African National Congress Government Research Articles

Some Critical Thoughts on Consolidating the Neoliberal Agenda in South African Politics

The paper attempts in narrative form, a critical commentary in respect of the issues raised in the title of the paper. The issue arises as to what has happened to the working class in South Africa, under the ruling African National Congress government of South Africa? In reality neoliberalism has triumphed and therefore, according to Zwelinzima Vavi, the unnecessarily suspended Secretary General of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU, radical economic transformation remains a dream in South Africa. The paper crystallizes his thoughts in the formulation of this paper. On the other hand, the paper will discuss the work of Mzukisi Qobo, who argues that the South African Communist Party has abandoned its socialist convictions, is now a strange bedfellow of the government. In reality, under the present leadership it has sold out to the capitalist neoliberal agenda and has abandoned the working class. It is a question of waving goodbye to the red flag in South African politics. It is against this background that the paper will look at some of these issues, but will not pretend to intellectually exhaust the issues that permeate this important topic. It is hoped that the article would generate critical discussion in this direction by South African and world academics.

South African Economic Woes : Poor Political Leadership and Rating Downgrades Hampers Growth and Development

Purpose: The paper aims to focus on South Africa’s poor economic performance and the regular downgrades of the country’s economic and financial rating by international rating agencies. It attempts to show that these continuous downgrades are a recipe for economic and financial disaster in the long – run; that the continuance of this phenomenon will stymie the implementation of the National Development Plan (NDP) and the securing of the much desired developmental state. A host of other important and necessary issues will be raised that pertain to the economic woes of South Africa. Research Method: The classical research design is not followed. A range of economic and financial issues amidst other salient issues are analyzed by the researchers. In so doing South African newspapers and its media including the opinions of other writers will be utilized in formulating the thought processes of the researchers. This will allow for a clear delineation of the economic and financial woes that confront South Africa, under a so – called democratic state. The research method is therefore self – explanatory as captured above, and relies on articles that appeared in the South African media and invokes the critical analysis of the writers in terms of projecting on the issues raised in the title of the paper. Findings: The findings are influenced by the thought processes of the researcher and the analysis made, by various writers as concerns these issues. The implications for South Africa and its people are immense. These findings are dispersed throughout the discussion undertaken in the paper. It also draws attention to the poor political leadership in South Africa, exhibited by the ruling party. It draws attention to the all embracing fact that a successful election win for the ruling African National Congress Government on May, 7 2014 is not a panacea for sound development nor will it promote the general welfare and the enhancement of the public good. It argues that if the economic and financial challenges and problems are not dealt with decisively, then poverty, unemployment and inequality will escalate and spiral out of control. Originality Value: The paper draws attention to a number of vexing issues that require urgent attention by politicians and the South African bureaucracy to address the issues raised in this paper. The originality value underscores a host of issues as concerns the economic, financial and downgrade woes that generally are not addressed by the government in a proactive and sustainable manner.

Lionising De la Rey: Afrikaner identity politics and performative nostalgia in post-apartheid South Africa

Bok van Blerk's hit song ‘De la Rey’ invokes the name of a general who led Boer forces against those of the British Empire during the Anglo-Boer or South African War (1899–1902). The ‘Lion of the West Transvaal’ was renowned for his use of guerrilla tactics against the conventional methods of the heavily encumbered British and colonial troops. The performance of the song seems to strike a strong emotional chord with white Afrikaner audiences at a juncture when they appear to be undergoing something of an identity crisis in the throes of the country's transition. Van Blerk's song resonates with those imagining an Afrikaner community as victims of British imperialism, as well as those concerned about the future of their culture and language under an African National Congress government. For many white Afrikaners, nostalgia is not so much a hankering for a bygone era but a projection of a sanitised vision of the past into the future. This paper suggests that performative nostalgia is a useful concept to explain the appeal of the song in the context of the workings of Afrikaner identity politics in post-apartheid South Africa.

Rural Safety and the Disbandment of the Commando Units in South Africa: A Challenge to Rural Communities and the African National Congress (ANC)?

