South Africa’s Bubble Meets Boiling Urban Social Protest

Patrick Bond

As the June-July 2010 World Cup draws the world’s attention to South Africa, the country’s poor and working-class people will continue protesting, at what is now among the highest rates per person in the world. Since 2005, the police have conservatively measured an annual average of more than eight thousand “Gatherings Act” incidents (public demonstrations legally defined as involving upwards of fifteen demonstrators) by an angry urban populace, which remains unintimidated by the year-old government of Jacob Zuma. This general urban uprising has included resistance to the commodification of life—e.g., commercialization of municipal services—and to rising poverty and inequality in the country’s slums.1

In most provinces, the majority of the Gatherings Act incidents were over the rising cost of (and declining access to) water, sanitation, and electricity. Such increased costs due to the implementation of neoliberal policies have resulted in higher nonpayment rates, higher disconnection levels (affecting 1.5 million people per year for water, according to officials), and lower consumption levels by poor people in such cities as Durban, where, from 1998 to 2004, the doubling of real water prices led the poorest third of residents to drop consumption from 22,000 to 15,000 liters per month.2

The accelerating rise in “service delivery protests” thus reflects the distorted character of “growth” that South Africa witnessed after adopting neoliberal macroeconomic and microdevelopment policies, following the demise of apartheid in 1994. Such internal contradictions are manifest in the extreme disparities between the luxury stadia and impoverished neighborhoods (like Riverlea near “Soccer City” in Soweto) that have seen no improvement in living conditions. The growing anger also reflects some specific catalysts: the World Cup’s gentrification of inner-city access by low-income informal traders (Cape Town and Durban); the displacement of shack dwellers (Cape Town); and students from schools (Nelspruit). The onset of the global economic crisis only amplified and extended these existing internal contradictions emanating from uneven urban development.

As just one example of this extreme uneven development: from 1997 to 2008, South Africa’s cities hosted the world’s most speculative residential real estate bubble, with an inflation-adjusted price rise of 389 percent, which, according to The Economist (March 20, 2009),3 is more than double Ireland’s runner-up rate of 193 percent. (The rise in the U.S. Case-Shiller national index was only 66 percent over the same period.) Compared to the last decade of apartheid, there were many more houses in the post-apartheid period built annually for lower-income people with state subsidies. But the houses were typically half as large, and constructed with flimsier materials; located even further from jobs and community amenities; characterized by disconnections of water and electricity; with lower-grade state services, including less frequent rubbish collection, inhumane sanitation, dirt roads, and inadequate storm-water drainage.4

How did this happen, in a society that, during the 1980s, boasted one of the world’s greatest urban social movements which, in the early 1990s, generated a powerful urban reform project, culminating in the African National Congress’s 1994 campaign platform—the “Reconstruction and Development Programme”—which demanded decommodified real estate, housing finance, and access to basic services? These promises turned out to be another case of what is locally termed “talk left, walk right.” Notwithstanding Joe Slovo—a housing minister who at the time (just prior to his death due to cancer in early 1995) was also chair of the South African Communist Party (SACP)—the December 1994 Housing White Paper set as a main task that of restoring “the fundamental pre-condition for attracting [private] investment, which is that housing must be provided within a normalized market.” In practice, this entailed huge concessions to banks, alongside a drive to commercialize municipal utilities.5

The die was cast when neoliberalism was adopted in the early 1990s by the late-apartheid regime (following 1980s-era sanctions-induced dirigisme), led by F.W. de Klerk and other “verligte” (enlightened) Afrikaner “econocrats” in Pretoria, as the influence of “securocrats” faded and the power of white English-speaking business rose during the 1990-94 negotiations. That period included South Africa’s longest depression (1989-93). Successfully carrying out negotiations required Nelson Mandela’s ANC (African National Congress) periodically to demobilize urban protest, especially under near-revolutionary conditions in September 1992 and April 1993, until finally, in late 1993, the final touches were put on the “elite transition” to democracy.

