CHAPTER THREE: TRACING THE DEVELOPMENT OF RURAL DEVELOPMENT POLICIES IN POST-1994 SOUTH AFRICA
3.6 RURAL DEVELOPMENT POLICY FRAMEWORK
3.6.6 The War on Poverty Campaign and Rural Development
110 of personnel to manage and coordinate programmes. These factors also compounded the challenges of the LG and weakened its capacity to effectively address the problems of rural poverty and under-development.
Other researchers, such as Gwanya (2013) point out that the ISRDP remained for too long at District Municipality level and failed to address local municipalities at the ward and village levels. This again indicates that District Municipalities with many rural local municipalities under their jurisdictions were too overwhelmed to render support and build the capacity of those weak local municipalities. The suggestion is that the IDPs of rural local municipalities are compromised since they depend on District Municipalities for guidance and technical support in this regard. Therefore, while the legislation framework on which the LG is built exists on paper, functional structures and systems that are supposed to enable the LG to deliver its constitutional mandate, remains a major challenge especially in rural municipalities.
According to the Public Affairs Research Institute (PARI, 2020:1), the fiscal framework for local government which was designed in the post-1994 era was to ensure “that municipalities have the ability to raise significant amount of their own revenue”. It was assumed that municipalities could “raise about 73% of revenue through property rates and service charges”
(PARI, 2020:1). On the contrary, research shows that many municipalities are financially distressed and this inhibits their ability to deliver quality services to citizens. This suggests that if local government is to fulfil its mandate to spearhead developmet at the grass-roots level, the fiscal framework needs to be reviewed. Fincial distress at the local government level has a direct impact on rural development as it reduces the capacity of local government to implement rural development programmes effectively. Nonetheless, the ISRDS was prematurely aborted and replaced with the War on Poverty campaign at the ANC Policy Conference in 2007.
111 Online). This study has shown that the most deprived wards are situated in the poor rural municipalities. As a result, the poorest households would be identified during the campaign’s steps at reducing poverty and they “would be visited periodically by teams of professionals and community workers who would identify their needs, accelerate their access to government services, and provide safety nets” (BuaNews, 2008: Online). The underlying assumption was that the campaign would deliver positive results faster than the ISRDP, and to this end, it offered new hope to the rural poor.
However, it is important to note that the ‘war on poverty’ mantra did not originate in South Africa. It was popularised by President Lyndon B. Johnson of the United States of America at his State of the Union address on 8 January 1964. Johnson made the war on poverty the centrepiece of his speech in which he declared that: “Our aim is not only to relieve the symptoms of poverty, but to cure it and, above all, to prevent it” (quoted in Walsh, 2014:2).
Johnson’s proposed programme to win the war on poverty included the creation of job corporations and various other programmes that would provide work training and work-study options for the disadvantaged. Walsh (2014:2) also notes that, the war on poverty programmes would also include:
“Funding for Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA), a domestic Peace Corps;
loans to facilitate hiring the unemployed; a Community Action Programme to empower and encourage local communities and citizens to fight poverty with federal help; and the creation of an Office of Economic Opportunity to coordinate the whole anti-poverty campaign”.
Johnson further requested Congress to approve a big tax cut in order to stimulate the economy and provide sufficient funds to build more houses, schools, libraries, and hospitals (Walsh, 2014). The campaign would also include the provision of more government aid to education, housing, health care and food stamps for the poor. He believed that his vision of a great society could be achieved within a short space of time. Despite its promise for a better life for all Americans, especially for the poor, the campaign was deemed to be too ambitious, complicated and ineffectual. It also created too much dependency on the government and provided unlimited space for the federal government to meddle in society. Thus, Eller (2014:1) comments that:
“Appalachia is not part of some ‘other America’ but is in fact a reflection of America. Anti-poverty programmes did little to address problems of inequitable
112 land ownership, capital outflow, or political cronyism in Appalachia18. Programmes designed to provide jobs and to develop the region’s economy concentrated resources in middle-class growth centers, failed to protect the landscape and water quality, encouraged the growth of consumer dependency, and facilitated the outmigration of youth”.
Clearly, the war on poverty campaign was not a success story in America. The campaign failed to achieve the intended vision of eradicating poverty. Eller (2014:13) argues that the war on poverty failed “because of the lack of national will to build a fair and equitable society and because of the failure of government programmes to create a level playing field”.
The war on poverty mantra was first echoed in South Africa by the then President, Nelson Mandela in a statement on 17 October 1996 during the International Day for the eradication of poverty in which he declared his government’s ‘ war on poverty’. The declaration of war on poverty was in line with the ideals of the RDP whose vision was to tackle poverty and provide a better life for all, especially for the majority of the formerly disadvantaged people, the majority of whom still languished in abject poverty in rural areas. Nonetheless, the ANC-led government abolished the RDP and adopted GEAR in 1996. The GEAR strategy was criticised from within the tripartite alliance and civil society organisations who viewed it as a home- grown version of the World Bank’s Structural Adjustment Reform programmes (SARPs) that had amplified poverty in most of the developing countries (Turok, 2008).
