Anglo
American’s boardrooms at 44 Main Street, Joburg, and Carlton House
Terrace, London, are lovely – far lovelier than its mineshafts in
Rustenburg. This is business as usual. In a sweeping analysis of
corporate social responsibility, from the colonial philanthropy of
the Oppenheimers to BEE, Dinah
Rajak hunts
the elusive ghost of empowerment. What follows is an excerpt from her
recent book, In
Good Company: An Anatomy of Corporate Social Responsibility (Stanford
University Press, 2011), PMS
Diwe
‘I’ve
come here today, to see what they have to offer’, Diwe said to me;
‘they don’t come to us, so we must come to them’. Diwe, whose
partner had been a temporary contractor at the Rustenburg Mine, was
attending Anglo Platinum’s annual ‘Community Participation Day’
on 4 June 2005. For the past three years, she had been living in
Edenvale, the largest of the informal settlements on the outskirts of
Rustenburg, the urban hub of South African’s platinum belt. ‘At
heart, I am a business woman’ she said, before asking if I had any
‘social enterprise’, ‘empowerment’ or ‘business projects’
for which I could recruit her. Diwe appeared as the model of
entrepreneurialism, the kind of convert whom, Anglo American (or
indeed any of South African’s corporate giants that espouse
commitment to corporate social responsibility), strive to produce
through its ‘empowerment’ work. In all but the material goods,
she embodied the ideal-type small entrepreneur imagined in the
inclusive vision of a new corporate-driven development, bringing the
opportunities of the market to empower the margins; extending the
promise that in the new South Africa, ‘everyone can be a
businessman’.
Like
many others Diwe had embraced the entrepreneurial spirit that
‘empowerment through enterprise’ commands, in which freedom means
freedom to do business alongside all others. She was one of many
thousands who inhabit excluded margins such as Edenvale, hopeful
entrepreneurs in search of opportunities. As the mining boom drew
increasing numbers of people to Rustenburg in search of work,
informal settlements, bearing names suggestive of a very different
reality – Edenvale, Mayfair and Park Heightsii – have developed
on the edge of the town. Here, in the ‘borderland’
(metaphorically and geographically speaking) between the mines and
the formally recognized community, ‘disadvantaged young people from
post-revolutionary societies, from inner cities and from other
terrors incognita . . . seek to make good on the promises of the free
market’ (Commaroff and Commaroff 2000: 308iii).
It
was not only the tangible benefits that Diwe sought from the company,
though of course these are much in demand, but also acknowledgement
of her status as a potential participant in the company’s corporate
social investment programmes; to be ‘seen’, as it were, as a
suitable target for ‘empowerment’ which the company extended to
the ‘community’, but which had up to this point seemed elusive.
In quest of recognition as ‘stakeholders’, and the possible
benefits this brings, there are many like Diwe who aspire to be
selected as a potential small business contractor, or future Anglo
Platinum bursary holder. As Deborah James has written of rural
squatters, the prospect of success is ‘tantalizing’:
The promise of accelerated social mobility…is a vivid one. Although people like Amos Mathibela with his entrepreneurial and leadership skills are outnumbered by the multitude of their real or prospective followers with fewer prospects of upward mobility, the promise is there: one to be realized (or thought to be achieved). (James 2011: 334iv)
The
power of this ‘new’ South African dream to recruit followers to
the ideology of empowerment through enterprise lies, as it does with
the American dream, in the aspiration rather than the fulfilment of
that illusory yet persistent promise.
Just
as the systems of patronage generated by the practice of corporate
social responsibility (CSR) can create categories of ‘beneficiaries’
or ‘recipients’, so where there are beneficiaries there are also
those who are excluded from the educational, medical or
infrastructural advantages provided by CSR initiatives. The
construction of a ‘community’, demarcated through the practices
of CSR as they are pitched at particular groups and target zones, is
itself a moral project; one which is mediated through the
technologies of social investment and the mechanisms of partnership
and ‘stakeholder engagement’. Here the power of CSR works to
define the territory under the company’s purview, and to render the
informal settlements as external to the company’s social
responsibility as they disrupt the picture of upliftment and
empowerment it strives to portray. As I continue the analysis of the
company’s social investment in Rustenburg, these exclusionary
processes are the main focus of this chapter.
As
CSR around the mine generates webs of patronage and clientelism,
company personnel saw themselves as empowerers of a hand-picked bunch
of beneficiaries and expressed resentment at the expectation of
handouts from others. For gifts are given, but should not be claimed.