In the meantime, long-standing ANC promises to nationalize the banks, mines, and monopoly capital were dropped; Mandela agreed to repay $25 billion of inherited apartheid-era foreign debt; the central bank was granted formal independence in an interim constitution; South Africa joined the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade on disadvantageous terms; and the International Monetary Fund provided a $850 million loan with standard Washington Consensus conditionality. Soon after the first free and fair democratic elections, won overwhelmingly by the ANC, privatization began in earnest; financial liberalization took the form of relaxed exchange controls; and interest rates were raised to a record high (often double-digit after inflation is discounted). By 1996, a neoliberal macroeconomic policy was formally adopted. From 1998 to 2001, the ANC government granted permission to South Africa’s biggest companies—Anglo American, DeBeers, Old Mutual, South African Breweries, Didata, Investec—to move their financial headquarters and primary stock market listings to London.

With extremely weak private sector fixed capital investment, the basis for sustaining the subsequent property and financial bubble came from two sources: residual exchange controls, which limit institutional investors to 15 percent offshore investments and which still restrict offshore wealth transfers by local elites; and a false sense of confidence in orthodox macroeconomic management, exemplified by a budget surplus in 2006-08 and the country’s highest-ever real interest rates. The oft-repeated notion is that, under Finance Minister Trevor Manuel, who served from 1996 to 2008, “macroeconomic stability” was achieved. In reality, though, no other emerging market suffered as many currency crashes (15 percent in nominal terms) over the last two decades: in 1996, 1998, 2001, 2006, and 2008. By early 2009, The Economist ranked South Africa as the most “risky” of seventeen emerging markets, in large part because corporate/white power had generated an enormous balance of payment deficits, thanks to outflows of profits/dividends to London/Melbourne financial headquarters.6

Moreover, consumer credit had drawn in East Asian imports at a rate greater than South African exports, even during the 2002-08 commodity price bubble. If there was a factor most responsible for the 5 percent GDP growth recorded during most of the early 2000s, it was, by all accounts, consumer credit expansion, with household debt to disposable income ratios soaring from 50 percent to 80 percent from 2005 to 2008, while, at the same time, overall bank lending rose from 100 percent to 135 percent of GDP. But this overexposure soon became an albatross, with nonperforming loans rising from 2007 by 80 percent on credit cards and 100 percent on mortgages, compared to the year before, and full credit defaults, as a percentage of bank net interest income, rising from 30 percent at the outset of 2008 to 55 percent by year’s end.7

Overaccumulation, Financialization and Social Inequality

In early 2009, at the World Social Forum, David Harvey specified how these processes of financial-speculative accumulation intersect with class struggles in cities:

Since 1970 there have been 378 financial crises in the world. Between 1945 and 1970 there were only 56 financial crises….My guess is that half of the financial crises over the last 30 years are urban property based….Since 1970, more and more money has gone into financial assets and when the capitalist class starts buying assets the value of the assets increases. So they start to make money out of the increase in the value of their assets. So property prices go up and up and up….So more and more low income people were brought into the debt environment. But then about two years ago property prices started to come down. The gap between what working class people could afford and [consumer] debt was too big. Suddenly you had a foreclosure wave going through many American cities. But as usually happens with something of this kind there is an uneven geographical development of that wave.8

“Overaccumulation of capital” at the global scale is the root process behind the recent crisis, coming on the heels of a period of thirty-five years of world capitalist stagnation, extreme financial volatility, and internecine competition that has had ruinous impacts.9 The huge bubble in commodities—petroleum, minerals, cash crops, land—disguised how much countries like South Africa stood exposed, and indeed, the early 2000s witnessed increasing optimism that the late 1990s emerging markets currency crises could be overcome within the context of the system. Moreover, according to one British government study, thanks to deregulatory, neoliberal policies, even before the resources boom, by 2001, the rate of profit for large South African capital was restored from an earlier downturn, from the 1970s to the 1990s, to ninth highest among the world’s major national economies (far ahead of the United States and China).10

