Abstract
ABSTRACTWhen South Africa’s credit/debt landscape expanded during the 1990s, this was justified by some as a new form of inclusion but alleged by others to have intensified the power and profit of capitalism and acted to the detriment of householders, thus perpetuating ‘credit apartheid’. Yet, blame cannot be so easily assigned. Forces of state and market have intertwined to create a redistributive neoliberalism, enabling brokers – who have played a key role in establishing the current credit/debt landscape – to insert themselves into the interstices of the system, making money by adding interest at every point in the value chain. Apartheid’s spatial separations meant that traders – and later informal moneylenders – relied on agents to bridge the gap between themselves and the rural/township world of economic informality. Even attempts at credit reform have been complicated, and stalled, by the ongoing presence of intermediaries. The paper explores these dynamics, illustrating how difficult it is to separate bad from good protagonists or perpetrators from victims.
Highlights
Scholars critical of new techniques and discourses of development, through which the poor and marginal have been included through ‘bottom of the pyramid’ (BoP) techniques, and through which ‘everyday life’ has been financialised (Martin 2002; Langley 2008; Krige 2014), maintain that these techniques obscure new forms of exploitation
With debtors being taken to court and repossessions carried out in record numbers, it was a broad spectrum of problems relating to ‘reckless lending’ that he and other designers of the National Credit Act (NCA), effective from 2007, intended to tackle
Is people’s powerlessness in the face of initiatives undertaken by powerful interests augmented if neoliberal forces persuade them into complicity, such that their daily livelihoods depend both on their participation in it? Where critical accounts emphasise the newness of such schemes of inclusion (Dolan 2013; Elyachar 2005; Huang 2015; Meagher 2013), individuals in South African society have long devised ways to challenge the terms of their exclusion by incorporating themselves into money-making activities
Summary
Scholars critical of new techniques and discourses of development, through which the poor and marginal have been included through ‘bottom of the pyramid’ (BoP) techniques, and through which ‘everyday life’ has been financialised (Martin 2002; Langley 2008; Krige 2014), maintain that these techniques obscure new forms of exploitation.
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