The question of rural safety in South Africa has been a contested terrain for a number of years. In most cases, the safety crisis threatened the farmers and their labour force. In order to contain the situation, the commandos played a significant role of providing security to both the farmers and the farm workers. Although the commandos provided this security, in the main the structure was regarded as the National Party's (NPs) initiative. To the new African National Congress (ANC) as the ruling party after the April 1994 general elections where it got the majority votes, the organisation wanted to replace the commando units with another security force in the rural areas. However, this initiative was not welcomed by the farming communities who were mostly White. They viewed the disbandment and the replacement of the commandos as an attempt by the ANC's government to make them vulnerable for physical attacks, which in most cases led to deaths. Therefore, this study attempts to highlight the socio-political impact of this initiative to both the farmers and farming communities. The question of whether the commandos were to be retained or not in favour of rural safety had a huge socio-political impact and divided the South African rural communities.

Fanon’s Travels in Postcolonial Theory and Post-Apartheid Politics

Using Edward Said’s reflections on travelling theory as a point of departure, this essay traces how Frantz Fanon’s radical anticolonial and postcolonial theory has travelled to South Africa in the last fifty years. Said’s mode of analyzing travelling theory is extended in two ways, namely by attending in detail to how specific historical moments and locations set limits and exert pressures on theory, and secondly, by examining how communities of activist-intellectuals rather than individual theorists reinterpret theory. Three groups of South African appropriations of Fanon’s theory are analyzed: the anti-apartheid activists of the 1970s; African National Congress government ministers post-1994; and the communities of resistance critical of the ANC’s post-apartheid governance. In the light of these reception histories, certain limitations of Said’s model of travelling theory are identified and conclusions are drawn regarding how Fanon’s theory serves conflicting political interests in these different (mis-)appropriations.

Rural and Agrarian Development Discourse in a Post-apartheid South Africa: An Agro-ecological Challenge

KEYWORDS Land Reform. Rural Development. Land Restitution. Land Redistribution. Land Dispossession. ABSTRACT This study examines the impact of rural and agrarian development discourse in a post-apartheid South Africa. Although the African National Congress (ANC) led government introduced the land reform programme almost two decades ago, pointers are that the process has not yield the desired results. Despite the ANC's enormous rural development efforts, land reform programme elicited criticisms by some land claimants, land owners and to a certain extent scholars calling for its total abandonment. Its relevance in attempts to fast-track sustainability for rural and agrarian development has been questioned. Land reform programme is one of the most important rural development strategies employed by the ANC's government. This study interrogates the perceived laxit y in the implementation of the land reform programme by the ANC's government despite having policies in place to fast- track the process. Initially when the programme started, it was aimed at poverty alleviation and the creating employment. Therefore, this study shows that there are challenges confronting the land reform progra mme in South Africa. Furthermore, the study argues that the land reform question is not only a rural and agrarian issue, but a critical social concern of the black South Africans.

Revisiting History: The Creation of Provinces and the Politics of Social Policy in a Democratic South Africa

AbstractThe pre‐democracy negotiations between the African National Congress (ANC) and the National Party (NP) established nine provincial forms of government to replace the four provinces of the apartheid era. The nine provinces contrasted with the historical goal of the ANC to create a ‘democratic, non‐racial and unitary South Africa’. The NP wanted nine new provinces to prevent centralized state power under an ANC government and saw possibilities for winning electoral power in the Western Cape. The ANC conceded following political pressure from the Inkatha Freedom Party, which threatened civil war, and a policy shift after examining the German federal governance system. The article analyzes the history, politics, process and outcomes of the establishment of the nine provinces for social policy delivery in South Africa. It explores the contention that the nine provinces re‐fragmented service delivery (although not on a statutory racial basis) and created a system of fiscal decentralization with serious implications for social policy: weakening bureaucratic capacity, institutional capability and political accountability. The provincial governance mechanisms and fiscal institutions created a particular ‘path dependency’ which, 18 years after democratic, rule still impacts negatively on service delivery and more equitable policy outcomes. This is in part due to the undermining of provincial governance mechanisms and fiscal institutions by a significant minority of corrupt and incompetent provincial civil servants. The corruption of these provincial governance mechanisms and fiscal institutions erodes the egalitarian values aimed at creating a non‐racial, non‐sexist, democratic and unitary South Africa which historically underpinned the policy agenda of the ANC. It also has weakened social citizenship on a geographical and ultimately racial basis given the continuing co‐incidence of race and place in a democratic South Africa.