The corporate discourse of ‘self-empowerment’ thus implicitly
rejects any claims of entitlement. Anglo Platinum’s entrepreneurial
development initiative, The Businessv, describes its goal as
‘unleashing the unlimited socio-economic potential of disadvantaged
job seekers surrounding the mine’. But aspiring participants must
heed the warning on the front of the brochure, in a speech bubble
next to the photograph of a newly empowered graduate of the
programme: ‘I used to expect the mine and the government to give me
everything to make me happy. I can’t believe how I now see life
differently’. A profile of another success story of the company’s
empowerment initiatives has a similar message: ‘since Bennet
attended (The Business) he became so motivated he started finding
opportunities for business everywhere! . . . He never stops, hence
the nickname the “Duracell Bunny”. The injunction to ‘help
oneself’ and ‘exploit the opportunities given’ acts to
reinforce the denial of obligation. Individuals who do not respond to
the moral injunction to help themselves have, it seems, only
themselves to blame:
Everyone in Rustenburg is always looking to the mines for the town’s failures, for their own failure, and for the solutions. Perhaps they should to start looking to themselves . . . because when the mines close, we’ll all be gone (Refinery Manager, Anglo Platinum, Rustenburg).
Implicit
within the construction of the ideal subject of empowerment—one who
can ‘help oneself’—is the rejection of those who cannot or do
not follow this model: those who, as one CSR officer put it,
‘squander the opportunities provided by the mine and sit waiting
for handouts’ (Gilbert Mogapi, Anglo Platinum, Rustenburg). Thus we
find Victorian discourses of the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving
poor’ re-animated and redefined in the contemporary register of
CSR: on the one hand the ‘deserving’ who have earned their status
as beneficiaries by demonstrating their will and capacity for
upliftment and conversion to the entrepreneurial spirit; and on the
other the ‘undeserving poor’, who are rendered ‘dependent’
and ‘idle’ through social welfare. As Polanyi (2001vi) showed us,
it was just such moral rendering of the corrosive effects of social
welfare, and the edifying influence of the market which provided the
legitimation for reforming the Poor Law in 1834vii.
The
true subjects of empowerment are juxtaposed with the myriad ‘false’
claims on the company for ‘endless supplies of cash’ about which
the company’s CSR officers often complained: ‘we’re not made of
money, we’re not a bottomless pit, but everyone thinks we are’.
They saw it as their responsibility to sort the ‘legitimate’
subjects of empowerment (those who reject the role of ‘beneficiary’
and, as Anglo’s empowerment arm, Anglo Zimeleviii, put it, ‘stand
on their own two feet’), from those who try to ‘take advantage
of’ or ‘exploit’ the company. The inclusive vision of economic
empowerment, whereby the goals of transformation and development are
asserted to embrace all through the emancipatory power of market
opportunities, gives way to exclusive practices of patronage,
delivered by the company to those who, so we are told, ‘can help
themselves’ and do not ‘think the mine owes them’, as Grace, an
Anglo Platinum CSR officer, put it. The celebration of a new era of
entrepreneurialism thus rebukes those who ‘squander’ or fail to
seize the opportunities of the market, facilitated through CSR.
When
claims to compensation or entitlement were made on the company, CSR
officers dismissed these as illegitimate or driven by, as Gill (a
socio-economic development coordinator at Rustenburg) put it,
‘ulterior motives’. To illustrate this, let me return to the June
4 public participation day, when a decision was made to cancel the
‘open discussion forum’ that had been planned. Instead, the
Recreation Club in Anglo Platinum’s Waterval mining complex was
filled with stalls presenting what the company had to offer, or had
done, in the various areas of its CSR work. There was a stall for
black economic empowerment (BEE) procurement offering Cadbury’s Top
Deck chocolate bars (a layer of white chocolate on a layer of dark
chocolate) with a ribbon attached on which was printed ‘Add Value,
Not a Face’. There was another for educational bursaries handing
out application forms; a stall for HIV/AIDS prevention distributing
awareness leaflets; and one for environmental management with large
technical diagrams of the new Acid Converting Plant, explaining how
the sulphur dioxide which it produced would be used as fertilizer.
Above the entrance table, posters listed the issues raised at the
last open day (May 2004) and the ways in which the company had
responded to these, or was in the process of doing so. Nox, a
corporate social investment (CSI) manager at Rustenburg Section, and
her colleague Grace, explained the company’s decision to cancel the
discussion forum so as to avoid the ‘fiasco’ of a previous
stakeholder event held earlier in the year, which, according to
Grace, had been ‘invaded’ by a group of people who ‘came only
to make demands, and make trouble’:
Grace:
If we have an open day, people come and say “oh our home has cracks in it because of the blasting in the mines”, or “our children are sick because of the pollution”. At the last meeting Nox was completely mobbed by people making these claims, weren’t you?