The outflow of profits and dividends of large firms, which increasingly funneled their economic surpluses into speculative investments abroad, is one of two crucial reasons South Africa’s current account deficit has soared to among the highest in the world (in mid-2008 exceeded only by New Zealand), posing a major danger in the event of currency instability. The other cause of the increasing current account deficit is the negative trade balance during most of the recent period, which can be blamed on a vast inflow of imports after trade liberalization, with which export growth could not keep up. Where corporate profits were retained in the country, they did not feed into investment in plant, equipment, and factories. Instead, the financialized economy encouraged asset speculation in real estate and in the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, where there was a 50 percent increase in share prices during the first half of the 2000s. Showing classical neoliberal tendencies, from 2000 to 2008, the construction sector grew 250 percent; finance by 160 percent; trade by 150 percent; and manufacturing by just 13 percent (the mining sector lost 40 percent).

In this context, uneven geographical development is the basis for race/class segregation in South Africa’s extraordinary built environment. In spite of greater access to housing mortgage bonds and other forms of consumer credit for working-class people during the 2000s, the overarching process of property speculation amplified that unevenness. The South African version of the financial-housing crisis is still playing itself out because, five years after the late-2004 peak year-on-year 30 percent increase in the most cited House Price Index, there were steady declines in the year-on-year average house price at more than 10 percent each month during 2009 (there is insufficient data available on the distributional impact of a worsening real estate crisis).11 The debt overhang is important because black households lost 1.8 percent of their income from 1995 to 2005, while white households gained 40.5 percent, and income inequality overtook Brazil as the worst for a major country.12 Unemployment doubled to a rate of around 40 percent at peak (if those who have given up looking for work are counted; around 25 percent, otherwise)—but state figures underestimate the problem, given that the official definition of employment includes such work as “begging,” “hunting wild animals for food,” and “growing own food.”

Burst Bubbles and Economic Struggles

South Africa’s wholehearted embrace of neoliberalism left its economic growth path especially fragile, relying on asset bubbles and subject to capital flight at the first sign of trouble. It is no surprise that, in the second week of October 2008, the Johannesburg stock market crashed 10 percent (on the worst day, shares worth $35 billion went up in smoke) and the currency declined by 9 percent, while the second week witnessed a further 10 percent crash. Even the apparent death of South Africa’s neoliberal project in September 2008, personified by former president Thabo Mbeki, whose pro-corporate managerialism was one reason for an unceremonious removal from power, is misleading. The “populist” ruling party leader Jacob Zuma was intent on retaining Finance Minister Manuel as long as possible—he became overall Planning Minister in mid-2009, replaced at Finance by the equally conservative Pravin Gordhan—even if that meant a collision course with his primary internal support base, trade unionists and communists. As Zuma put it to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in November 2008, “We are proud of the fiscal discipline, sound macroeconomic management and general manner in which the economy has been managed. That calls for continuity.”13

A few days earlier, when asked by the Financial Times about the impact of the world crisis on South Africa, Manuel told his constituents to tighten their belts:

We need to disabuse people of the notion that we will have a mighty powerful developmental state capable of planning and creating all manner of employment. It may have been on the horizon in 1994 [when the governing ANC first came to office] but it could not be delivered now. The next period is likely to see a lot more competitiveness in the global economy. As consumer demand falls off there will be a huge battle between firms and countries to secure access to markets.14

At the same time, the International Monetary Fund’s Article IV consultation with South Africa confirmed the external pressures. Ironically, the institution’s managing director, Dominique Strauss-Kahn (2008), proclaimed the same month that the IMF now supported a 2 percent budget stimulus “everywhere where it’s possible. Everywhere where you have some room concerning debt sustainability. Everywhere where inflation is low enough not to risk having some kind of return of inflation, this effort has to be made.” Pretoria, under these circumstances, should have qualified for an IMF seal of approval, but no, the IMF saw a chance to garrote the state-social sector. According to the IMF staff who prepared the annual Article IV Consultation paper, South Africa should instead:

