Paper short abstract:

This paper examines moral and social attachment to labour among the long-term unemployed in South Africa and Namibia, along with state and civil society perceptions of work and distribution, and the way this attachment influences proposals for more universalist social protection policies.

Paper long abstract:

More universal forms of social protection - for instance, unconditional cash transfers or universal basic income grants - are getting increasing attention from both scholars and activists on the African continent. Yet despite promises, activism and positive feasibility studies, no country has actually implemented universal basic income grants outside of small-scale pilots. Why? This paper makes the argument that the key impediment to basic income grants is a failure of imagination. This is not simply a failure of political and economic imagination by policy makers, but rather a far broader failure to imagine a society where welfare and the distribution of resources is no longer tied to wage labour - a critical dimension missing from recent work on the topic (Ferguson 2015). The launching point of this argument is qualitative research with welfare grant recipients in South Africa, a country which supports a third of its population with social grants and which seriously considered but ultimately rejected implementing a basic income grant in favor of work-linked welfare policies. In-depth interviews with welfare recipients in South Africa, complimented by broader qualitative research with policy makers, activists and citizens in both South Africa and neighboring Namibia, show that people across class, race and political divides are resistant to basic income grant ideas because of the perceived threat of these ideas to deeply held attachments to wage labour as a key social, moral, redistributional and meaning making category.