Nox:
Yes, people were coming with all sorts of claims about what the mine had done to them. But you know, what people really want is jobs. There’s such unemployment and they’ve come here from all over to find jobs and they are expecting to find them at the mine . . . then they complain ‘you give jobs to migrant workers from Gauteng or Eastern Cape, but not to locals’. But they are not from Rustenburg themselves. Maybe they have been living here some years now, but they’re migrants too!
Grace:
You know I really felt for you—it was like going into the lions den. But you know, we say to them, ‘ok, we’ll bring a mine doctor to check your children’, and of course he’ll say it’s not the mine making them sick. Look at my children, they live right on the mine and they aren’t sick. Or we’ll say ‘ok we’ll bring an engineer to your house to check the cracks’. But it’s not the mine, it’s the poor building and materials, no concrete, nothing. But what they want is jobs . . . They have all these expectations that the mine will just provide. These are people who are not happy with their lives because if you were happy with your life would you bother going to an Anglo meeting. And Nox has to tame them.
Since
the event recounted by Nox and Grace, Anglo Platinum public
participation meetings had been a little short on both drama and
participation. The June 4 open day was the third in a series of
‘stakeholder consultations’ held by Anglo Platinum in Rustenburg
between March and June that year. The first two events, both of which
were held at 9am on consecutive Tuesday mornings in the Recreation
Club, specifically concerned environmental pollution issues, with the
aim of explaining to the public the reduction in emissions achieved
by the new Acid Converting Plant. Highly technical presentations were
made by the manager of the converting plant and an environmental
consultant who had been contracted as a ‘third party’ to
facilitate the meeting. It was attended by around fifteen to twenty
people, including several management-level employees of the mines, a
union representative and directors of an environmental pressure group
operating in the Rustenburg area, run by Karl and Neelius, two
retired mining engineers who lived on small-holdings in the area
outside Rustenburg, and who described the group’s objective as ‘to
keep the mines clean’ (Neelius). ‘We’re watching them’ Karl
said, ‘we’re monitoring the emissions . . . but mostly now they
talk to us and listen to us because we speak the same language as
them’. The meetings remained highly technical. The only time
‘social issues’ entered the arena during the meeting was in a
question from Karl: ‘when are you going to do something about the
informal settlements? We have some in Kroondal now and the ecological
degradation that they are causing to the landscape is terrible, they
have to be moved’. In response to this, the facilitator explained,
‘we’ll deal with social issues at the 4 June open day’.
Writing
about stakeholder participation in England, Elizabeth Harrison
describes how participants are expected to conform to an ideal of the
‘good citizen’, demonstrating their worthiness for social welfare
initiatives. Conversely, those who refuse or fail to conform are
perceived as ‘subversive’ as they ‘disrupt or negate the
intended processes or outcomes of public policy’ (Barnes and Prior
2009, quoted in Harrison 2012ix). In the community participation
processes at the Rustenburg mines, those who are seen to ‘make
demands’ on the company risk being categorised as ‘troublemakers’,
or worse. Earlier, Grace had referred to the presence of these
apparently unwelcome guests at the stakeholder forum as an
‘invasion’. By making ‘claims’ on the company—whether in
relation to health, housing or jobs—they transgress the unwritten
rules of engagement, disrupting the apparent efficacy of the
company’s community upliftment and empowerment agenda. For in doing
so they are perceived to have given voice to an illegitimate sense of
entitlement, rather than demonstrating that they are willing and able
to be empowered ‘to help themselves’.
Diwe
went away empty-handed from the June 4 stakeholder event, except for
a bunch of pamphlets, and the promise of feedback within three months
to the list of questions and comments left on a clipboard at the
entrance. I asked Diwe what had gone before in the way of community
projects led by any of the mining companies. She said a couple of
years previously a mining company had initiated a recycling and waste
collection project in the area of Edenvale in which she lived: ‘one
of the companies came, Impala I think maybe, and they said we could
do a business with collecting waste, some recycling too . . . We made
a business plan . . . but I don’t know what happened, I never saw
it again’. She added, ‘I’m very interested in the BEE
procurement, so I come to all the stakeholder workshops to find a
project . . . but it’s very difficult to start something in
Edenvale’.
