that seemed a credible way of describing the spirit of his campaign. It is the strategy of ruling elites, Edward Herman wrote in his fine essay “The Banality of Evil”, to “normalise the unthinkable for the general public”. Ramaphosa’s use of the catchphrase “mixed economy” was intended to tap a vein of latent ideological power that harked back to the RDP.
It has been the ANC’s tradition, Ramaphosa said, to maintain ideological consistency from the Freedom Charter and “Ready to Govern” document during apartheid, and, beyond 1994, the RDP and the National Development Plan. There was no mention of the neoliberal Growth, Employment and Redistribution strategy. Instead, the speech described the more populist party entreaties to Radical Economic Transformation and broad-based BEE that had won broad acceptance through the last two decades of extraordinary crises.
Despite some policy departures, these venerated party cries had symbolised a policy arc since 1994 that was consistent: growth. The problem confronting SA, as Ramaphosa saw it, was not only that poverty and unemployment had arisen from a profound exhaustion of investment, but that growth was inadequate and BEE was not widespread enough.
At a time when BEE, as the legal framework for growth in SA, is fuelling elitism and inequality, and corrupt money is flowing into politics as never before, Ramaphosa has been concerned with the country’s economic growth rate, but for a more profound reason: the potential for social instability that had become palpable during the social unrest in early 2021.
And that’s arguably the all-important point. For many years, the government sought to reform, but not completely dismantle, the growth model, slicing and dicing it into successive iterations of BEE, despite its collateral social costs. Initially, the reforms seemed to prioritise GDP growth and deficit reduction as twin panaceas for sorting through the twin correlates of poverty and inequality. But something else happened.
The privatisation mania during the first decade of the reform process was replaced by a culture of state patronage, and a grisly tally of unemployment and poverty rose alongside a new elite on the back of BEE. It was a two-plus decade that charted a dramatic swing from the optimism of the “growth for all” mantra of the ruling party to social and economic decay. The most wrenching consequences were evident in townships like Alexandra, where the overriding question has persisted: growth for who?
In townships such as Alexandra a showdown with SA’s post-1994 growth doctrine has revealed just how far the poor are prepared to dig in
And here it is important to see the social unrest last year initially as a factional campaign against Jacob Zuma’s arrest, but which soon became a lightning rod for civil warfare against poverty and inequality. It was the combustible issue that Ramaphosa had to confront but did not quite succeed in redressing that incensed the glut of poor people in urban areas and townships such as Alexandra where, according to one survey, 50% of people are unemployed. For it is here — where popular expectations are among the highest — that a showdown with SA’s post-1994 growth doctrine has revealed just how far the poor are prepared to dig in.
Thus it was in this tempestuous climate of desperation and township anger that Ramaphosa’s first order of business in his Sona address was to deal with the budget deficit. In order of magnitude, it would be through private sector and foreign direct investment that capital would be mobilised to achieve the second transformation objective: the funding of BEE entitlements and, for the majority excluded from those entitlements, an increase in the social security net for public works and welfare grant programmes. And so, with rising levels of poverty, Ramaphosa made growth, a dry economic term, the starting gun for yet another roller coaster ride into the unknown.
The strategy, I was sure, was wrong-headed. One of the abiding myths that resurfaced during the pandemic has been the failure of the economy to grow at rates that benefit the poor. Yet, the fate of the formal and informal economies has remained entangled, with cruel disappointment for the latter born of the collateral consequences of the former.
When, during my visit to Alexandra in early March 2021, I asked a 20-year-old informal street trader named Arnold Madzunya whether Covid-19 had affected his trade, he stared blankly at me, a beacon of incredulity. “We live here because we have to survive. Every day!” I noted the irony, then asked him about housing, transport, electricity, water, sewerage, health care. The question rubbed his emotions raw. Visibly agitated, he waved me off. “Look around you. What do you see?”
Years of colonialism and apartheid had turned the place into a vast, unofficial, shadow economy that nestled in the bosom of the formal growth economy. Across the township, the picture was very different from the official growth story. For if the impact of Covid-19 on growth was “the story”, I surmised that places like Alexandra, where the swathe of informality had placed a heavy burden on its capacity to meet peoples’ needs, did not count. To understand this is to see why the failure of the government to deal with the true nature of the growth doctrine was far more sinister, if that is an adequate word.
The fact of the matter is that successive growth policies since 1994 have been systematically and ideologically disarticulated from their social and environmental consequences in a manner that has made the lack of growth seem like the cause of poverty and inequality.
Places like Alexandra, ironically, grew up because the rest of the growth economy succeeded for an elite; for the majority, it had created so many wants and shortages that the basic instinct to survive has driven dependence on social welfare provision.
These days, there is a shopworn joke in the township, related to me by King, that “Alexandra spent 80 years in a colonial convent; 26 years in a post-apartheid brothel.” In concept, the wealth of the old elite was rigidly colonial in the apartheid model, but under a democratic state, the ruling elite for whom economic growth has meant a fine life, have become masters of insincerity.
Economic growth has been a well-oiled pretence.
• Ray is the author of 'The Tyranny of Growth: Why Capitalism has Triumphed in the West and Failed in Africa'.
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