The Impact of Rural Development on Poverty Reduction in a Post-Apartheid South Africa: An Ecological Discourse

KEYWORDS Economy. Agriculture. Rural. Livelihood. Sustainability. Productivity. Programme. ABSTRACT One of the African National Congress (ANC) led government's promises to the electorate in all the elections since 1994 was to assist the African rural communities with infrastructure development for poverty reduction programmes. Consequently, this in return would help in the provision of sustainable livelihoods for such communities. Therefore, as part of service delivery programmes by the ANC's government, in the post-1994 period resources were directed to rural developments with the intention of reducing the level of pov erty. A qualitative and quantitative design was adopted with the aim of documenting and analysing the ecological impact of rural development in South Africa. The article examines and critiques the various rural development challenges and poverty reduction strategies as key initiatives for service delivery in rural South Africa. The critique highlights the linkages that exist between rural development and service delivery. The results of the study show that despite the challenges of the ANC in providing services to the rural communities, different interventions pr oved to be successful.

Satisfaction Levels and the Community’s Attitudes Towards Urban Renewal in Alexandra, Johannesburg

In South Africa, the spatial legacy of Apartheid has resulted in township areas that can be recognised as intense concentrations of poverty. Variations in the types of housing, often dominated by informal structures and overcrowded conditions, are characteristic of these areas. As such, they are generally perceived as areas of limited economic potential. In response to these conditions and in an attempt to alleviate the associated problems, the African National Congress government has initiated an Urban Renewal Programme in eight nodes in six urban areas in the country. Alexandra in Johannesburg is one of these nodes. The programme and service delivery in this township is a controversial issue that reached boiling point during instances of civil unrest in 2011. The renewal programme entails the demolition of housing units, the relocation of the inhabitants, as well as the expropriation of properties for redevelopment by the developers. This perception study on the success rate of the renewal programme was conducted in four sectors of Alexandra, namely East Bank, River Park, Tsutsumani and Tswe’tla, each with its own housing and socio-economic characteristics. This paper evaluates the effectiveness of the Urban Renewal Programme as perceived by the inhabitants in the delivery of public services such as sanitation, water supply and electricity, and the provision of housing, health facilities, educational and recreational facilities. On the visual front, the programme appears to be meeting with success, particularly in terms of the provision of housing. The beneficiaries, however, are generally of the opinion that management and/or the government is not making enough of an effort to meet their expectations.

For how Long can South Africa ‘punch above its Weight’?

South Africa is a privileged member of various global governance clubs. This status is based on its relative economic weight in sub-Saharan Africa and its legacy of ‘soft power’ derived from the peaceful transition from apartheid to democracy. However, those foundations are waning in the face of the African National Congress (ANC) government's growing ambivalence towards democratic norms and the relatively rapid growth and development taking place in sub-Saharan Africa. The ANC government's own policy choices, particularly its emphasis on state-driven economic policy, and the internecine power struggles racking the party have set the country's economic policy adrift. Thus investor confidence has been undermined at a time of global economic crisis. Taken together, these trends suggest South Africa's days as the African representative of choice are numbered. Ironically, this development may portend reversal of current trends, by concentrating the ANC leadership's collective mind on what really needs to be done to restore growth, and international confidence, in the country.

Traditional Leaders and the Culture of Governance in South Africa

The global neoliberal economic and political order impregnated the emergence of democracy in South Africa. One of the hallmarks of this order is that the capacity of the state to transform society is constrained, particularly in the rural hinterlands. The incapacity of the state to extend its grip, both economically and politically, has provided traditional leaders with an opportunity to both recast themselves as intermediaries between state and society and elevate themselves to decision makers on behalf of large communities. The article examines the way in which traditional leaders have repositioned themselves in the new democracy, what their source of support is, and why the African National Congress government has come to support these efforts.

