[DEBATE] : (Fwd) Habib on SA civ.soc.&democracy

[Patrick Bond]

www.sangonet.org.za

Civil Society and Democracy in South Africa

By Prof Adam Habib

Regime change can have significant impacts on society. And, this is all 
the more so if it occurs in an era of globalisation. Nowhere is this 
more evident than in South Africa where democratisation and 
globalisation have fundamentally transformed the society. In the 
process, civil society has itself been remolded in significant ways, the 
effects of which are only now becoming evident. Thirteen years after the 
transition the most obvious outcome of the remolding process is the 
evolution of civil society into three distinct blocs, each of which is a 
product, to different degrees, of separate transitional processes.

The three different blocs within civil society - NGOs, survivalist 
agencies, and social movements - that emerged in response to structural 
factors such as the democratisation process and globalisation’s 
neo-liberal manifestation in South Africa, have very distinct 
relationships with the state. On the one end of the spectrum is a 
powerful set of formal service-related NGOs, which as a result of the 
more enabling environment created by the democratic regime, have entered 
partnerships with and/or sub-contracted to the state. These 
organisations have more engaged and collegiate relations with the state.

On the other end of the spectrum, there is a group of community-based 
structures, which actively challenge and oppose what they perceive as 
the implementation of neo-liberalism. These organisations, whose 
activists covet the status of social movements, also have an explicit 
relationship with the state. This relationship, depending on the 
organisation and the issue area, hovers somewhere between adversarialism 
and engagement, and sometimes involves both. But even when engaging the 
state, this is of a qualitatively different kind to that of the formal 
NGOs. The latter has a relationship with the state that is largely 
defined by its sub-contractual role, whereas the former is on a 
relatively more even footing, engaging the state in an attempt to 
persuade it through lobbying, court action, and even outright resistance.

In between these two sets of organisations is a third, more survivalist 
and informal, mainly in marginalised communities, who have no 
relationship with the state. These organisations are preoccupied with 
assisting people to survive the ravages of neo-liberalism. They receive 
neither resource, nor do they covet recognition, from the state. They 
are preoccupied with the task of simply surviving the effects of the 
state’s policies. Indeed, it is doubtful whether the majority of these 
associations even recognise that the plight of the communities they 
located in is largely a result of the policy choices of political elites.

Of course, these distinctions within civil society are not as stark and 
rigid as they are depicted here. In the real world, there are many 
organisations that straddle the divide and blur the boundaries between 
one and more of these blocs. Some organisations, like the TAC, display 
adversarial relations with the state on one issue and more collegiate 
relations on another. Other organisations, like the Homeless Peoples 
Federation (HPF), challenge and oppose some state institutions but have 
established partnerships with others. What is important to remember of 
the contemporary era is that democratisation and globalisation have 
facilitated the reassertion of the plural character of civil society and 
undermined the homogenous effects that the anti-apartheid struggle had 
on this sector.

Most activists, politicians and government officials recognise this 
plurality of civil society, at least at the rhetorical level. But in 
most cases, its meaning has not been internalised for had it been, we 
would not have the constant demands from these actors for a single 
homogenous set of relations between civil society and the state. For 
state officials, and the leadership and politicians of the ruling party, 
the most appropriate relationship between civil society and the state is 
one founded on collegiality. In this view, service-related NGOs which 
contract with the state and community organisations which partner with 
the ruling party, are behaving in a manner conducive to democracy. 
Indeed, the ruling party has gone out of its way to reward such 
behavior, mainly through providing access to corporatist institutions 
and other public participation channels established by the state.

But sometimes the state has intervened more aggressively in manipulating 
its resources to benefit some, and undermine other, civil society 
institutions. The most notorious case of this is Eskom’s write-off of 
electricity arrears in Soweto. In this case, the previous Minister of 
Public Enterprises, Jeff Radebe, convinced the public parastatal to 
write-off electricity arrears in the township in an effort to demobilise 
the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee (SECC) who had been gaining 
ground by connecting poor residents who had been disconnected for 
failure to pay their arrears. Eskom officially negotiated the write-off 
with the South African National Civic Organisation (SANCO), the national 
civic body officially aligned to the ANC, both to delegitimise the SECC 
and publicly demonstrate the benefits of alignment with the ruling 
party. This blatant abuse of public resources by the state to intervene 
and influence the outcome of competition between two civic associations, 
while rare, does graphically demonstrate what the ruling party perceives 
as an appropriate state-civil society relationship, and the extent to 
which it would go to advance its model of state-civic engagement.

But the state is not alone in wanting to advance a homogenous 
state-civil society agenda. Radical activists within civil society also 
advance a homogenous vision, except in their case; the relationship 
should not be collegial, but rather adversarial. Of course this is not a 
dominant view within civil society. Indeed, a majority of activists, 
mainly located in COSATU, TAC and even SANCO, hold the view that the 
strategic priority of the contemporary era is to struggle for the soul 
of the ANC by remaining in partnership with it, while retaining the 
independence and organisational capacity to take to the streets when 
required. But others, both activists and scholars, argue that a 
strategic partnership with the ruling party has the systemic effect of 
consolidating existing power relations. These, they maintain, enable 
state elites to be more responsive to the interests of black 
entrepreneurs and foreign and domestic capital. The antidote to this 
state of affairs is to break civil association’s partnership with the 
ruling party, reintroduce political uncertainty into the political 
system, and thereby make political representatives more responsive to 
the interests of poor and marginalised citizens.

In any case, it needs to be noted that a single homogenous set of 
state-civil society relations is not conducive to the consolidation of 
democracy. Whether it is the state’s view of collegiate state-civil 
society relationships, or the adversarial alternative of the radical 
activists, neither on its own would facilitate the deepening of 
democracy. Indeed, it is only the plurality of civil society, and its 
consequent diversity of state-civil society engagements, that is 
beneficial for democracy and governance in the country. The 
informal-based CBOs enhance democracy at the simplest level because they 
enable ordinary people to survive. The establishment of more formal 
relations between them and the state would subvert their character and 
thus compromise this role. The more formal NGOs’ collaborative 
relationship with the state is largely a product of the services they 
render for the state. And, in a society confronted with massive backlogs 
and limited institutional capacity, this role can only be to the benefit 
of democracy since it facilitates and enables service delivery to 
ordinary citizens and residents. Finally, the adversarial and 
conflictual role of new social movements and more formal CBOs enhances 
democracy for it creates a fluidity of support at the base of society. 
This can only be beneficial for it permits the reconfiguration of power 
within society, forcing the state not to take its citizens for granted, 
and effecting a systemic shift to the left which may create the 
possibility for a more people-centered, Keynesian-oriented developmental 
agenda.

These diverse roles and functions undertaken by different elements of 
civil society, then, collectively create the adversarial and 
collaborative relationships, the push and pull effects, which sometimes 
assist and other times compel the state to meet its obligations and 
responsibilities to its citizenry. The plurality of civil society and 
the diverse sets of relations that it engenders with the state is thus 
the best guarantee for the consolidation of democracy in South Africa.

- This article written by the University of Johannesburg Deputy 
Vice-Chancellor: Research, Innovation and Advancement, University of 
Johannesburg, Adam Habib, appeares in Prodder - NGOs and Development in 
South Africa 2008.