Leon A Schreiber

The ANC has governed South Africa for more than two decades but its iron grip is slipping. For the first time since the advent of democracy in 1994, there is no guarantee that it will retain power. If ANC support drops below 50% in the 2019 elections, the political landscape will be transformed dramatically: we will be governed by a coalition, and the consequences will be felt by everyone. One of South Africa's brightest political minds, Leon Schreiber, explores the myriad possibilities - and effects - of coalition country. Will Mmusi Maimane and Julius Malema be in charge? Or will the ANC and the EFF join forces? What will this mean for our nation? A must-read for every South African who wants to prepare for this new reality.

In 2017, Cape Town, South Africa, was on a countdown to disaster. An unprecedented and wholly unforeseen third consecutive year of drought threatened to cut off water to the city’s four million citizens. Faced with the prospect of running dangerously low on potable water, local officials raced against time to avert “Day Zero”—the date on which they would have to shut off drinking water to most businesses and homes in the city. Cape Town’s government responded effectively to the fast-worsening and potentially cataclysmic situation. Key to the effort was a broad, multipronged information campaign that overcame skepticism and enlisted the support of a socially and economically diverse citizenry as well as private companies. Combined with other measures such as improving data management and upgrading technology, the strategy averted disaster. By the time the drought eased in 2018, Capetonians had cut their water usage by nearly 60% from 2015 levels. With each resident using little more than 50 liters per day, Cape Town achieved one of the lowest per capita water consumption rates of any major city in the world. The success set a benchmark for cities around the world that confront the uncertainties of a shifting global climate.

In its 2006 national vision to end poverty, Ethiopia set its sights on becoming a middle-income country by 2025. It was a hugely ambitious goal for a country that, at the time, was one of the poorest in the world. To support development objectives put on hold during a decade of political turbulence, including a costly border war with Eritrea that drained public coffers, the Ethiopian government sought to expand its resources by significantly boosting tax revenues. The new plan called for a sharp increase in the ratio of tax revenue to the size of the economy—and within four years. The government merged its separate customs and domestic tax offices into a single entity and restructured the new agency’s operations along functional lines, increased salaries, adopted stringent anticorruption rules, implemented a modern information technology system, and launched public awareness campaigns. It was important that the new revenue authority worked to improve its coordination with the tax offices of subnational governments, which operated with substantial independence under the country’s federal system. Although unproven charges of corruption against the Ethiopian Revenues and Customs Authority’s long-serving director general in 2013 stalled progress, a new round of IT and legal reforms in 2016 helped increase tax collection significantly: to US$7.8 billion in 2017 from US$1.3 billion in 2006 (measured in constant 2010 US dollars). Nonetheless, revenue gains continued to lag behind economic growth. In 2018, under a new prime minister, the government began to take further steps to strengthen tax collection.

In 2009, South Africa's health-funding system teetered on the verge of collapse. Despite the adoption of a transparent and credible budget framework in 1994, large parts of the public health system suffered from chronic overspending and poor financial control. As wage hikes and supply costs ate into the health budget and as government revenues plummeted in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, the national health department had to find ways to preserve priorities, linking them more effectively to the budget. The department won agreement on a list of non-negotiable expenditure items to protect in provincial budgets, used earmarked conditional grants to channel funds to key programs, cut medicine costs by improving central procurement, rolled out a new information technology system, and improved its monitoring of provincial finances. Although the country's nine provincial health departments had important roles to play, most of them struggled. However, the Western Cape was able to set a model by controlling personnel costs, improving monitoring, and creating incentives for health facilities to collect fees. Nationally, total per-capita government revenues dropped by 5% in the immediate aftermath of the financial crisis and grew only slowly thereafter, but the health sector's strategy helped ensure progress on its key priorities even as resources fluctuated.