* run a budget surplus, i.e., “an increase in public saving so as to bring the structural public sector borrowing requirement to zero over the next few years,” but bearing in mind that “cuts in the corporate income tax could boost growth”;
* adopt privatization for “infrastructure and social needs,” including electricity and transport by “relying more widely on public-private partnerships”;
* maintain existing inflation-targeting (i.e., in the 3-6 percent target range, although inflation was more than 12 percent in 2008) and “raise interest rates further if supply shocks resume or domestic demand pressures do not dampen”;
* “open the economy to greater international competition” by removing protections against international economic volatility, especially “further liberalization and simplification of the trade regime”; and
* remove worker rights in labor markets, including “backward-looking wage indexation” to protect against inflation.15

It would not be so easy. Manuel did not follow this advice, mainly because the leftist forces within the ANC Alliance—the SACP and Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu)—were powerful enough to prevent it. Indeed, just as in the West, the South African central bank came under heavy pressure to reduce interest rates—by 5 percent from late 2008 through mid-2009—and the real prime rate fell to the 2 percent range, down from a peak of 15 percent a decade earlier, while lower revenues took the state budget deficit from a 0.5 percent surplus to a 7.6 percent deficit within a year.16

Although, as late as February 2009, Manuel claimed his policies would prevent a recession, he was proven badly wrong in May when government data showed a 6.4 percent quarterly GDP decline, the worst since 1984, during anti-apartheid protests, the gold price’s plummet, and the tightening of sanctions. The economy shed close to one million jobs in 2009, especially in manufacturing and mining. January 2009 alone witnessed a 36 percent crash in new car sales and a 50 percent production cut, the worst ever recorded, according to the National Association of Auto Manufacturers. Repossessed houses increased by 52 percent in early 2009, from a year earlier.

The first quarter 2009 crash was, however, mitigated by the construction industry, which grew 9.4 percent, thanks to white elephant state infrastructural investments: 2010 World Cup stadiums (hugely over budget and not anticipated to cover operating costs after the soccer matches); an elite rapid train service for Johannesburg-Pretoria; a failing, albeit generously subsidized, industrial complex (Coega); port/airport/road/pipeline expansions; the vast new Medupi coal-fired electricity generator (the world’s fourth-largest); and mega-dams. The impact of all these public investments was both to maintain the expansive fiscal posture (at least through the Medupi power-plant, when state-backed construction will probably grind to a halt) and to raise foreign debt dramatically, given that these projects carry enormous import bills. From 7 percent of GDP in 2003, the foreign debt rose to 45 percent ($75 billion) by 2010, a level last broached in 1985, when the apartheid leader P.W. Botha was forced into a $13 billion default and imposed exchange controls to halt capital flight.

Although, technically, South Africa left its downturn in late 2009, there is little doubt that further property recession, ongoing manufacturing stagnation, the credit squeeze, and a return to dangerous current account deficits will create ever-sharper tensions, especially with labor demanding more concessions and increasingly angry about the macroeconomic policy status quo. Cosatu’s mini-revolt included threats of a national strike to halt 25 percent yearly electricity price increases in the foreseeable future (with inflation hovering around 7 percent), and anger that Gordhan’s first budget in February 2010 not only ignored a promised National Health Insurance plan and the need to phase out “labor brokers” (responsible for mass hiring/firing of casualized workers), but also even introduced a “dual labor market” by subsidizing young workers at a cheaper entry-level wage.

