History in the new South Africa: an introduction - Det danske ...

eliable national data on the issue, at least none that are publicly available (it does appear
a considerable amount of data has been collected but not released). McDonald notes that
the issue is not simply privatisation per se but publicly-owned and operated service
providers that are commodifying services with negative results for the poor. He notes
that cut-offs are now less of a concern “because they became such a political hot potato”
that municipalities feared the political backlash of cutting off basic services, choosing
instead to introduce service ‘restrictions’ (such as small devices to limit the rate and
amount of water flow) and introducing prepaid meters which – in his view – have forced
“people to cut themselves off by limiting their purchases, thereby personalizing the cutoff
situation and hiding it behind closed doors”. 22
The census is not a vehicle for measuring cut-offs, certainly, and does not help us
engage with the debate in a specific manner; but it is not without value. For example, in
the 2001 census, 29.8% of households did not use electricity as their main source of
energy for lighting purposes – the other 70.2% did use it. The census questionnaire did
explicitly not ask if the service was operational, but certainly implied it by asking
respondents ‘What type of energy/fuel does this household MAINLY use for cooking,
heating and for lighting?’ (emphasis in original). The census data indicate that between
1996 and 2001, those without electricity for lighting purposes dropped from 4 in 10
households (41.8%) to less than 1 in 3 (29.8%). It is unlikely that hundreds of thousands
of people replied ‘electricity’ while meaning ‘electricity that I would be using if it hadn’t
been cut off’.
The situation may have worsened since 2001, which our data do not show; but between
1996 and 2001 the picture is one of expansion of both connectivity to the grid and
utilisation of electricity. The same is true on a smaller scale where water is concerned,
for example. Access to a tap in the household or the yard increased by 1.6% for the
country as a whole, and by 11.1% in ISRDP nodes – but not in URP nodes where the
situation worsened slightly by 0.3%.
While rates of poverty for the ISRDP and URP nodes dropped between 1996 and 2001,
this occurred even through neither ISRDP nor URP were in place. (The ISRDP was still
in the design stage when the census was in field.) This can largely be explained by the
fact that government’s policy orientation since 1994 has been to target the ‘poorest of
the poor’ particularly in rural areas, and many of government’s targeting mechanisms
(such as that used for the Community Based Public Works Programme) identified the
same areas for infrastructure provision that later became ISRDP/URP nodes, for the
same reasons – their high levels of poverty. 23 Moreover, many redistributive programmes
that began life under the RDP continued to be implemented after the GEAR strategy had
been adopted by government, and these very poor areas continued to benefit from
delivery. The real test for the two programmes – and for anti-GEAR critics - will be to
22 Communication from David McDonald 23 rd June 2006.
23 See for example Everatt D. (1998) Targeting in public works programmes (Department of Public Works
Policy Series, Vol. 1/1); David Everatt, Moagi Ntsime and Lucy Stevens (1998) Monitoring and
Evaluation (Pre-Implementation Task Team of the Community Based Public Works Programme); David
Everatt (1998) Targeting and budget allocation (Pre-Implementation Task Team of the Community Based
Public Works Programme)
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