As Vietnam gradually became a middle-income country during the early 2000s, its tax agency struggled to keep up. In the decade and a half following the Communist Party–led government’s 1986 decision to establish a market-based economy, local entrepreneurs launched businesses, foreign investors poured into the country, and the average annual rate of economic growth soared to 7.5%. But during the same period, tax revenues declined as the General Department of Taxation (GDT), which previously collected almost all of the country’s taxes from a small group of state-owned enterprises, strove to keep pace with the economic dynamism. In 2004, the department established an internal reform team and adopted a strategy to make sure those who could pay covered their fair share of the cost of government services. The GDT worked with the finance ministry’s tax policy department and the parliament to implement a raft of legal changes. The department then reorganized each of its 758 tax offices along functional lines, rolled out a new IT system, improved staff training, and created a unit to bolster taxpayer compliance. It later adopted a personal income tax and tried—sometimes unsuccessfully—to close exemptions created earlier to attract foreign investors. Although its collection levels began to plateau after 2010, in the decade or so from 2004 to 2015 the GDT increased the number of registered taxpayers in the country to 15 million from 2 million and tripled the amount of taxes it collected annually, maintaining one of the highest tax-to-GDP ratios in East Asia.

After the 1994 genocide that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, Rwanda’s tax collection collapsed to $132 million in 1996 from $225 million in 1990. Aside from its desperate need for money to pay for reconstruction, the new unity government, led by Paul Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Front, was also determined to break its dependence on foreign donors by becoming entirely self-funding. To do that, Kagame’s government had to convince a traumatized and distrustful public to pay its fair share of taxes. In 1998, the government replaced the existing tax and customs departments with the Rwanda Revenue Authority (RRA), a semiautonomous tax agency. The RRA overhauled tax collection procedures, increased staff capacity, improved information management, and launched a massive and sustained public education campaign in an effort to build a new social contract. As a result, in 2017 Rwanda collected in three weeks the same amount of tax it had collected annually a dozen years earlier. From 1998 to 2017, Rwanda’s tax-to-GDP ratio improved from 10.8% to 16.7%, and total tax revenues collected grew more than 10-fold to $1.3 billion. Moreover, from 2007 to 2017 alone, the number of registered taxpayers grew 13-fold—from 26,526 to 355,128—though Rwanda was one of the world’s poorest countries and most of its labor force of 6.3 million still had incomes below the threshold that made them tax eligible. By 2017, the government financed 62% of its annual budget from domestic tax revenues, up from just 39% in 2000. The country was on its way to ending donor dependence.

When the first cases of Ebola virus disease appeared in Liberia at the end of March 2014, a critical first step in preventing an epidemic was to identify those who had contracted the virus. However, Liberia’s disease surveillance capacity remained feeble in the wake of a 14-year civil war that had weakened the health system, and citizens’ distrust of the government sometimes raised risks for public health teams dispatched to carry out that vital surveillance function. In August, as the number of new infections began to escalate, the government and its international partners shifted to a proactive strategy. Rather than wait for families to call for help, they began to engage local leaders and community health workers in hunting the disease. They also developed data management practices to more effectively track and analyze the evolution of the epidemic. By year-end, most of the new Ebola infections involved Liberians who were already under observation. In another important measure of success, the time between patients’ onsets of symptoms and their medical isolations shortened markedly. The ability to hunt down Ebola slowed the spread of the disease and helped bring an end to the epidemic in May 2015.

In mid 2014, health-care services in Liberia were being overwhelmed by the largest-ever outbreak of Ebola virus disease. Transmitted through contact with the bodily fluids of an infected person, the disease was spreading at a rate of 80 new cases per week by the end of July, killing up to 70% of the people it infected. The country’s fragile health-care system, damaged by a 14-year civil war, could not respond to all of the demands it faced. The rate of new infections rose, and schools and health facilities closed. Collaborating with international partners and five months into the epidemic, the Liberian government created a dedicated Incident Management System (IMS) to coordinate all elements of the country’s fight against the disease. The IMS team created a clear decision-making framework, provided responders with adequate infrastructure and technical support, and set up a coherent procedure for communicating with a frightened and anxious public. At the end of the outbreak, the question was whether Liberia’s approach had provided a model for managing responses to infectious disease outbreaks in other, similar settings or whether the approach had left room for making the system work better.

