Among the sources of resistance to universal basic income is the sense that it would constitute a terrible defeat, a last resort after everything else has failed. Monthly payments to all, according to this view, would be like setting up a drip to feed a comatose patient. It keeps her alive, which is good, but it is no substitute for curing her so that she can sit up and smile and eat with a knife and fork.
I think that is exactly the wrong way to understand universal basic income. Places in SA that are dying, places strangled by the politics of patronage, would come to life were everyone to be paid a decent monthly cheque.
I recently conducted several years of on-and-off research in Bethlehem in the eastern Free State. I was staggered to witness the extent to which it had become a single-source economy. In the township of Bohlokong the majority of those I met who had a formal job or stable business either worked for the government or were contracted to deliver a public service.
I was even more staggered to discover how many of these jobs were available only to those with personal connections to leading ANC figures. The patronage networks went right down to the bottom of the municipal wage scale; I met cleaners who got their jobs through membership of their local ANC branch.
The result is that branch meetings are like vipers’ nests. Factionalism is vicious and interminable because everyone needs their patron to get ahead. This is no way for people to live. It is the worst form of dependence; it makes grovelling and obsequiousness, trickery and deception, facts of everyday life.
What if everyone in a place like Bohlokong were given a monthly cheque? Not the R350-a-month recipients of the Covid-19 grant get; something more in the order of R1,200 a month. It would change so much, overnight.
For one, the cumulative total of that R1,200 a month would constitute a big new source of demand. A layer of economic activity, and a thick layer at that, would come to life, largely independent of municipal and provincial government.
I saw something similar, albeit on a smaller scale, when working in the old Transkei in the wake of the rapid expansion of state pensions. A stratum of young entrepreneurs arose, mainly selling dry goods and alcohol to pensioners. They became respected people in their villages, part of a civic leadership, largely outside the orbit of the ANC.
There is another benefit to grants, less tangible but more important. To walk the streets in a place where unemployment is above 50% is to feel the tension of a horribly abnormal world. There is an edge, a brittleness, to daily life. People get used to it; they even forget it is there; but it is a terrible way to live.
A decent universal grant softens that edge. It mitigates that ambient sense that something is very wrong. Places like Bohlokong become more inhabitable for all who live there, poor and well-off alike.
These things are measurable. Give everyone in Bohlokong a grant for a year. See what happens to suicide rates, to murder, to aggravated assault. The decline in human suffering such measures proxy is less observable. It is also priceless.
It is said that universal basic income is unaffordable. But that only means that those who need it most don’t have the wherewithal to make trouble. They are not members of trade unions. They cannot strike. They are, by definition, without power. Their suffering is expressed in depression, in suicide, in interpersonal violence, seldom in political action.
The alternative is to wait until provincial economies thrive. But that is to wait for Godot. Much of provincial SA has been in decline since the 1970s. The SA state, hobbled and dysfunctional, is not going to turn that around now. In the meantime, human beings live and die.
• Steinberg is a research associate at Oxford University’s African Studies Centre.
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