A
Joint Responsibility
The
dramatic expansion and urbanisation of the area within the Rustenburg
Local Municipality (RLM) has created enormous developmental
pressures, manifest most starkly in the rapid expansion of informal
settlements which surround the various Rustenburg mining operations
and which now account for an estimated 10–20 percent of the
population of the RLM (Rustenburg Local Municipality 2005: 13x). The
RLM’s 2005 Integrated Development Plan states that:
This is a stark reality, in that the municipality now continues to see an influx of migrant and seasonal workers, imported crime activities, over burdening of existing resources, shrinking land availability, widening gap between ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ (ibid: 4).
In
most of Edenvale, as in the other informal settlements in the
Rustenburg area, there is no access to basic services. Only a very
small corner of Edenvale has access to water tanks and a sewage
system. According to Prosper Masinga, a union shop steward at Anglo
Platinum who lives in Edenvale:
We have a mobile clinic which comes to the place I live in—one mobile clinic for 20,000 people and Anglo built sewage and supply water to the bit of the camp I live in, but that’s the only one I know. That’s it.
The
clinic which comes once or twice monthly is provided by the
Department of Health. According to Jerry Mosenyi, the company had
plans to fund another such clinic at some point in the future. There
are no schools in Edenvale, (the nearest school is over 3km awayxi),
and only one tarred road which goes from the edge of the settlement
to the Anglo Platinum mining compound.
The
informal settlements have become categorised as a problem of their
own, isolated from the list of core development issues identified in
planning processes which commonly read as education, healthcare
services, water provision, small and medium-sized enterprise
development, and informal settlements. In formal documentation, both
Rustenburg Municipal Council and Anglo Platinum stress their
commitment to working in public-private partnership to meet the
urgent development challenges of these areas. According to the
discourse of partnership, this is to be achieved through the
‘Integrated Development Process’. In the Municipality of
Rustenburg, as in all municipalities in South Africa, there is a
sophisticated Integrated Development Plan (IDP), a strategy for
multi-stakeholder partnership to which all parties claim to
subscribe. CSR managers within the mining companies commonly referred
to the IDP as ‘the motherboard’, ‘template’ or even, ‘bible’
guiding the company’s socio-economic development activities and
stated their commitment not only to working with local government,
but also to being guided by them on CSR planning: ‘we all really
subscribe to it—you know it has become a bible to many of the
people because these are the real needs of the community identified
in here’ (Jerry Mosenyi, corporate social investment officer,
Rustenburg). Nox explained that needs assessment was made on the
basis of dual and complimentary processes of stakeholder engagement:
through the integrated development plan and through the company’s
in-house systems:
Well, you see it’s a combination. First of all we have our own broad priorities—infrastructure, small business, education and HIV—although infrastructure is more for the new remote mines in Limpopo, not so much for Rustenburg anymore. Then we undertake needs assessment, first with reference to the Integrated Development Plan for the RLM, and secondly through our own stakeholder engagement as part of SEAT [Anglo American’s Socio-Economic Assessment Toolbox]. So we hold ‘community participation’ meetings like this one on June 4th.
The
national government requires that all municipalities in the country
produce a comprehensive Integrated Development Plan every five years,
and review the plan annually in consultation with all local
stakeholders, from representatives of the corporate sector to local
ward councillors. In Rustenburg, a central focus of the IDP is
diversifying the economy away from a reliance on mining, by
developing small and medium sized business and encouraging large
non-mining industrial business to move to the area, together with a
strategy for rural and agricultural development.
The
support which Anglo Platinum provided to this collaborative pursuit
of the IDP goals was not simply financial. Anglo Platinum personnel
spoke of ‘donating’ the company’s ‘expertise’ and
‘technical know-how’ in areas such as environmental management,
urban planning and water delivery, in order to help ‘build
capacity’ in local government. During the time I was in Rustenburg
the company had seconded two technical advisors to the municipal
offices for a period of two years. The first, an environmental
manager was involved in designing the new environmental plan for the
Rustenburg Municipality. The second, a housing officer, had been
seconded to the council’s planning department, ostensibly to help
deal with the acute shortage of housing in the area, and the rapid
growth of informal settlements.
But,
while the inhabitants of the informal settlements are often the
subjects of formal discussions, they are rarely participants in the
conversations. With the exception of a small area of Edenvale and
Mayfair, another settlement which surrounds the Xstrata Chrome mining
areas, the informal settlements remain outside the existing
structures aimed at recruiting stakeholder participation in the
integrated development planning process. As the largest of the
informal settlements with an estimated population of somewhere
between 20,000 and 40,000, Edenvale has some level of formal
recognition, but was only granted the formal status of a ‘ward’
of the Rustenburg municipality in 2005, and as such, is represented
by elected Ward Counsellors who attend the annual IDP review.