When Ebola crossed into Liberia in early 2014, the West African nation had few defenses. Because no effective vaccine was available at the time, the only way to limit the spread of the viral disease was to restrict physical contact with those who were infected, what they had touched, and the bodies of victims. But that advice countermanded the most basic of human instincts: to comfort a sick child, hug an ill relative, or shake hands with a friend or coworker. The challenge of changing human behavior was especially difficult because Liberia was still recovering from a long civil war. Public distrust of government, persistent rumors, linguistic diversity, and limited communication capacity hobbled efforts to send a clear public message and win citizens’ cooperation. After top-down tactics—including forcible quarantines of whole communities—failed to stem the rate of infection, a small team of Liberian officials, supported by international partners, realized that effective steps to contain the disease would require active participation by citizens themselves. The officials engaged Liberians in developing an information campaign and recruited people throughout the country to visit their neighbors door-to-door, explain the steps people could take to protect themselves, and respond to questions. Although the complexity of the Ebola response and the volatility of the outbreak had made it hard to measure the success of the social mobilization effort in reducing new infections, an analysis of timing together with anecdotal evidence strongly suggested that the effort helped save lives and contributed to the disease’s decline during the final months of 2014.

In April 1994, after a decades-long struggle for democracy and more than three years of arduous peace negotiations, Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress formed a power-sharing government with its rivals: the National Party and the Inkatha Freedom Party. It was vital to overcome lingering distrust between the three groups, which had been locked in a violent conflict. Based on the outcome of an election and in accordance with an interim constitution adopted the year before, political leaders apportioned cabinet posts and appointed ministers from all three parties to the new government. They then tried to design practices conducive to governing well, and they introduced innovations that became models for other countries. When policy disputes arose, they set up ad hoc committees to find common ground, or they sought venues outside the cabinet to adjudicate the disagreements. Despite the National Party’s withdrawal from the power-sharing cabinet in mid 1996, South Africa’s Government of National Unity oversaw the creation of a historic new constitution, restructured the country’s legal system and public service, and implemented a raft of social programs aimed at undoing the injustices of apartheid.

In June 2012, Rwanda’s national land registry completed a nearly four-year project that mapped every one of the country’s 10.4 million parcels and prepared title documents for 8 million landholders. It was an unprecedented accomplishment in a country in which lack of land titling had weighed on the economy and led to escalating conflict over access to land. The mapping program promised to reduce tensions by establishing an orderly system for registering and transferring landownership. However, the system could work only if Rwandans registered every transaction, and in 2012, a survey found that only about one of every eight landowners had even bothered to pick up their official titles. The registry urgently had to both make it easier to register transactions and build public awareness about the importance of keeping the land database up-to-date. A registry team launched a nationwide campaign to raise awareness about the importance of titling and of reporting all land transactions. Managers simplified procedures and registration forms. And to provide greater access in rural areas, where titling was nearly unknown, the registry decentralized services and introduced a new software platform to speed transactions. By mid 2017, more than 7 million people had collected their titles, and registrations of sales, purchases, and other kinds of transfers had begun to improve. Still, the number of transactions reported in 2016 fell short of the registry’s target, indicating that further work lay ahead.

Following Kenya’s disputed 2007 presidential election, fighting broke out between supporters of incumbent president Mwai Kibaki and opposition leader Raila Odinga. Triggered by the announcement that Kibaki had retained the presidency, the violence ultimately claimed more than 1,200 lives and displaced 350,000 people. A February 2008 power-sharing agreement between the two leaders helped restore order, but finding a way to govern together in a new unity cabinet posed a daunting challenge. Under the terms negotiated, the country would have both a president and a prime minister until either the dissolution of parliament, a formal withdrawal by either party from the agreement, or the passage of a referendum on a new constitution. The agreement further stipulated that each party would have half the ministerial portfolios. Leaders from the cabinet secretariat and the new prime minister’s office worked to forge policy consensus, coordinate, and encourage ministries to focus on implementation. The leaders introduced a new interagency committee system, teamed ministers of one party with deputy ministers from the other, clarified practices for preparing policy documents, and introduced performance contracts. Independent monitoring, an internationally mediated dialogue to help resolve disputes, and avenues for back- channel communication encouraged compromise between the two sides and eased tensions when discord threatened to derail the work of the executive. Despite the odds firmly stacked against it, Kenya’s Grand Coalition cabinet was largely able to govern according to a unified policy agenda. As a result, the coalition managed to implement some of the important reforms stipulated under the power-sharing deal, including the adoption of a new constitution. However, the level of political corruption remained high.