Municipal commonage policy and livestock owners: Findings from the Eastern Cape, South Africa

The new African National Congress government announced after 1994 that municipal commonage would be a pillar of their land reform programme. The Department of Land Affairs spearheaded this by acquiring new land to complement the existing ‘old’ commonages. The aim of old commonage was to supplement the income of poor urban residents through the subsistence user system whereas new commonage was intended as a ‘stepping stone’ for emergent farmers. We investigated the differences between old and new commonage farmers as well as how they perceived the Makana local municipality's capacity to manage the commonage. The results showed that local institutions were weak. Only 46% of the old commonage farmers were members of a local livestock association whereas 74% of the new commonage farmers were members. Most old commonage farmers (59%) were dissatisfied with local government's management of the commonage. In contrast, only 37% of the new commonage farmers were dissatisfied with the management of the commonage. There were no differences between old and new commonage farmers in terms of livestock owners’ characteristics and mean annual net direct-use value of livestock. There were also no differences in the age of the two types of commonage farmers. Furthermore, there was no association between the type of commonage and level of education. The mean annual net direct-use value of livestock on old commonage was R6308 compared with R9707 on new commonage. Although the income from livestock for new commonage farmers varied slightly from that of old commonage farmers, the annual productive output per farmer on old commonage was R473 ha −1, three times higher than that of new commonage farmers which was R134 ha −1. We suggest that new land policy legislation is needed in which poverty as well as the legal arrangements between all stakeholders is clearly defined. Furthermore, national departments need to be more involved with local municipalities to increase local management capacity.

South Africa's democracy: from celebration to crisis

This essay is based on a reading of a selection of texts that have been published around the tenth anniversary of South Africa's much celebrated democratic election of 1994, though not necessarily for that purpose. It focuses mainly on political commentaries which have appeared since 2002 in various anthologies, journal articles, magazines and newspapers at a time when the excitement and euphoria had died down and the African National Congress (ANC) government faced an assessment of its first two terms in power, and growing problems during its third. South Africans across the board have begun to take stock of the progress (or lack of it) made in the country since the transition to majority rule. Between 2005 and 2008 journalists, sociologists, economists, political scientists and others, including rank‐and‐file members of the governing Alliance partners (ANC, South African Communist Party [SACP] and the Congress of South African Trade Unions [COSATU]), have taken a strident tone. The essay also visits central features of current politics in South Africa, discussing media and other reaction to Jacob Zuma's powerful political claim to the presidency, his cultivation of the image of popular champion of the oppressed and his capitalization on growing resentment against Thabo Mbeki's authoritarian ‘top‐down’ style of governance. It examines the increasingly negative interpretations of the ANC government's performance in key areas, especially health, land policy, restitution for apartheid human rights' abuses recorded by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), and the economy. The review does not pretend to be comprehensive, but reflects some of the more robust critique that now challenges earlier valorizations of the achievements of 1994, which pitched apartheid against democracy and praised the Mandela era.

Die historiese in die hede: Dinamika van die De la Reyfenomeen in Afrikanerkringe, 2006-2007

In 2006 - 2007 an Afrikaans song about an intrepid Boer general, JH de la Rey, during the Anglo-Boer War sold an unprecedented 200,000 compact discs and attracted extraordinary media attention.This article attempts to explain why the song became so popular, what it meant for different Afrikaner groupings and why it was deemed to be controversial. The dynamics of the phenomenon are unpacked in terms of the rise of nostalgia in Afrikaner circles – a yearning for and a reclamation of a pre-apartheid sanitized past. This process, it is argued, does not necessarily reflect a revival of old-style political Afrikaner nationalism, but rather a disenchantment with developments since 1994 under an African National Congress government and a re-assertion of cultural identity in the face of what some perceive as deliberate marginalization of Afrikaner interests.