However, the formal discourse of the IDP continues to distinguish
between ‘formal stakeholders’, defined as ‘permanent residents’
of the Rustenburg Municipality, and ‘informal stakeholders’
(Rustenburg Local Municipality 2005: 25). In the 2005 IDP, the ward
which represents Edenvale, was formally categorised as ‘Edenvale
Squatters’ (ibid: 54). This classification explicitly emphasises
not only the spatial liminality of the informal settlements, but
imposes a temporal liminality on them. This distinction is replicated
in documentation relating to Anglo Platinum’s local socio-economic
development activities, and in the discourse of the company’s
frontline socio-economic development officers, in which, informal
settlers were commonly categorised, not only as informal
stakeholders, but as illegal squatters or invaders.
As
a result, social responsibility for the informal settlements was
displaced between the development planning mechanisms of the
Rustenburg Municipality and the ‘community’ of beneficiaries as
it is constructed through the patronage and clientelism generated by
corporate social investment, so revealing the disjuncture between
state provision and corporate responsibility. This tension was
further compounded by the febrile relationship between the Rustenburg
Municipality, Anglo Platinum and the Royal Bafokeng Administrationxii
(RBA)—which owns a significant amount of the land leased by the
mining companies and has developmental (though not legal)
jurisdiction over the territory under its domainxiii. Displaced
within this institutional triad of authority, the informal
settlements have become the subject of competing attempts to deny,
rather than assert social responsibility. As Jeremy Brooke,
ex-Community Affairs Manager for Anglo Platinum remarked: ‘the
informal settlements are just a disaster—not that I was personally
responsible for that . . . but those are the areas that no one wants
to take responsibility for’.
While
Anglo Platinum’s socio-economic development officers stressed that
the Integrated Development Plan was their ‘motherboard’ guiding
the company’s social investment activities, a very different
picture emerged from the annual IDP representative forum meeting at
the Rustenburg Civic Centre in May 2005. The hall was packed with
over 300 Ward Counsellors from each of Rustenburg’s thirty-five
wards and any other people who wanted to attend the open meeting. No
representatives from any of the five mining companies were present.
Odette Kambalame, the IDP manager for the Municipality, told me:
They sit on the advisory panel of the IDP and meet to tell us their needs and plans, but when that meeting happens is up to them—sometimes it doesn’t, or . . . instead most companies send a junior manager with no power to the meetings. They send the ‘photocopy boy’ who knows nothing and can’t make any decisions. If they followed the IDP, as they say they do, they would come to us to ask, where is the need that we have identified through our community consultation process? But with them, people just manoeuvre their way in and then the mine just hands them the money. There is no identification of need. I have never seen them at an IDP representative forum.
At
the IDP representative forum ‘The Informal Settlements’ was
listed as an item on the agenda, a separate category in its own
right. The Rustenburg Mayor opened the meeting, with a brief obituary
for a ward counsellor, PJ Xhosa, who had died the previous Sunday. In
his obituary the Mayor spoke of PJ Xhosa’s work ‘at the forefront
of negotiating for those people in Edenvale to be relocated to a more
formal township’:
The big problem in the squatter camp is that this is a big camp and there is no water there because the squatter camp land belongs to the mines and there was a view that mining would happen in that area.
After
the plenary session was formally concluded with a roll-call of all
the ward counsellors present, a prayer in Setswana and token budget
approval, the assembly broke into eight separate working groups to
address the priorities listed on the agenda: education,
infrastructure, health, tourism, small-business, sports and leisure
facilities, roads, and the ‘Informal Settlements Commission’.
However,
the Informal Settlements Commission discussion was constrained by the
absence of a critical group of actors—the mining companies—making
debate on the whole range of urgent issues listed (including water
provision and sanitation) fruitless and resolution impossible. The
first point for discussion was water. The issue of relocation which
had been raised by the Mayor in his obituary of PJ Xhosa, was the
subject of heated yet brief discussion ending in frustration:
RP Nkosi, Ward Counsellor (Park Heights):
I want to know how this consultation works, because they have never consulted with us. We did not have the consultation of the budget and it was not presented to the community.
Facilitator (from the RLM council):
It is very important when we report back that we can say consultation was done and on what day it was held.
RP Nkosi, Ward Counsellor (Park Heights):
Ok, but now I see on the budget that in Protea Park Extension Four they are requesting a swimming pool. We have no toilets. They cannot have a swimming pool when we have no waste removal, no sewage system.
