Paying+for+white+privatopias,+B+Day

Business Day, Johannesburg, 06 July 2005
=Paying for white ‘privatopias’=


 * Anthony Butler**

UNDER apartheid, the law dictated where one might live or work, how one would be educated, and which beach, park bench, and railway carriage one might occupy. Yet, more than 10 years into nonracial democracy, racial apartness still characterises much of South African life. Affluence and poverty still seem to depend on the colour of one’s skin.

In part this is because the poor lack jobs, and it is at work that most cross-race interaction occurs. Most black South Africans, moreover, either live in monoracial, peri-urban townships, or are trapped in desperate poverty in the former bantustans.

Meanwhile, wealthy urban whites work in business parks or fortress office blocks, and shop and play in suburban malls and glass-roofed atria. Their private security forces use hidden violence to keep poor black citizens at bay. Government no longer enforces segregation, but private markets now perform this task equally well.

The spread of gated communities and golf estates, surrounded by electrified fences, has become a potent symbol of the new apartheid. Within these “privatopias”, the affluent and largely white residents enjoy private hospitals, gyms, shops and restaurants. Home entertainment, internet banking and new work-from-home technologies allow whites further opportunities to escape cross-class and inter-race interaction.

Even political activity has been privatised. Municipal elections and the pursuit of public office have been abandoned, the gated elite rather enjoying the heady thrills of the “homeowner association”. Here residents debate their rights and responsibilities, haggle over the wages of their gardeners and security guards, and negotiate annual golf fees.

Such internal émigrés venture out only to holiday, in private game farms — whose farmworkers have been evicted — and in national game parks, whose entrance fees exclude almost all citizens.

What about those black South Africans who have forged ahead since 1994, seizing the opportunities offered by the lifting of open discrimination by fighting their way into the new middle class? Surely a new generation is reconfiguring old racial understandings, social classes are slowly being remade, and residential, social, and school integration is often succeeding?

Progress has been slow. Members of the new middle class — in business, the professions and the public service — may have a reliable income, but they struggle harder than their asset-rich white peers to support dependants, pay school fees, and service housing bonds.

Apartheid’s distribution of property and educational assets perpetuates racial inequality across generations. The children of the affluent suburbs seem always to become affluent in their turn. How many members of the black new middle class have sought out a home in a formerly white neighbourhood, close to places of work, where their children might grow up in safety and learn in a leafy suburban school? Only a few have succeeded. Most aspirant buyers have watched prices rise inexorably beyond their reach. Meanwhile, apartheid beneficiaries who choose to sell their properties enjoy a postapartheid windfall.

Can anything more be done? Or must government remain impotent as generation follows generation in racially defined inequality?

Although there are great obstacles confronting policy makers, there are some options that merit discussion. First, government should explore ways to make internal émigrés pay more fully for the costs that they impose on others. Gated communities, golf estates, and business parks enjoy hidden and indirect public subsidies when they despoil the environment, drain water tables, and back up sewers. Public agencies are stretched by new demands for fire, refuse, transport and local infrastructure services for expensive edge-of-city housing developments. Their inhabitants choke public roads with their luxury cars, as they shuttle from enclave to enclave. Their booms and private roads lengthen citizens’ journeys, while their security guards trample constitutional rights.

Government has found it hard to calculate the social and environmental costs of suburban and “edge city” development and to ensure these are borne by their developers and occupants.

Yet, if they had to shoulder the costs they create, and respect the rights of others, most internal émigrés would reconsider their flight. Only a tiny elite can casually purchase private health care, education and security. Most of the established middle class cannot so easily afford to spurn public services or avoid public spaces. If incentives were stronger, they might preserve public amenities, bring economic life to downtown streets, and spurn the bleak malls.

Second, government should redouble its efforts to curtail the transmission of asset inequality across generations. Some critics have argued that government should pursue more aggressive taxation of capital gains and inherited wealth — for white and black alike. Yet in this already heavily taxed society, the technical and political difficulties this raises are immense.

Since asset inequality is so hard to reverse, the public education system offers a critical window of intervention. While it is important to retain the faith of middle-class parents if public schooling is to thrive, former model C schools are giving too much away to the entrenched middle class. It is relatively easy for any formerly white school to admit a small number of historically disadvantaged children. If they arrive in numbers, however, the wealthy may withdraw their children, their money and their parental energies to suburban schools with less progressive principals and teachers.

Alternatively, school governing bodies can abuse language rights to recreate segregation, using a single medium to exclude Africans altogether, or dual medium streaming to create a new internal segregation within schools. Government needs to strengthen financial and moral incentives for public schools to promote integration, ideally an integration defined in class terms so as to avoid the racial codification of children.

The children of the privileged typically parachute back into the largely state-funded elite universities. They take up places on heavily subsidised programmes, and then secure work in the new “knowledge economy” of information technology, communications, and services, where the numerate and technologically skilled enjoy inflated salaries. Policy makers need to be more creative in finding ways to identify and reduce such hidden subsidies to the well-off.

SA is not alone in facing perpetuated inequality. Powerful social and economic forces around the globe have created small oases of private affluence surrounded by deserts of urban decay. Whether in São Paulo, Los Angeles or Jakarta, most urban citizens are caged in vast zones of poverty. The rural poor, meanwhile, languish in destitution.

SA’s privileged citizens, however, have more reason than their international peers to fear entrenched injustice. The established middle classes elsewhere may find it all too easy to close their minds to the poverty outside their walls. Such complacency would be dangerous in SA, where apartheid’s legacy is an excluded citizenry that is black, and an established middle class that remains largely white. Social injustice that is colour coded is harder to ignore or justify. In generations to come it may lead to a new politics of racialised conflict.


 * Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town. He is preparing an unauthorised biography of Cyril Ramaphosa.


 * From: http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/opinion.aspx?ID=BD4A64846