Struggles Around the Commodification of Daily Life in South Africa

Post-apartheid South Africa has seen the emergence of new social and community movements making demands on the African National Congress government to deliver on its promise of ‘a better life for all’. In these struggles, the identity of ‘the poor’ has been increasingly mobilised, both by movements reminding the state of its obligations to its people, and in official policy discourse seeking to introduce neoliberal macro-economic changes. This paper explores how the category of ‘the poor’ is mobilised in struggles for basic services in urban areas in South Africa, and in state policy that seeks to draw poor people into agreements to pay for services. In doing this, it explores the possibilities inherent in capitalist society for change and the building of relations that challenge or subvert the dominant logic of commodification and, in turn, of capital.

Wage Labor and Social Citizenship in the Making of Post-Apartheid South Africa

The scholarly literature on the South African democratic transition generally recognizes the decisive role of organized labor and black trade union organizations in the collapse of the apartheid regime. Labor's contribution in this regard was premised on a view of liberation that was not limited to the achievement of political rights and civil liberties, but crucially included a discourse of social citizenship enabled by expectations for employment creation, redistribution and decommodification of social provisions. Labor's social citizenship discourse was largely translated into the massive electoral support that the government of the African National Congress (ANC) has enjoyed since 1994. Conservative macroeconomic policies, and the deepening crisis of stable employment that have characterized the South African transition radically challenge, however, wage labor as an effective vehicle of social inclusion and the repository of collective identities and solidarity. The downgraded material conditions and the growing commodification of everyday life that confront a widening share of the black working class question the links between citizenship and wage labor emerged in past struggles. At the same time, the ANC government's social policies have turned the celebration of waged employment into a set of moral and pedagogical imperatives that prioritize labor market participation and the individual responsibility of the poor as alternatives to redistributive interventions regarded as conducive to welfare ‘dependency’. The article analyzes the shifting position of waged employment in relation to access to social services and social citizenship discourse in two specific cases: manufacturing workers in the East Rand region and employees of the Greater Johannesburg municipality.

Union-Party Alliances in the Era of Market Regulation: The Case of South Africa

Analyses of the alliance between the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and the ruling African National Congress (ANC) have been preoccupied with debating the desirability or otherwise of this alliance. Even those that have acknowledged stresses in the alliance because of neo-liberal policies of the ANC government have failed to account for the general fragility of union-party alliances in the contemporary world. This article begins by acknowledging that union-party relations are affected by political transitions such as those in developing countries, including South Africa's more recent one. The article then takes the debate further by providing a framework for understanding the nature of these alliances in a liberalising world. It argues that a critical shortcoming of existing analyses is their failure to locate union-party alliances in the context of a transition from ‘social regulation’ to ‘market regulation’. The article uses the alliance between COSATU and the ANC to illustrate this argument. For COSATU, the shift from social regulation to market regulation presents itself as a ‘paradox of victory’. This means that while the federation was a central actor in the struggle for political democracy, it is now increasingly finding itself relegated to a marginal role. The article concludes by arguing that the advent of market regulation results in the ‘withering away’ of existing union-party alliances.

