CHAPTER THREE: TRACING THE DEVELOPMENT OF RURAL DEVELOPMENT POLICIES IN POST-1994 SOUTH AFRICA
3.6 RURAL DEVELOPMENT POLICY FRAMEWORK
3.6.3 The Rural Development Framework (1997)
The Rural Development Framework (RDF) of 1997 was based on the objectives of both the RDP White paper (1994) and the RDS (1995). It reiterates the Government’s commitment to work with rural people to build sustainable rural communities. As a discussion document, the RDF identifies specific areas that needed to be addressed and strengthened in order to pave the way for rural development. For example, it identifies the development of rural infrastructure as a priority area. In this regard, it focused on the construction of roads, water and sanitation, energy and housing. The document recognises the development of rural infrastructure as a prerequisite for the provision of essential services to rural areas and to reduce poverty and unemployment. Furthermore, it identifies public administration, local government and rural non-farm employment as the key areas to be capacitated in order to achieve sustainable rural development (RDF, 1997). The issues articulated in both the RDP and the NRDS are re- emphasised in the RDF. For example, the development of local government, the strengthening of public administration institutions in rural local government and creating new economic opportunities in rural areas are some of the key issues already proposed in both the RDP and the NRDS (RDF, 1997; Phuhlisani Solutions, 2009).
The RDF’s key points include the need to co-ordinate the different sectoral programmes at both national and provincial levels to achieve better policy outcomes. Although the co-ordination of rural development programmes could be done by the local government, the RDF indicates that few of the rural municipalities had the capacity to do so. Therefore, it proposed that co- ordination be done at the national and provincial levels of Government as these have more resources and a better institutional capacity. However, entrusting the coordination of rural development programmes to the national and provincial Governments is not in sync with the principle of public participation which the framework claims to promote. Instead it would perpetuate a top-down approach, which limits the involvement of the local communities and promotes the status quo.
100 The RDF is quite descriptive in nature and more detailed in outlining crosscutting rural development activities and responsibilities. One of the RDF’s major contributions is in the formulation of a working definition of rural areas in a democratic South Africa. The RDF (1997:2) defines the rural as “the sparsely populated areas in which people farm or depend on natural resources, including the villages and small towns that are dispersed through these areas”. Rural clusters without an economic base that existed in the former homeland regions are included in this definition. The RDF acknowledges the limitation of the definition which included households from both urban and rural categories that rely on a range of resources for their income. Notwithstanding the limitations, the definition highlights the complexity of rural areas in a post-apartheid South Africa. Rural areas became complex as a result of the transformation of local government in the post- apartheid era. The post-apartheid transformation of local government was done through the process of re-demarcating municipal boundaries. The re-demarcation process involved the elimination of administrative distinctions that existed between urban and rural, and aimed at creating inter-linkages between the urban and countryside. Local Government Budgets and Expenditure Review (2011), notes that, the re-demarcation of municipal boundaries complicated the administrative determination of what constitutes a rural area and, by extension, what constitutes a rural municipality. The RDF’s definition of rural areas was used as a working definition by various government departments.
In addition, it focuses the rural development discourse to specific geographical contexts and challenges that need to be tackled to eradicate rural poverty in the post-apartheid South Africa.
Nonetheless, it should be noted that, although it shows the complexity involved in addressing rural development, it was not confirmed as an official rural development policy.
Furthermore, the RDF uses statistical data from the past apartheid regime to demonstrate the distribution of poverty between urban and rural areas. The table below shows the magnitude of rural poverty inherited by the new Government in 1994. It is indeed a desperate situation that needed effective policy responses and political will from the new administration.
Table 5: Distribution of Poverty between Rural and Urban Areas (1993) Poverty Shares, (%)
(Where are poor people?)
Poverty Rates (%) (What proportion of the Population is poor?)
Poor Ultra-poor Poor Ultra-poor
101 Rural
Urban Metropolitan All
74.6 15.7 9.8 100.0
80.7 14.1 5.3 100.0
73.7 40.5 19.7 52.8
43.5 19.8 5.8 28.8 Source: Department of Land Affairs, 1997 The poverty share in percentages refers to all poor people who live in a given area. The table indicates that, 74.7% of the poor in South Africa lived in rural areas in 1993, while only 15.7%
lived in urban areas. The poverty rate refers to the percentage of people in a given area who were poor, such that, 73.7% of the rural population was poor in 1993. These figures compare the reality of poverty between rural areas and urban areas before the democratic elections of 1994. It is this statistical data that was used in the RDF of 1997 because the data from the 1996 census was not available (Department of Land Affairs, 1997).
The 1994-1996 is described by Everatt and Zulu (2001) as the learning curve period because it marks the first phase in which the democratic government learnt to deliver services and define the overall programme direction. They also point out that various public servants in this period were new in their jobs and lacked the skills to manage and implement new programmes effectively. Some of the new public servants were recruited from the NGO sector, and as such they brought new ideas and energy in readiness to deliver services speedily to the poor.
However, despite their wealth of experience from the NGO sector, they were faced with the challenge of learning and understanding how the public sector functionsandmaster the rules of government (Everrat and Zulu, 2001). The problems were compounded by the lack of certainty regarding the role of the RDP office and the roles of the national and provincial departments in relation to service delivery and programme implementation.
The implementation of rural development programmes between 1994 and 1996 was largely experimental. The main approach to rural development was the Community Based Public Works Programme (CBPWP) used by the Independent Development Trust (IDT) (Everrat and Zulu, 2001). An analysis of the implemented programmes, such as the CBPWP and the Community Employment Programme (CEP), indicates a bias in favour of community-based development. Everrat and Zulu (2001) note that, the early stages of rural development were characterised by a willingness to learn from mistakes, and the sense that the government was
102 acting as a partner rather than a manager. Nonetheless, the experimental nature and learning from mistakes approach resulted in less progress being made.
The period between 1996 and 1997/8 was more focused on the evaluation and refining of the programmes. Everrat and Zulu (2001) assert that some rural development programmes were substantially refined and new objectives set with some that were unrealistic. What is significant about this period is that a lot of innovation was encouraged and different models of institutional arrangements were introduced. The introduced models include outsourcing some programmes to independent stakeholders for implementation. It was also a period of refining policy responses through evaluation of previous programmes, learning from the previous mistakes, and experimenting on various approaches. The RDF of 1997 provided guidance for the development and implementation of rural development programmes for almost three years.
Unfortunately, there was a bit of stagnation regarding the construction of a clear and official rural development policy. Thus, stagnation prompted some advocacy groups such as the Rural Development Initiative (RDI), to urge the government to address the issue of rural development (Perret, Anseeuw and Mathebula, 2005).