Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses the role of agents, lawyers and consumer rights activists in facilitating income redistribution in South Africa.

Paper long abstract:

This paper discusses the role of agents, lawyers and consumer rights activists in facilitating income redistribution in South Africa. The funding and positioning of these agents derives from a space where boundaries blur between redistributive welfare, wages, debt, and financialised capitalism. South Africa's democratic transition - combined with financial liberalisation and growing unemployment - encouraged a borrowing boom. In its most recent guise it has seen sophisticated new technologies of biometric registration bringing millions of poor 'social grant' recipients within the ambit of multinational which in 2012 won the tender from the government's South African Social Security Agency (SASSA) to deliver these grants. It has used its access to beneficiaries' biometric details to offer its own loans (via subsidiaries) and to allow airtime sellers, the electricity provider, other microlenders and funeral insurance sales agents to sell them products, ensuring repayment through direct deductions from their grants on - or before - payday. Attempting to regulate the otherwise untrammelled activities of these lenders, hybrid private/corporate/community-based initiatives have stepped in where the state refuses to go. In a setting where unemployment or casual/underpaid employment is rife, activist/advisers attempt both to promote sustainable householding and also to curb borrowing. But their concern about the collateralisation of welfare - about the erosion of people's socio-economic rights to redistribution (including social security/assistance, education, nutrition, and secure housing) - often fails to recognize that life without borrowing, worldwide, has become increasingly impossible.