In the mid 2000s, Indonesia’s Directorate General of Taxes (DGT) was still struggling to recover from the shock of the Asian financial crisis of the previous decade. Tax revenue had plummeted during the crisis, and the collection rate remained well below accepted standards, as well as below the standards of many peers in the region. In 2006, the directorate’s new leaders launched a nationwide overhaul, drawing lessons from a successful pilot program that had reorganized the DGT’s biggest offices and enabled large taxpayers to settle all of their tax-related affairs with a single visit to one office rather than having to go through multiple steps. Expanding that pilot to more than 300 locations across a 3,000-mile archipelago presented no small challenge. The implementers built a digital database that linked all offices to a central server in the capital of Jakarta, developed competency testing and training that bolstered the quality of staff, and created new positions to improve relationships with taxpayers. Other measures aimed to reduce corruption and tax fraud. When political and practical crosswinds frustrated the DGT’s efforts to build the workforce its leaders thought it needed, the agency turned to big-data analytics to improve compliance and broaden the tax base. By 2018, domestic revenue mobilization had plateaued, but the changes introduced had produced important improvements. The question was then what to do to broaden the base further without decreasing incentives for investment or raising administrative costs to unsustainable levels.

In late 2015, Liberia’s newly appointed education minister, George Werner, recognized that the government school system was wasting money and failing its students. Shortly before Werner assumed office, a pilot project had identified significant numbers of ghost workers (teachers who never showed up for their jobs or were fraudulently included on the payroll) as well as teachers who lacked even basic qualifications. Although the project covered just three of Liberia’s 15 counties (the most populous counties of Montserrado, Nimba, and Bong), the findings illuminated a long-standing national problem. Resolving to put an end to the abuses, Werner and senior ministry officials created a program implementation unit dedicated to the nationwide project, refined vetting procedures for assessing qualifications, and introduced mandatory competency testing that laid the foundation for additional reforms. President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf provided crucial political support when the project ran into resistance from the national teachers’ association. By February 2018, the education ministry had removed 83% of the 2,046 ghost teachers, and planned to remove the remaining 17% that it identified during the last six months of the project. Overall, the project generated $2.3 million in annual savings that opened spaces for new teachers in the school system and budget, with the ministry expecting that this number would increase to $3.1 million once all ghost teachers were gone. As a result of the project, the ministry hired 1,371 trained new graduate teachers. Still, challenges remained: 49% of public school teachers had failed the competency tests. Armed with this important baseline data, the ministry had to decide what to do to improve teacher quality.

When he won Indonesia’s October 2004 presidential election, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono found he had inherited a struggling land administration system that would block progress on some of his key policy initiatives. The National Land Agency (known by the abbreviation BPN, for Badan Pertanahan Nasional) managed records on landownership and transactions. But the organization was dogged by corruption, high costs, and delays. On average, it took 33 days, six visits to a local land office, and US$110 for landowners to register property transactions. In addition, the BPN held ownership records for only a third of the estimated 89 million land parcels on the thousands of islands in the sprawling archipelago. In keeping with his campaign pledge to spur rural development, Yudhoyono appointed a new leadership team to revamp the BPN and get the agency on track. The team partnered with the World Bank in a program to title unregistered land and then rolled out a new land database that digitally stored all new transactions, equipped vehicles to deliver mobile services in rural areas, and worked with other ministries to design a comprehensive OneMap for the country. Although the reforms improved efficiency and sharply increased the pace of property registration, 10 years after Yudhoyono’s election it remained clear that additional measures were still needed to reach the goal of a well-functioning, corruption-free, comprehensive, and sustainable land registry.

In the early 2000s, Tanzania struggled to protect the land rights of the 75% of its citizens who lived in rural areas. Rapid population growth and rising investment in commercial agriculture had increased land scarcity and created the potential for violent conflict in parts of the country. In accordance with the provisions of a new law, the national lands ministry launched a pilot project in 2001 to title 158 villages and more than 1,000 individual parcels. Building on lessons from the project, the government passed a new land-use planning act, created a new implementation program, and drew up a strategic plan to title rural land throughout the country. Starting in 2008, the lands ministry worked with community leaders to grant villages and their residents title documents that protected them from land grabbing. Villages also decided how they would use communal land and how they would set up committees to resolve boundary disputes. Officials constructed registry buildings in villages and districts to house title documents before surveying individual land parcels and handing over titles to village residents. By 2017, more than 11,000 of Tanzania’s approximately 12,500 villages had mapped their outer limits, and about 13% of villages had also adopted land-use plans. Of the approximately 6 million households located within rural villages, about 400,000 also had obtained individual title documents.

