Programs for destitutes in botswana

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Latest News. Full Picture. Featured Video. While they sought to strengthen white families, they were unable to ensure that white families accommodated and supported elderly parents. Expenditure grew rapidly on residential institutions for the elderly. Similarly, despite their enthusiasm to abolish social pensions for elderly African men and women, the importance of pensions to most African people created a very large vested interest, while the apartheid-style devolution of responsibility to compliant African leaders gave an effective veto power to players whose modest legitimacy would vanish if they were complicit in the abolition of the pensions.

As international and domestic pressure intensified on the apartheid state, persistent racial discrimination in benefits became less and less defensible. In the s the National Party presided over major increases in the real value of the social pension paid to African people as it moved toward parity in benefits.

The semi-social insurance system expanded to accommodate most skilled and semi-skilled African workers in provident funds managed by newly legal trade unions. The existing programs thus not only created directly vested interests but also provided both symbolic and material incentives to groups of African people to demand their inclusion in the welfare state, creating even stronger vested interests.

While committed to the reduction of poverty among its mostly African support base, the ANC was ideologically ill-disposed to the idea of a welfare state.

Without unmanageable debts and independent of foreign aid, the new government was not beholden to any international organizations or aid donors. It was, however, influenced by the developmentalist ideology that had been hegemonic across much of Africa since the s. ANC governments did rein in expenditure on residential institutions for the elderly, considered abolishing grants for poor, single mothers and rejected calls for a basic income grant.

They also proposed shifting the emphasis of social protection from social assistance and provident funds to social insurance, through national pension and health insurance programs.

Civil society activists pushed for programmatic expansion. Faced with electoral competition, the ANC did expand massively grants for poor mothers and other caregivers , but they rejected a series of other proposed reforms and as of failed to implement their promised national insurance systems Lund ; Proudlock ; Patel ; Seekings and Nattrass ; Button et al.

The ANC after found it as difficult as the National Party before to resist the expansion of the welfare state.

The dominant norms within the ruling party might be ambivalent or hostile to welfare statism, but institutions, interests and popular ideas all contributed to path dependency. Institutionally, the consolidation of social assistance programs within the Department of Welfare later renamed Social Development created an institutional vested interest.

ANC party structures and MPs , fearing a popular backlash against programmatic retrenchment, wielded a potential veto. Faced with persistent poverty, the ANC expanded programs to maintain its electoral support. The existing programs created a massive vested interest in their continuation—except for residential institutions for elderly white people who comprised a politically weak constituency.

Every suggestion that the trade union-run provident funds would be incorporated into a national pension fund system was met with blanket opposition from the politically powerful trade unions.

The promised national health insurance system was welcomed by the public sector unions but was resisted by the black as well as white middle classes, who had migrated to private health care after , and prompted ambivalence even among sections of the working class who were covered by sector-specific or other medical aid schemes. Perhaps most importantly of all, the priority attached to deracialization generally meant that programs that had benefitted white South Africans primarily should be extended to all South Africans.

The very idea of social assistance had become so taken for granted that grants could be extended to African single mothers and even a basic income grant could be put on the agenda, despite widespread concern over the payment of grants to undeserving individuals. South African policy-makers were consistently determined to adapt foreign ideas and models to suit local circumstances.

While foreign actors never had the power to impose their preferred policies, South African policy-makers were deeply influenced by foreign ideas. Between the s and s, policy-makers drew on some of the ideas and models in Britain and other British Dominions in introducing programs to provide primarily for South Africans of European descent. In the South African context, however, these programs served, inter alia, the racialized objective of securing white supremacy.

In the early s, debates in Britain and elsewhere influenced some policy-makers to extend some programs to African people, albeit on a discriminatory basis. From , the National Party tried to reverse these reforms, in part because of the influence of a new set of foreign ideas, that is, deeply conservative neo-Calvinist ideas from the Netherlands. After , ANC leaders drew on global developmental ideology as well as their own conservative views about family to resist the expansion of so-called handouts.

Despite the ebbs and flows of ideas about welfare, the welfare programs introduced in the second quarter of the twentieth century were not only never retrenched to any significant extent but tended to expand through parametric reforms that extended the reach of existing programs.

The British colony or, more precisely, Protectorate of Bechuanaland renamed Botswana at independence in was a very different context to its neighbor South Africa. The territory was extremely poor and heavily dependent on remittances sent by migrant mineworkers in South Africa. There were very few European settlers or immigrants. Moreover, British colonial officials enjoyed considerable power until independence, although they chose to devolve considerable authority to Tswana chiefs under indirect rule.

At the same time as South Africa was introducing and expanding welfare programs, the British colonial government in Bechuanaland made almost no provision for their subjects. The absence of welfare programs in Bechuanaland was typical of British colonies in Africa. Britain might have devolved responsibility for policy-making to colonial officials on the ground, but it, nonetheless, generally provided those officials with clear guidance as to what policies they should make.

Only in societies where there was little or no peasant agriculture, as on islands such as Mauritius, might old-age pensions or other such programs be considered appropriate. In societies without large white settler or immigrant populations, the Colonial Office actively discouraged the kinds of reform already introduced in South Africa and in some Caribbean colonies. Colonial states were under pressure to protect colonial subjects against one specific risk: famine, which in Africa usually arose from drought and, more occasionally and locally, from pests such as locusts or flooding.