The “Right to the City”

What the contraction, relatively durable power relationships, and economic policy continuity together imply is that the social protests will need to intensify and ratchet up to force concessions, especially in urban areas, where their “popcorn” character—popping up and landing in various ideology-free, leaderless ways—has hampered a genuine urban social movement’s emergence. As Harvey puts it, “My argument is that if this crisis is basically a crisis of urbanization then the solution should be urbanization of a different sort and this is where the struggle for the right to the city becomes crucial because we have the opportunity to do something different.”17

One of the first strategies, however, is defense. Memories remain of the prior downturn in South Africa’s Kuznets Cycle of roughly fifteen-year ups and downs in real estate prices. The resulting negative equity generated early-1990s housing “bonds boycotts” in South Africa’s black townships, in the wake of the granting of 200,000 mortgage bonds to first-time black borrowers during the late 1980s, once apartheid urban restrictions were eased. The long 1989-93 recession left 500,000 freshly unemployed workers and their families unable to pay for housing. This, in turn, helped generate a collective refusal to repay housing bonds until certain conditions were met. The tactic moved from the site of the Uitenhage Volkswagen auto strike in the Eastern Cape to the Johannesburg area in 1990, as a consequence of two factors: shoddy housing construction (for which the homebuyers had no other means of recourse than boycotting the housing bond) and the rise in interest rates from 12.5 percent (-6 percent in real terms) in 1988 to 21 percent (+7 percent in real terms) in late 1989, which, in most cases, doubled monthly bond repayments.18

As a result of both the popular resistance—township housing foreclosures, which could not be consummated due to the refusal of the defaulting borrowers supported by the community to vacate their houses—and threat of a national bond boycott from the national civic organization, the holding company, Nedcor, which had a black housing bond exposure of $700 million, lost 20 percent of its Johannesburg Stock Exchange share value (in excess of $150 million) in a single week in September 1992. Locally, if a bank did bring in a sheriff to foreclose and evict defaulters, it was not uncommon for a street committee of activists to burn the house down before the new owners completed the purchase and moved in. Such power, in turn, allowed both national and local civic associations to negotiate concessions from the banks.19

However, there are few links between the early 1990s civics struggles, which used these micro-Polanyian tactics successfully, and the 2000s generation of “new social movements,” which shifted to a strategy of decommodification of water and electricity through illegal reconnections.20 The differences partly reflect how little of the late 2000s mobilizing opportunities came from formal sector housing, and instead related to higher utility bills or forced removals of shack settlements. Still, there are profound lessons from the recent upsurge of social activism against the implications of world capitalist crisis, not only in South Africa, but elsewhere.

The lessons come from deglobalization and decommodification strategies used to acquire basic needs goods, as exemplified in South Africa by the national Treatment Action Campaign and the Johannesburg Anti-Privatization Forum, which have won, respectively, antiretroviral medicines needed to fight AIDS and publicly provided water. The drugs are now made locally in Africa—in Johannesburg, Kampala, Harare, and so on—on a generic, not a branded, basis. They are generally provided free of charge, which is a great advance on the $15,000/patient/year cost of branded AIDS medicines a decade earlier. In South Africa today, nearly 800,000 people receive antiretroviral drugs, representing one of the world’s great victories against corporate capitalism and state neglect. (Just as successful in the Constitutional Court was Durban’s Abahlali baseMjondolo shack dwellers movement, which in 2009, won a major victory against a provincial housing ordinance justifying forced removals, though shortly afterward they were uprooted from their base by vicious attacks attributed to the local ANC.)

The water in Johannesburg is now produced and distributed by public agencies (Suez was sent back to Paris after its controversial 2001-06 protest-ridden management of municipal water). In April 2008, a major constitutional lawsuit in the High Court resulted in a doubling of free water to fifty litres per person per day and the prohibition of pre-payment water meters, but the Constitutional Court reversed this decision in September 2009 on grounds that judges should not make such detailed policy. The reversal led activists to commit illegal reconnections, if required.21

The ability of social movements in the health, water, and housing sectors to win major concessions from the capitalist state’s courts under conditions of crisis is hotly contested, and will have further implications for movement strategies in the months ahead. Marie Huchzermeyer argues that the South African Constitution mandates “an equal right to the city,” and suggests that we can fill in an alleged “gap” in left thinking about the city between what Huchzermeyer caricatures as “the Marxist ideology of nothing but a revolution,” on the one hand, and on the other, the “Right to the City” movement, articulated by Henry Lefebvre and David Harvey. This requires activists to pursue marginal gains through the courts: “Urban Reform in this sense is a pragmatic commitment to gradual but radical change towards grassroots autonomy as a basis for equal rights.”

