The urban poor do not need to wait for experts to provide data on conditions of life in their communities, writes Steven Robins.
Professor Sandra Liebenberg, from Stellenbosch University Law School, recently criticised the City of Cape Town for failing to properly engage with the Social Justice Coalition’s (SJC) recent social audit of toilets in Khayelitsha (GroundUp, October 22, 2014). Instead of accepting its constitutional obligation to participate in “meaningful engagement” with civic organisations representing the recipients of state services, senior city officials launched missile attacks on the SJC and its audit report.
What irked the city officials so much was the finding that one in four of the Khayelitsha public toilets, which were meant to be cleaned by the City of Cape Town’s janitorial services, were not working. The SJC’s audit also found that half the toilets inspected were very dirty, only one in eight janitors was inoculated against disease as stipulated by the City of Cape Town, and janitors did not receive proper training and did not have the right cleaning equipment. Even though the sample was small, the investigation nonetheless revealed that there were indeed problems. After years of lobbying for a janitorial system for the maintenance and cleaning of toilets, the SJC now found that the implementation of the janitorial system by the city had serious shortcomings.
Councillor Ernest Sonnenberg’s kneejerk response to the audit was to accuse the SJC of grandstanding and using social media platforms to embarrass the city. He also claimed that the SJC had refused to work with the city to improve the lives of residents. Instead of welcoming the SJC’s report as a constructive civil society initiative, Sonnenberg and his colleagues slammed the SJC report, claiming that its sample was far too small, that it was using this data opportunistically for fundraising purposes, that it was acting in “bad faith” because it did not involve the city in the audit and it had not shared the raw data with the city (Cape Times, October 8, 2014). The SJC’s response was to convene a press conference to officially announce the report’s findings and to refute the city’s accusations.
The venue for the press conference was BM Section, an informal settlement in Khayelitsha. Seated at a table with microphones were three SJC activists, Luthando Tokota, Nomlungisi Qezo and Axolile Notywala. Behind them were a row of communal flush toilets. The press conference had hardly begun when a truck loaded with dozens of portable flush toilet containers drove past, prompting a group of small boys to block their noses, provoking laughter among the community members present. But this did not distract Notywala, who, in response to a journalist’s question, proceeded to refute the city’s accusation that the SJC had focused only on the worst of Cape Town’s informal settlements.
Notywala noted that the organisation chose these settlements because most of its members happened to come from there. He also pointed out that the sanitation situations in some of the other informal settlements in Khayelitsha were just as bad as the ones that featured in the SJC audit. Notywala mentioned that despite their disagreements, the SJC was willing to continue working with the City of Cape Town to solve sanitation problems. Journalists, who are trained to sniff out political spin, left the press conference satisfied with the SJC’s highly professional responses to the city’s criticisms. Before they left, they were also offered the opportunity of a first-hand inspection of toilets in the areas that the SJC had done their audit.
The SJC’s brand of data-driven activism poses interesting challenges to conventional understandings of governance and active citizenship in post-apartheid South Africa. Of course, the SJC is not the only community-based organisation to do audits and community profiles. South African affiliates of the Slum Dwellers International (SDI) have been producing their own data on informal settlements for over two decades. Both organisations see the value in training their members to conduct surveys and audits in order to engage with the state to improve access to services in poor communities.
During apartheid, the collection of data about the lives and deaths of millions of rural, black South Africans was typically scanty. The historian Keith Breckenridge has noted that the reason that censuses and data-gathering in the former rural homelands was so shoddy was because the state was not particularly interested in managing these rural populations using modern techniques of governance. Instead, the task of governance was “outsourced” to chiefs and traditional authorities through indirect rule, or what Mahmood Mamdani has referred to as decentralised despotism. The lack of attention to the accurate recording of births, deaths and data on the general health and social being of these rural populations meant that the latter were often invisible to the modern state bureaucracy.
Theorists of modern government such as Michel Foucault have highlighted how data-gathering by experts has increasingly played a central role in European state efforts to monitor, survey and improve the health and economic efficiency of its populations. Social theorists influenced by Foucault have tended to view surveys and statistics as part of a set of governmental techniques and procedures that target, shape and direct human behaviour. Governance is seen here to rely on the gathering of information and expert knowledge to guide and manage a population’s interests and direct the conduct of individuals. This also implies that these forms of expert knowledge on the health, longevity and productivity of populations are used to buttress state power. Foucault called this a form of biopolitics that reinforced a bureaucratic rationality of rule by experts.
These state techniques of enumeration have a long history of being resisted by black South Africans and anti-apartheid activists. Surveys and censuses, which were then associated with a repressive and racist apartheid state, typically triggered popular resistance from a sizeable section of the black population, who did their utmost to avoid being captured by the state’s various censuses and enumeration processes. During the time of influx control and pass laws, there were indeed sound reasons for such evasive tactics. Forging documents and evading state enumeration and surveillance kept one out of prison or being forcibly “repatriated” from the “white cities” to ethnic Bantustans.
After apartheid, the rationale for these tactics of evasion changed. Instead, it became increasingly important for citizens to become more legible to the state in order to make themselves eligible for social welfare grants, housing and various other state resources and social services. Identity books and official documentation also became crucial for exercising newly acquired political rights such as the franchise. It is therefore not surprising that surveys, audits and enumeration have come to take on very different meanings in post-apartheid South Africa. These kinds of shifts of meaning also suggest that we need to rethink the premises of much of the political theory on enumeration, surveys and statistics.
The anthropologist Arjun Appadurai has written about how slum dweller organisations throughout the global South have developed what he describes as “governance from below” or “autogovernmentality”. Appadurai refers specificially to SDI community activists in Mumbai who use enumeration to generate data about slum settlements. This data is then used to lobby and leverage access to housing, health services, sanitation and water. It also gives residents a wider and more technical understanding of the community’s assets and needs. In recent years, the SDI has sought to collate and aggregate thousands of these profiles, which are downloaded on to the SDI website so that communities can make comparisons between the profiles of settlements.
SDI activists have drawn attention to the ways in which data-driven activism involving enumerations, censuses, social audits and surveys can empower poor communities. These SDI activists use community-driven enumeration practices precisely to make their members more legible to the bureaucratic state in order to lobby for access to state resources.
Similarly, the SJC has produced a document, titled “The Power of Data as Evidence”, which spells out the importance of data-gathering: “Remember that if the government can use statistics to lie about delivery, you can use that data against them and uncover the truth.”
It is time that the City of Cape Town, and local authorities throughout the country got used to the idea that the urban poor do not need to wait for experts to provide data on conditions of life in their communities. Officials and politicians are going to have to learn to accept that South African citizens, together with social movement and NGO partners, are increasingly engaging in forms of active citizenship and “governance from below”.
It remains to be seen whether local authorities will become more responsive to these forms of active citizenship. If the City of Cape Town’s response to the SJC’s social audit is anything to go by, it would seem that officials still feel compelled to attack civic organisations that dare to challenge their expertise by producing their own data.
Will such multibillion-rand local authorities continue to feel threatened by the data produced by civic organisations with miniscule budgets? Municipalities do not really have a choice but to engage with their civil society counterparts. As Liebenberg reminds us, the Olivia Road Constitutional Court judgment requires that local authorities facilitate “structured, consistent and careful” engagement with citizens and civic organisations.
Attacking the civil society messenger and refusing to engage is not only undemocratic, it is also unconstitutional.
*Professor Robins, from the Department of Sociology & Social Anthropology, University of Stellenbosch, is the convenor of Theme 1 of the Mellon Foundation-funded Indexing the Human Seminar Series Programme: Technologies of Governance and the Shapes of Politics.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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