Celia Kabene, Ward Counsellor (Edenvale):
It’s premature to talk about waste removal now, we can’t talk about waste removal when people don’t even have water.
Gladys Mogwaza, Ward Counsellor (Edenvale):
The people who don’t have water to drink will come and take water from the swimming pool!
Facilitator:
I don’t want to talk about swimming pools, let’s leave swimming pools where they are and move on.
Gladys Mogwaza, Ward Counsellor (Edenvale):
We are not talking about a nice-to-have, we must focus on the priorities . . . When are they going to put the water in?
Facilitator:
They cannot put in full water systems . . . because some of the informal settlements are going to be moved for the mine . . . So we’ve all agreed on water tanks in all the informal settlements. OK, water’s done, let’s move on to clinics.
Celia Kabene:
I want to know the time-frame for people being moved because we have no water or sanitation but I don’t have the information as to when we are being moved.
Facilitator:
The RLM is working with the mining company. Their plans are to put in water and sanitation in the new place so that when people move there it is fully developed. Because people are going to be relocated, they obviously aren’t going to pump in lots of money to the place which will be moved for the mine. So they’ll first put in a few tanks of water. Now, let’s move on, the tar road.
Soon
after, the facilitator stopped the discussion and instructed us to
return to the plenary. Celia Kabene never got an answer as to when
the residents of her ward would be relocated. Indeed, speaking to
both the planning office in the council and the company’s
socio-economic development office, no clear plans seem to have been
made (or were told to me) either for the relocation of the informal
settlement or for the sinking of new mine shafts in the area it
currently occupied. In the meantime, neither the mine nor the local
government were making moves to provide full water and sanitation
systems to Edenvale.
Beyond
the ‘Community’
As
spaces of exclusion from service provision, the liminality of the
informal settlements reveals the fissure between CSR and state
responsibility. They expose the failure of partnership, of which
Anglo Platinum’s HIV care and prevention programme, Circle of Hope,
and processes such as the IDP were intended to be shining examples.
Local government officers responsible for the IDP represented this as
a failure on the part of the mining companies to acknowledge their
responsibility in both creating and providing for the informal
settlements:
They won’t accept responsibility for the informal settlements. The mineworkers want to be with their wives. So their wives are coming to be with them and are living in the informal settlements. That is who is living in the informal settlements—it’s the families of their employees (Odette Kambalame, IDP Manager, Rustenburg Local Municipality).
However,
Anglo Platinum employees, from hostel managers to socio-economic
development officers, stressed that the true obstacles to delivering
development to the informal settlements were, on the one hand the
incapacity of local government, and on the other, the Royal Bafokeng
Administration’s prohibition on the formalisation of ‘illegal
settlements’. Thus, Nox Ndovulu, Anglo Platinum regional corporate
social invesment coordinator, explained:
I must tell you, you try and coordinate with local government to come up with a joint venture between the company and local government, but because of lack of capacity there are no decision-makers, people don’t turn up to meetings, they’re not committed.
Nox’s
assessment of the failure of local government officers to ‘turn up
to meetings’ or take decisions, thus echoed almost completely
Odette Kambalame’s converse account of how the IDP process was
undermined by the mining companies who either sent ‘the photocopy
boy’ to meetings or were absent altogether.
At
the same time, with regards to the Royal Bafokeng Administration, any
attempt at social investment in infrastructure or development more
broadly, Anglo personnel explained, would be taken as an act of
formalising a settlement of illegal squatters on Bafokeng land. Thus
Kobus, a hostel manager, had remarked while pointing to the informal
settlement outside the fences of Hostel A:
You see the squatter camp over there. We’d like to do something for them, give them water or sanitation, but the Bafokeng Administration would accuse us of formalising an illegal settlement on their land. They are squatting illegally on the land—it is Bafokeng tribal land . . . The mine is not allowed to give anything. So they get nothing from them and nothing from us.
Similarly,
Daniel Enele (an Anglo Patinum socio-economic development officer)
described his relationship with the ‘squatters’ of Robega, an
informal settlement close to the Bafokeng Rasimone Mine (a joint
venture between Anglo Platinum and Royal Bafokeng Holdings that falls
within the territory of the RBA). Enele stressed their status as
illegal land invaders:
Fortunately I have only this Robeja in my territory unlike Jerry Mosenyi who is in charge of the areas around Waterval, he has many areas like this, many squatters in his area. Here, they played a very clever game. A few came in and then they advised many others to invade the land and fill it up with people and shacks because they know that the government couldn’t tell them to leave. They are the only outsiders who live in Bafokeng territory.