After all, Huchzermeyer argues, “three components of the right to the city—equal participation in decision-making, equal access to and use of the city and equal access to basic services—have all been brought before the Constitutional Court through a coalition between grassroots social movements and a sympathetic middle class network” (even though the rights language “is fast being usurped by the mainstream within the UN, UN-Habitat, NGOs, think tanks, consultants, etc., as something of an empty buzz word, where the concept of grassroots autonomy and meaningful convergence is completely forgotten”).22

Critics such as Danie Brand, Tshepo Madlingozi, and Marius Pieterse, in contrast, point to the opposite processes (i.e., less intrinsic equality and more potential political demobilization, through recourse to courts) in the water case, and consider a move beyond human rights rhetoric narrative necessary on grounds that—following the Critical Legal Scholarship tradition—rights talk is only conjuncturally and contingently useful (as in the cases Huchzermeyer cites).23 In addition, the limits of neoliberal capitalist democracy sometimes stand exposed, when battles between grassroots-based social movements and the state must be decided in a manner cognizant of the costs of labor power’s reproduction. At that point, if a demand on the state to provide greater subsidies to working-class people impinges on capital’s (and rich people’s) prerogatives, we can expect capital to pot-hole the road to rights to the city.

The challenge for South Africans committed to a different society, economy, and city is to combine requisite humility, based on the limited gains that social movements have won so far (in many cases matched by the worsening of regular defeats) with the soaring ambitions required to match the scale of the systemic crisis and the extent of social protest. Looking retrospectively, it is easy to see that the independent left—the radical social movements, serious environmentalists, internationalist activists, and the left intelligentsia—peaked too early, in the impressive marches against Durban’s World Conference Against Racism in 2001 and at Johannesburg’s World Summit on Sustainable Development in 2002. The 2003 protests against the United States and United Kingdom for the Iraq War were impressive, too. But, although, in each case, they out-organized the Alliance, the harsh reality of weak local organization outside the three largest cities—plus interminable splits within the community and divisions between its various currents—created major ideological, strategic, and material problems that South Africa’s independent left has failed to overcome.

By all accounts, the crucial leap forward will be when leftist trade unions and the more serious SACP members ally with the independent left. The big question is, When will Cosatu radicals reach the limits of their project within the Alliance? Many had anticipated the showdown in 2007 to go badly for unionists and communists, and they (myself included) were proven very wrong. There is probably no better national trade union movement in the English-speaking world than Cosatu, and the regular bouts of the National Union of Metalworkers with neoliberal macroeconomic policy-makers are indicative of the soaring ambitions and harsh realities of life inside the Alliance.

These challenges are not particularly new nor unique, with many socialists in Latin America and Asia reporting similar opportunities, with profound barriers to making decisive gains anticipated. It is, however, in South Africa’s intense confrontations during this capitalist crisis that we may soon see, as we did in the mid-1980s and early 2000s, a resurgence of perhaps the world’s most impressive urban social movements. If not, we may see a degeneration into far worse conditions than even now prevail, in a post-apartheid South Africa more economically unequal, more environmentally unsustainable, and more justified in fostering an anger-ridden grassroots protest—based on a sense of betrayal—than under apartheid itself.