The British Empire had a long experience with drought and famine in India. Official Famine Codes set out how colonial officials should respond to famine. The Famine Codes were sometimes catastrophically inadequate as evident in the Bengal Famine of but were generally regarded as useful enough that they and subsequent operational manuals were embraced by Indian governments after independence.

Colonial officials in Africa faced regular famines and sometimes responded with limited relief programs, although only in the Sudan did officials draft a Famine Code De Waal ; Iliffe British colonial officials replicated the kind of approach developed in India: wherever possible, drought should be addressed through the market, in that members of poor rural families could work for wages as migrant laborers, remit their earnings and their rural families could then buy food that had been supplied to rural areas by merchants; if this was insufficient, local authorities typically chiefs should intervene; colonial governments themselves should intervene only in dire emergency.

Bechuanaland, although especially vulnerable to drought, experienced no major droughts in the s or s. In the early s, however, several years of drought threatened mass famine.

The colonial government—in the process of transferring power to local leaders—reacted very slowly. Food aid was distributed to between one-third and one-half of the population through feeding schemes.

The scale of these emergency programs was unprecedented in the territory. It quickly became apparent that continued food aid from the WFP required a shift in approach. It was unwilling to provide food to able-bodied adults.

The new government of Botswana therefore introduced workfare programs, providing food for work to men and women, with the intention of supporting whole families. By the end of the s, the Botswana government had put in place the key features of the Indian Famine Codes, although there is no evidence that it was even aware of them.

Insofar as the design of the programs was influenced from elsewhere, it appears to have been the WFP rather than the Colonial Office in London Seekings a. Seretse Khama, the first president of Botswana, was steeped in broadly liberal British values. He had been educated at a mission school, then at South African and British universities, had been living in exile in Britain for several years, married a British woman and employed British advisors and speech writers Tlou et al.

His ideology was, however, rooted in Tswana norms. In the late s and s before his death in , he articulated a benign conservative ideology of responsibility for the poor. He and his successor, Quett Masire, were respectful of the private sector and wary of enlarging the state. But they saw the new state as assuming the responsibilities for the deserving poor that chiefs, communities and kin had shouldered hitherto.

In this ideology, the deserving poor were those poor people who were unable to support themselves: the destitute elderly and infirm, children and mothers. Expectations of reciprocity underlay public responsibility.

Anyone who could—that is, able-bodied adults—had a responsibility to work, to support their dependents and to contribute to the common good, hence the emphasis on workfare. This ideology of welfare was rooted in agrarian conditions. While most of the s were years of good rains, Botswana persisted with the programs introduced in the previous decade: school and other feeding schemes supported by the WFP , destitute rations and when necessary workfare.

These welfare programs were integral not only to resilient support for the BDP among voters but also to the construction of a modern state. Drought relief is coming to assume a role in Botswana politics comparable to education and welfare in the industrialised countries. Indeed, it is already so popular that the leaders of the BDP have resisted pressures for cuts from bureaucrats.

It will be difficult for the Ministry of Finance and Development Planning, which quite naturally concerns itself with balancing the budget, to find a politically acceptable way of reducing the various relief programmes, once the drought is over. Holm and Morgan , When the drought finally broke, in the late s, the WFP resumed discussions with the government of Botswana about withdrawing from the country.

By then, as Holm and Morgan had already recognized, it had become difficult for the government of Botswana to reverse or to step away from the path it had followed hitherto. External resources and ideas were thus central to the origins of the welfare state in Botswana.

WFP food aid and accompanying ideas shaped what the new state provided, for whom and with what conditions. This was a very different set of origins to those in neighboring South Africa. Programs in Botswana were not aimed at European immigrants or settlers. They did not draw on legislation from Britain or other settler societies. They were not linked to any racialized political project, but rather to indigenous African norms and values.

Their relevance was rooted in local conditions: specifically, the risks of drought in an agrarian society comprising mostly small farmers.

Since the mids, foreign actors have played a key role in putting ideas about social assistance onto the agenda in many African countries. International organizations and aid donors have funded consultants to assist with writing policy documents, spent large sums on study tours, seminars and other events to build coalitions of reform-friendly politicians and officials and embedded advisors in government departments see Devereux and Kapingindza, Chap.

They have funded programs and sometimes established parallel, quasi-state bureaucracies. Given that Botswana is considered a stable democracy, the need for democracy assistance does not at first glance seem necessary.

South African Review of Sociology. As an indigenous and minority ethnic group in Botswana, the San find themselves trapped in unequal … Expand. View 3 excerpts, cites background. Chronic Poverty and Remote Rural Areas. This paper is a first attempt at putting the case that people living in remote rural areas RRAs account for a substantial proportion of the chronically poor.

The evidence for this will be gathered … Expand. Highly Influenced. View 4 excerpts, cites background. Interpreting the Exceptionality of Botswana. Botswana has achieved rapid growth with stability since independence in , largely through the supportive interrelations between an open market economy and a system of elite democracy, … Expand. Botswana ranks very high in sub-Saharan Africa in income per capita , and in such indicators of human development as public expenditure on health and education.

Nevertheless, inequalities of wealth … Expand. Struggles over water, Struggles over meaning: cattle, water and the state in Botswana. From an organization standpoint, there are legislations or litigations opportunities that we have identified and we are working around the clock to ensure that after this we look at what is next," said Moruti.

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