At
the same time, Enele’s comments exemplified the conventional
representation of informal settlements, not only as illegal land
invaders, but as the common locus of crime, violence and social
corruption:
These ones in Robeja are not so bad as other squatter camps though, they are not so violent. At first, they were demanding and threatening, always demanding—they came to a meeting carrying guns. Now the chairman of the informal settlement and myself—we’re the best of friends . . . When I needed to see him because they were squatting on the land where we want to sink a ventilation shaft, I go out of the office . . . I go to his place and I take a loaf of bread and I sit and have tea with him in his shack … People say, ‘what are you doing going from the office to the shack?’ But I go anyway.
This
dual construction of the informal settlements as both illegal, and
the source of illegality, was pervasive. During our discussion of the
development challenges in the Bojanala Platinum District (which
incorporates those areas under the jurisdiction of the RBA), the
Bafokeng Queen Mother, SB Motlegi, explained:
The major challenge is poverty and then poverty brings a lot of underlying things—you get prostitution and drug abuse. People are flocking to this area—with this free movement from one place to another you get all these things.
This
resonated with the account given by Annie du Toit, a housing
coordinator for Anglo Platinum Rustenburg. Despite commenting earlier
that a large number of Anglo Platinum mineworkers were living in the
informal settlements, she explicitly placed them outside the zone of
the company’s responsibility, while categorising them as the source
of ‘theft, noise and pollution’:
The informal settlements aren’t really a problem for us. Unless they are adjacent to our housing suburbs—then there can be problems with theft, noise and pollution . . . It is a concern to think that people live in shacks—but that will be addressed by the IDP I’m sure.
Thus
the failure to accept developmental responsibility for the informal
settlements reveals the institutional fissures and fragmentation
which lie beneath the claims to community partnership and tri-sector
collaboration that are encapsulated in the commitment to ‘integrated
development’ and the 2003 Memorandum of Understanding between the
Rustenburg Municipality and Royal Bafokeng Administration (see note
13). Yet, as each party attempts to distance themselves from this
responsibility, the tension between them serves to collectively
reinforce the construction of the informal settlements as outside the
welfare ‘community’, and mainstream society in general. While
each party shifted the burden of responsibility to the other, all
drew on a common discourse that sought to undermine the legitimate
status of informal settlers as citizens, and therefore deny their
claims to developmental benefits or social welfare whether provided
by the mining companies, the local government or the RBA. Local
government officers and company CSR personnel alike constantly
emphasised that the informal settlements are ‘very new, they are
migrants’, or, as Gilbert Mogapi put it, ‘for most people in the
squatter camps—this is not their permanent address’. Equally
Carol Flynn, a CSR consultant hired by Anglo Platinum to carry out a
socio-economic impact assessment in Rustenburg in 2004 commented:
‘they’re all migrants in the squatter camps, these aren’t local
guys and if the company puts infrastructure in, it’ll be making
them permanent and they don’t want that’. Explaining her own
frustration with the apparently intractable situation she added, ‘the
trick is to do something, but not too much’.
The
persistent categorisation of their status as ‘migrants’ serves a
dual purpose. Firstly, as the IDP statement exemplifies, it provides
a narrative that serves both the Municipality and the mining
companies, according to which Rustenburg’s ‘social tensions’
can be attributed to the moral and social degradation ‘imported’
by an ‘influx of migrant(s)’ (Rustenburg Local Municipality
2005:4). Thus the Development Plan lists one of the priorities for
Rustenburg as ‘rebuilding the moral fabric of society’ (ibid:
53). Just as the informal settlements were viewed as a threat to the
physical and moral integrity of the workplace, a source of corruption
and contagion, within corporate paradigms of HIV managementxiv, so
they are categorised as such within the broader development
discourses that dominate discussions around planning and social
improvement in Rustenburg. Secondly, this classification underpins
the representation of the informal settlements as transitory,
impermanent, and usually, illegal, and in so doing to reject claims
to entitlement by casting their inhabitants—many of whom have lived
in the area for a number of years—as, in effect,
‘non-stakeholders’. Thus the disjuncture between the mechanisms
of corporate social investment and the Integrated Development
Planning process serves constantly to reinforce the representation of
the informal settlements as transient, to excise those who live in
them from the institutional map of stakeholders, and by casting them
as ‘informal’ or ‘illegitimate’ stakeholders, to deny any
claims to entitlement. This reminds us how, as discussed in the
previous chapter, corporate responsibility is conceptualised as
something which is dispensed, or given voluntarily to projects or
people selected by the company, so eschewing claims to entitlement,
particularly from those who fall outside the demarcated zone of
social responsibility.