South Africa: a new nation-state in a globalising era

South Africa:a new nation-state in a globalising era Bill Freund (bio) Globalisation as a concept presents a real challenge to economic historians because inherent in their subject matter is the assumption that a world economy has been in the making for at least the last several centuries. By some indices - the extent of foreign investment, human movement or international trade, for instance - the second half of the nineteenth century already represented a massively 'globalised' era fuelled by impressive new technology such as telegraphs and steamships.1 The literature on globalisation which fails to acknowledge process and assumes an ahistorical and unbounded concept stretching seamlessly into an otherwise unknown future clashes with this kind of picture. However, it is possible to justify globalisation as a term designating rather a current phase in the evolution of a world economy. Technologically it is the advent of computers and information technology which is most characteristic here.2 This enables production, of which a very large element is under the control, direct or indirect, of large corporations, to take place internationally - not merely trade or investment activities. Realising profits is dependent on selling on a global sale - the creation of a 'brand name' economy that can be fitted to serve many kinds of consumers but no longer structured around national markets. There is a strong drive to create globally normative regulatory institutions relating not just to directly economic activities (the WTO and the so-called 'Washington Consensus' institutions) but to peace-keeping and governance issues and to the environment. Once again, there is massive population movement. However, whereas in the nineteenth century, most itinerants were peasants and workers plus their families, embedding limited industrial skills, today those welcome to shift are the highly educated and skilled who work with a pen; [End Page 41] if anything, an international regime to block the movements of the poor is intended, if never very successfully, put into place. Writers on globalisation see the world of Empire as one in which the nation-state, as conceptualised at the dawn of modernity, constitutes something for the trash heap as well (Negri and Hardt 2000). The state is defined as an impediment to the needs of capital on the one hand (unless it has been successfully transformed into a facilitator) and a barrier to the achievement of human freedom on the other. In particular, the nation state representing in some sense the immanence of a people in maturity is no longer a foundation stone of political activity and international relations. Supra-national structures with imbedded rules multiply while local or regional governments are supposed to take more initiative on the assumption that they can do better at tapping the real heartbeat of the people. This paper takes the position that while these are all very important tendencies that are promoted on a significant scale in our world, there are also counter-tendencies. There are plenty of realities, for better or worse, that work in other directions and show that earlier paradigms continue to bear life. This, of course, is what George W Bush & co are discovering in Iraq.3 Globalisation is best taken therefore as a specific contemporary historic phase, which continues to be rent with conflict and controversy and contains its own contradictions in which outcomes are by no means certain. It is likely that some of the great political and social paradigms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have come to the end of their shelf life in their own terms, but to leap from that to assumptions about 'the end of history' à la Fukuyama, the view that 'there is no alternative' - or even the sense that the modern is no longer with us - has little justification. Post-apartheid South Africa came to life as a 'new' country in the midst of this set of circumstances. I wish here to suggest that while the African National Congress government has been won over by the need for participation in globalising economic institutions such as membership in the World Trade Organisation, with macro-economic policies aiming at high interest rates, an autonomous Reserve Bank, low state indebtedness and the reduction of import tariff barriers; it has simultaneously, contradictorily, moved...

National Liberation, Neoliberalism, and Educational Change: The Case of Post-Apartheid South Africa

It is extremely informative to read recent World Bank reports concerning higher education in the so-called developing countries. (1) Although the prescriptions were firmly committed to promoting core neoliberal values, such as the curtailing of government spending and the reduction of unnecessary duplication of public educational services, a subtle turn of sorts has occurred: an equity agenda has been carefully interwoven into the Bank's more traditional recommendations to downsize the state, as well as to enhance competition, efficiency, and accountability in higher education through privatization. In Africa, this shift involving the notion of equity is in part an expression of the failure of socialist projects to rid nation-states of entrenched poverty and deep-seated class, religious, and racial-ethnic cleavages. The vacuum created by this failure to sustain radical economic programs in Africa has been filled by supranational or organizations that have seized the moment to articulate an equity agenda in higher education that is no longer viewed as anathema to a free market ideology. South Africa furnishes a good example of this kind of sea-change in perspective, insofar as in the volatile days of protest against the Nationalist Party regime prior to the fall of apartheid the Communist Party promised to nationalize banks and mines. This has given way to the African National Congress (ANC) government's endorsement of fiscally conservative macro-economic policies, such as the Growth, Employment, and Redistribution Strategy (GEAR). The equity agenda in the new South Africa must therefore contend with competing priorities that often compel the ANC government to construct a social justice platform with the sort of formulas for development that correspond to what the World Bank and other supranational organizations considered appropriate strategies for South Africa's economic survival and growth in the age of globalization. In this essay the governmental policies for transforming higher education in South Africa will serve as the primary landscape to explore the complex relationship between the country's national liberation struggle to overcome its racially divided history, and its post-apartheid future. It will examine the progressive reforms that contributed to the end of apartheid and the emergence of an equity agenda spearheaded by the ANC government. This case study of the University of the Western Cape (UWC) describes its radical transformation from a so-called bush college created by the apartheid state for the education of Coloured or mixed-race peoples to South Africa's first non-racial, ANC-aligned, open admissions institution. The historical lessons we can learn from UWC's transformation should inform the debate over the ANC government's recent decision to reduce the number of South African public higher education institutions. Influenced by the World Bank's neoliberal prescriptions for post-secondary institutions in developing countries, the restructuring of the South African higher educational system has centered on the neoliberal objectives of the global economy that emphasize the importance of fiscal restraint, standardization, efficiency, research productivity, and competition. (2) COLOUREDS AND ANTI-APARTHEID PROTEST IN THE WESTERN CAPE Until recently, the Coloureds were considered a somewhat obscure element in South African history. There are several reasons for their relative obscurity. The problematic designation Coloured has a distinctive meaning in the U.S. context; indeed, for many African Americans the term conjures up painful and humiliating memories of U.S. Jim Crow laws and the enforcement of separate and inferior public facilities in the southern states. Yet an examination of the experiences of the people designated as Coloureds in South Africa's province of the Western Cape furnishes critical insights into a number of political and economic conditions that are essential to understanding South African history. …