Notes

1. ↩ Freedom of Expression Institute and Centre for Sociological Research, National Trends Around Protest Action: Mapping Social Protest Action in South Africa, Johannesburg 2009.
2. ↩ Freedom of Expression Institute, National Trends; Patrick Bond and Jackie Dugard, “The Case of Johannesburg Water,” Law, Democracy and Development 12, no. 1, (2008), 1-28.
3. ↩ “Caught in the Downward Current,” The Economist, March 21, 2009, 80.
4. ↩ Patrick Bond, Elite Transition (Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2005) and Patrick Bond, “From Racial to Class Apartheid,” Monthly Review 55, no. 10 (March 2004).
5. ↩ Mzwanele Mayekiso, Township Politics (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1996); Patrick Bond, Cities of Gold, Townships of Coal (Trenton: Africa World Press, 2000).
6. ↩ “If One Green Bottle Should Accidentally Fall” The Economist, February 28, 2009, 82.
7. ↩ South African Reserve Bank, Financial Stability Review (Pretoria, 2009).
8. ↩ David Harvey, “Opening Speech at the Urban Reform Tent,” World Social Forum, Belem, January 29, 2009.
9. ↩ John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff, The Great Financial Crisis (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009); David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
10. ↩ Laura Citron and Richard Walton, International Comparisons of Company Profitability, Bank of England, 2002, http://.statistics.gov.uk/articles/economic_trends/ET587_Walton.pdf.
11. ↩ Amalgamated Banks of South Africa, Housing Price Index, Johannesburg, 2009.
12. ↩ Patrick Bond, “In ‘Power’ in Pretoria,” New Left Review 58 (2009), 77-88; Department of Trade and Industry, Republic of South Africa, “2009-2012 Medium Term Strategic Framework,” Pretoria, 2009; Martin Legassick, “Notes on the South African Economic Crisis,” http://amandla.org.za; Chris Loewald, “A View of the South African Economy in the Global Crisis,” National Treasury, Pretoria, 2009; Haroon Bhorat, Carlene van der Westhuizen and Toughedah Jacobs, Income and Non-Income Inequality in Post-Apartheid South Africa, Developing Policy Research Unit Working Paper, 09/138, August 2009, 8.
13. ↩ Luphert Chilwane, “Economic Policies to Remain, Zuma Tells US Business,” Business Day, November 27, 2008.
14. ↩ Richard Lapper and Tom Burgis, “S Africans Urged to Beware Left Turn,” Financial Times, October 27, 2008.
15. ↩ International Monetary Fund, “IMF Executive Board Concludes Article IV Consultations with South Africa,” Public Information Notice (PIN), no. 08/137, October 2008, 3-12.
16. ↩ Surprisingly, the IMF’s 2009 Article IV agreement had a very different tone, conceding that South Africa’s semi-Keynesian strategy was acceptable: “The expansionary fiscal stance is appropriate given the weak economic outlook, and strikes the right balance between supporting demand and preserving medium-term sustainability. If output turns out weaker than staff projects, the automatic stabilizers should be allowed to operate in 2009/10 and 2010/11….The monetary policy stance has been appropriate.” International Monetary Fund, “IMF Executive Board Concludes Article IV Consultations with South Africa,” Public Information Notice (PIN), no. 08/273, September 2009, 1.
17. ↩ Harvey, “Opening Speech.”
18. ↩ Bond, Cities of Gold, Township of Coal.
19. ↩ Mayekiso, Townships Politics.
20. ↩ Ashwin Desai, We Are the Poors (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2002).
21. ↩ Bond and Dugard, “The Case of Johannesburg Water.”
22. ↩ Marie Huchzermeyer, “Does Recent Litigation Bring Us Any Closer to a Right to the City?” Paper presented at the University of Johannesburg Workshop on Intellectuals, Ideology, Protests, and Civil Society, October 30, 2009, 3-4.
23. ↩ Danie Brand, “The Politics of Need Interpretation and the Adjudication of Socio-economic Rights Claims in South Africa,” in A. J. van der Walt, ed., Theories of Social and Economic Justice (Stellenbosch: Stellenbosch University Press, 2005); Tshepo Madlingozi, “Good Victim, Bad Victim,” in W. le Roux and K. van Marle, eds., Law, Memory and the Legacy of Apartheid (Pretoria: University of Pretoria Press, 2007); Marius Pieterse, “Eating Socioeconomic Rights,” Human Rights Quarterly 29 (2007), 796-822.

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