However, on 28th July 2008, former President Mbeki, after a three day Cabinet meeting, announced the launch of a nationwide campaign to reduce poverty amongst the country’s poorest. The long-term goal of the war on poverty campaign in South Africa was to enable the poorest households to receive assistance and support in a co-ordinated and sustainable manner (BuaNews, 2008: Online). Like in the case of America, a national “war room on poverty” was established in the office of the Deputy President to lead the campaign. An Anti-Poverty Inter- Ministerial Committee was constituted to co-ordinate and integrate service delivery across different spheres of government and social partners. The WOP campaign tasked all levels of government to align their businesses towards the implementation of a rural development agenda. Finally, the campaign encouraged each household to make its own contribution to the struggle against poverty.
18 Appalachia was the focal point of the war on poverty campaign in America in the 1960s. Eller (2014) describes it as a ‘Big White Ghetto, a vast moribund matrix of Wonder Bread-hued towns and villages stretching from northern Mississippi to southern New York, a slowly dissipating nebula of poverty and misery’.
113 Again, as in the case of America, the WOP campaign revived hope for the poor in South Africa, but it hardly succeeded in its promise to empower and transform lives at grassroots level, particularly in rural areas. Instead of helping to increase the poor’s capabilities to meet their needs, the strategy seemed to do the opposite. It promoted dependency and put more pressure on the State. This was highlighted by Zille (2010:2) in her criticism of the WOP campaign in the statement that:
“After my experience ‘on the ground’ in Bitou, I believe the ‘war on poverty’
approach is decreasing capability and increasing dependence. It is actually preventing people becoming active agents of their own destiny, and entrenching their bondage”.
Zille also argued that community profiling would have been a useful tool to identify precise intervention strategies that could facilitate the development of each poor household and empower it to defeat poverty. However, vital information was in most cases missing and this resulted in the proposed interventions undermining the key purpose of building the poor households’ capacity. Furthermore, Zille asserts that most of the identified poor households never received the proposed interventions because the State simply lacked the capacity to follow-up on the scale required.
Furthermore, Desai, Maharaji and Bond (2010:13) note that, the WOP campaign could not succeed in South Africa “given the balance of forces, the leadership, the chosen weaponry and the economic terrain upon which the battle” was launched. Furthermore, these authors argue that the failure of the WOP campaign was largely evidenced by the lack of information on its status. By 2010, newspapers had almost stopped reporting on the WOP campaign programmes because nothing was happening at the grass-root level that merited reporting.
Although the WOP campaign did not improve the conditions of the poor, it created awareness of the situation of poverty, particularly in rural areas, and outlined what needed to be done to reduce poverty across the country. It emphasised the need to improve co-ordination and the integration of anti-poverty initiatives, especially in rural areas. It also prioritised the creation of economic opportunities and the development of human resources as part of the government’s agenda to eradicate poverty. Above all, the strategy recognised the need to build partnerships across society in order to make the war on poverty everyone’s responsibility. Thus, Gumede (2008:2) notes that, “[T]he government is of the conviction, informed by experience, that the fight against poverty requires everyone’s effort”. The indication is that, campaign should focus
114 on mobilising and galvanising government, communities and social partners to take joint responsibility for the liberation of poor households from the yoke of poverty. The socio- economic profiling of households and communities revealed the need for a more comprehensive approach to tackle rural poverty. The Rural Development Overview document (2011) also notes that, the WOP campaign resulted in a new policy direction. It served as the direct forerunner for the Comprehensive Rural Development Programme (CRDP) which was inaugurated in 2009. In addition, the WOP campaign managed to accelerate the delivery of services to the poor on a large scale, and assisted the government and policy-makers to gain a better appreciation of the reality of poverty in rural areas. It indeed prompted the government to re-commit itself and opt for a more comprehensive approach to rural development andthe eradication of rural poverty.
It is noteworth that the ISRDS (2000) and the WOP campaign are not the only interventions to address the problem of poverty between 2000 and 2009. There are a number of government strategies aimed at advancing rural development across South Africa between year 2000 and 2009 (Olivier, Van Zyl and Williams, 2010:122). Some of the key strategies at the national level include the Strategic Plan for South African Agriculture (SPSAA) of 2001; the Integrated Food Security Strategy for South Africa (IFSS) of 2002; and the Drought Management Plan (DMP) of 2005. Olivier, Van Zyl and Williams (2010:123) add that provincial departments also designed sector-specific policies that were linked to rural development.