This
brings us back to Diwe, who opened this chapter, striving to be
recognized as a ‘stakeholder’, to be selected as a target of the
company’s empowerment initiatives. Over twenty years ago, Fred
Cooper wrote that ‘the city is inhabited by those still waiting to
win as well as those who have won’ (Cooper 1987: 181xv). This is
even more true today than it was then, despite the emancipatory
promise of the market, extended by the giants of corporate capitalism
to aspiring entrepreneurs at the margins. If winners in contemporary
capitalism are defined by their capacity to claim benefits from those
with the power or resources to deliver them (in this case a mining
company), then the odds are certainly stacked against Diwe and others
like her who, presumed lacking in these marketable assets, skills or
simply potential are further marginalised from the exclusionary
processes of empowerment (Ong 2006xvi). For the paradox of corporate
social responsibility lies in the fact that it expounds a doctrine of
self-empowerment, demanding that beneficiaries demonstrate their will
and capacity to ‘help themselves’ to a piece of the market, while
at the same time, rejecting any form of ‘claim-making’ on the
part of potential beneficiaries and corresponding obligation on the
part of the company. Through the master narratives of economic
empowerment and conversion to an entrepreneurial spirit, CSR appears,
not only as an authenticating discourse for corporate capitalism, but
an extension of supposedly market-based values. Yet steeped in the
morality of gift-gifting rather than the supposedly autonomous
relations of the market, in reality it serves to further entrench the
social hierarchies and vast economic disparities which define life
around the mines, between mine employee and unemployed, between
stakeholder and squatter. The ‘empowerment’ delivered through CSR
is highly selective, exclusive, and certainly elusive to those such
as Diwe who sit beyond the ‘community’ of corporate social
investment, but continue on in the hope of attaining empowerment
through enterprise.
***
References:
i
All names have been changed to ensure anonymity.
ii
The informal settlements have also been given fictitious names to
ensure anonymity.
iii
Comaroff, Jean. and John. Comaroff, 2000 ‘Millennial capitalism:
first thoughts on a second coming’, Public Culture 12 (2):291-344.
iv
James, Deborah, 2011. The Return of the Broker: Consensus, Hierarchy
and Choice in South African Land Reform. Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Society 17 (2):318-338.
v
The name of the initiative has been fictionalised to ensure
anonymity.
vi
Polanyi, Karl. 2001 first published in 1944. The Great
Transformation. Boston: Beacon Press.
vii
‘Never previously in all modern history has a more ruthless act of
social reform been perpetrated; it crushed multitudes of lives while
merely pretending to provide a criterion of genuine destitution in
the workhouse test’ (Polanyi 2001: 82).
viii
Zimele means ‘to stand on one’s own two feet’.
ix
Harrison, Elizabeth, 2012. ‘Performing partnership: invited
participation and old people’s forums’, Human Organisation.
x
Rustenburg Local Municipality. 2005. Draft Integrated Development
Plan 2005/2006. Rustenburg: Rustenburg Local Municipality.
xi
Furthermore, the majority of schools within a 5km radius of Edenvale
are either Afrikaans or Setswana medium schools. The great pressure
on English-language schools in Rustenburg further restricts access to
education for residents of the settlements, the majority of whom come
from outside the North West Province and are not Setswana speakers.
xii
The complex relationship between the RBN and the Rustenburg
Municipality is beyond the scope of this chapter, but has been well
documented by Andrew Manson and Bernard Mbenga 2003, ‘The Richest
Tribe in Africa’: Platinum-Mining and the Bafokeng in South
Africa’s North West Province, 1965–1999. Journal of Southern
African Studies 29 (1):25–47.
xiii
On 12 January 2003 a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the
RLM and RBA was signed by the Rustenburg Mayor and Kgosi (King Leruo
Loltlegi of the Royal Bafokeng Nation [RBN]), and witnessed by
President Mbeki. The MOU represents an effort to harmonise the legal
authority of the Rustenburg District Council with the ‘traditional
authority’ of the RBN as recognised by Chapter 12 of the
Constitution of South Africa, and as landowner of the Bafokeng area
(Memorandum of Understanding 2003: 1.4).
xiv
For a discussion of Anglo American’s HIV/Aids corporate care
programme and policy see chapters 4 & 5 of the book.
xv
Cooper, Frederick. 1987. On the African Waterfront: Urban Disorder
and Transformation of Work in Colonial Mombassa. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press.
xvi
Ong, Aihwa. 2006. Neoliberalism as Exception. Mutations in
Sovereignty and Citizenship. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.