Following the 1994 transition from racial apartheid to democracy, South Africa’s government aimed to provide tenure security for the estimated 16 million black South Africans living in communal areas. But the lack of a clear legal framework applicable to most communal areas meant that progress was slow. In contrast, a viable legal framework did exist to guide tenure reform in smaller communal areas formerly known as “coloured reserves,” where a series of apartheid laws had settled people of mixed race. In 2009, land reform Minister Gugile Nkwiti designated one such area—Ebenhaeser, on the country’s west coast—as a rural “flagship” project. The aim was both to transfer land held in trust by the government to Ebenhaeser community members and to settle a restitution claim. Provincial officials from Nkwinti’s ministry, working with private consultants, organized a communal association to serve as landowner. They helped negotiate an agreement with white farmers to return land that had originally belonged to coloured residents. The community also developed a land administration plan that would pave the way for Ebenhaeser’s residents to become the legal owners of their communal territory.

In April 2006, six international donor agencies established a program to help Mozambique’s government register community land rights and improve tenure security for rural residents. Under Mozambique’s constitution, the state owned all land. A 1997 law, adopted after a 15-year civil war, sought to recognize rural communities’ customary tenure rights while encouraging commercial investment through the issuance of 50-year leaseholds. But many communities failed to register their holdings with the central government, leaving their rights vulnerable to powerful state and corporate interests. To address the problem, the donor group established the Community Land Initiative (iniciativa para Terras Comunitárias, or iTC), a program to register community parcels in the government cadastre and empower communities to negotiate with potential investors. The iTC coordinated with national and local governments as well as nongovernmental organizations to map the borders of community lands. The program informed community members about their land rights and how to use and protect them. It also established natural resource committees, which enabled communities to receive shares of the natural resource taxes paid by commercial investors working on communal lands. The iTC further created producer associations to support budding commercial farmers, resolved boundary disputes, and worked with provincial cadastral offices to issue certificates that specified property boundaries. By mid 2016, the program had registered 655 communities in the government cadastre—nearly four times the estimated 171 community registrations carried out before the iTC was established. The registrations covered 6.9 million hectares and 10% of the country’s rural population.

In early 2013, six years after the end of a devastating civil war that claimed 17,000 lives and displaced an estimated 100,000 people, the Himalayan nation of Nepal faced the prospect of renewed violence. A 2006 peace accord between an insurgent Maoist political movement and traditional political parties called for ending Nepal’s 239-year-old monarchy and creating a new democratic system. But disputes over power sharing led to the failure of four successive coalition governments and slowed the effort to negotiate and enact a new constitution. In May 2012, the deadlock resulted in the dissolution of the elected legislature, which had also been serving as a constituent assembly. It was crucial to hold fresh elections. But when political parties were unable to agree on the formation of a coalition government for steering the country toward that goal, leaders of the four main political blocs, including the Maoists, agreed to set up a caretaker government under Khil Raj Regmi, the sitting chief justice of the Supreme Court and head of the country’s judiciary. Regmi and his team of technocratic ministers strengthened cabinet decision-making procedures, agreed on a shared governance agenda, and worked closely with both the election commission of Nepal and political parties to plan elections for a new constituent assembly. Despite concerns about having the same person in charge of both the executive and judicial branches at the same time, the caretaker cabinet succeeded in holding credible elections that put Nepal back on track toward a new constitution.

Despite the attempt to transform the system of state child support in South Africa shortly after the transition to democracy, the initial changes resulting in the implementation of the Child Support Grant were only partial in nature. This paper explains why institutional stickiness in the shape of failed reform efforts occurred in certain areas, while radical change took place in others. This effort involves the sequential integration of insights from the historical and rational choice variants of neoinstitutionalism. The resulting analysis accounts for the formation of distinct reform preferences, the strategic interactions which shaped eventual outcomes, as well as the ultimate incompleteness of policy transformation in a process of institutional layering. The paper therefore represents a practical attempt at overcoming the divisions between these neoinstitutionalist approaches, while also producing an analysis of a policy arena that is undertheorised.