The Evolution of Health and Welfare Policies in South Africa: Inherited Institutions, Fiscal Restraint, and the Deracialization of Social Policy in the Post-Apartheid Era

Institutions which have died as creeds sometimes continue, nevertheless, to survive as habits. --Richard H. Tawney, 1931 (1) The central question in this essay is: Why is social policy reform program of post-apartheid African National Congress (ANC) government failing to achieve its egalitarian objectives? Many commentators locate answer in embrace of economic and social policies by ANC ruling party and abandonment of its historical commitments to redistribution of wealth of as contained in documents such as 1955 Freedom Charter, which called for sharing of the national wealth of country among all South Africans. (2) By neoliberalism, I refer to those economic strategies and political objectives that privilege market over state, and call for (1) diminishing of economic influence of state through privatization of state assets, (2) state becoming a non-intervening regulator of economic relations between capital and labor, (3) reduction in social support for poor and unemployed received through social security and other non-market mechanisms in favor of labor market based strategies such as works programs, and (4) erosion of concept of public good through an increased emphasis in social and economic policy on individual responsibility for social goods, such as health and education. The Growth, Employment and Re-distribution Strategy (GEAR), introduced by government led by ANC in 1996, had two main objectives. The first was to maintain internal fiscal restraint to eliminate rapidly government deficit while, simultaneously, reprioritizing existing national budget to meet social needs. Second, it aimed to implement economic reforms, such as lifting exchange controls, restructuring state assets, and developing a flexible labor market to facilitate a globally competitive, export-led growth path that would enable economy to expand by 6 percent and create 400,000 jobs annually. (3) All these features of GEAR may reflect neoliberal underpinnings to ANC government's development approach. It is problematic to suggest, however, that there was a singularly correct strategy to transform inegalitarian nature of South African society, which ANC had abandoned. I argue that transforming South African society is a more complex exercise than anticipated. It is conditioned by historical, institutional, and related fiscal arrangements inherited from apartheid era, which have constrained, if not radically limited, ability to transform post-apartheid landscape. To explain limitations imposed by various inherited institutions in access to and use of health and welfare services in first post-apartheid government in South Africa, I use concept dualism. These inherited institutions limit realization of social equity, whatever particular strategy of transformation. A more interesting line of inquiry is to consider manner in which South African state, before and since end of apartheid, has responded to these institutional limitations. In this essay I will review these institutional arrangements and their historical roots as they pertain to reform of various aspects of health and welfare policies, and will attempt to demonstrate manner in which current social policy problems in South Africa are neither new to post-apartheid era nor mere consequences of this political change. The essay will also examine shifts in post-apartheid fiscal arrangements, which aimed to decentralize health service delivery in context of a new system of provincial governments, which was institutionalized after democratic elections in 1994. These changes have had unintended consequence of creating a fiscal and administrative re-fragmentation of post-apartheid nation-state in a manner similar in surprising respects to specific and intentional racial fragmentation found under apartheid. …