This essay was selected as one of the winners for the 2015 St. Gallen Symposium Wings of Excellence Award.

It interprets the tremendous recent proliferation of social protection cash transfers throughout the developing world as potentially precipitating the implementation of Basic Income Guarantees (BIGs) in some of the world's poorest regions. Through an examination of the silent revolution entailed through this recent expansion of social protection, it argues that the BIG is a policy idea whose time may have come.

Recent decades have witnessed the profound proliferation of social assistance cash transfer programmes throughout numerous countries of the developing world. While scholars have subsequently paid a great deal of attention to the largely positive socioeconomic effects generated through the expansion of these redistributive interventions, the literature has neglected the fact of tremendous empirical variation regarding the ways in which divergent countries have designed their social assistance policy regimes. The smattering of studies which have taken up the question have usually been content to regard fundamental differences in these patterns of welfare provision as the result of functional and ideational factors on the basis of conventional wisdom, rather than through rigorous analysis.

In the first study of its kind, this inquiry explicitly addresses this gap in the literature by resolutely focusing on the systemic variation in social assistance provision in the two benchmark emerging welfare states of South Africa and Brazil. Its central aim is to account for the disparity between the policy regimes instituted by the two countries. The fact that South Africa and Brazil have adopted very different approaches regarding issues of coverage, conditionality and orientation results in the construction of distinct typologies which sees the South African system classified as 'productive' and the Brazilian approach as 'protective'. The description of this empirically observable divergence is followed by an account of its manifestation through the application of a historical institutionalist framework, operationalised by employing the analytical approach of Actor-Centred Institutionalism.

The resulting investigation into the comparative political economy of social assistance provision reveals that, while conventionally accepted functional and ideational hypotheses fail to explain the divergence across the cases, variation on the institutional dimension is able to convincingly account for the fact that South Africa and Brazil have adopted qualitatively different policy approaches. The study thereby provides the first explanatory account of the contemporary domestic emergence of programmes which have become centrally important in combating poverty and inequality throughout the countries of the developing world. In addition to making a significant and entirely novel explanatory contribution to the knowledge on the subject, the findings attest to the decisive practical importance of the role played by local institutional structures in shaping context appropriate policy interventions.

This study identifies the way in which Brazil was able to achieve significant economic and social development during the Presidency of Luiz Inácio Lula Da Silva from 2003 to 2010. The element which makes the achievement of this development extremely interesting is the fact that it was engineered by a traditionally radical Leftist party, the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT – Workers’ Party) within the context of the globalized world economy. Throughout much of its existence, the PT has called for a radical socialist transformation of Brazilian society. However, once it came to power, it not only rejected radical positions, but acquiesced fully with the constraints placed upon it by global capital. Thus, in addition to describing the process of development in Brazil, this study also attempts to account for the way in which it was achieved. This is done by postulating that the Lula (as he is commonly referred to) administration was successful in solidifying Brazilian economic fundamentals, as well as in significantly reducing poverty and inequality in one of the most unequal societies in the world, because it adopted Third Way economic and social policies. It is argued that, even though there were few clear indications from the government that it regarded itself as following the Third Way, a practical examination of Lula’s economic and social policies indicate that they overwhelmingly conform to the prescripts of the Third Way.

The period from 1997 to 2008 alone saw the number of countries implementing variations of such non-contributory schemes increase from 3 to at least 28. While limited data hampers attempts at assessing the countless small-scale programmes contemporarily implemented around the world, the cases of Brazil and South Africa are instructive for examining the rise of this ‘revolution from the Global South’. This paper briefly conceptualises social assistance, followed by a discussion on the development and composition of the social assistance systems in Brazil and South Africa.

The report consolidates the performance information of Western Cape municipalities during 2009/10 into a Provincial Annual Report and provides an overview of the successes and challenges facing the local government sphere in the Province. It also highlights the role of the Provincial government in supporting municipalities in order to provide a comprehensive picture of the state of affairs in the Western Cape.