Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how community members and local officials create and deploy certain identities to justify the discrepancies between service delivery policies and what they implement on the ground drawing from the experience of Duncan Village in the Eastern Cape Province.

Paper long abstract:

The struggle against and subsequent demise of colonialism and apartheid was embedded with expectations over citizenship and liberty in the new dispensation. However, this has been constrained by the expansion of neoliberalism which has undermined citizens' access to basic rights through privatisation of basic services. This has propelled various forms of protests confronting the local state and some calling for resignation of local officials. This subject has attracted significant scholarship. However, most focus on unpacking discrepancies between policy and implementation as local authorities use public goods for clientelism whilst almost paying lip service to struggles and contestations over the manifestation of these discrepancies on the ground as fellow community members fight over the distribution of state resources resources. This paper examines how community members and local officials create and deploy certain identities to justify the discrepancies between service delivery policies and what they implement on the ground drawing from the experience of Duncan Village in the Eastern Cape Province. Informed by empirical evidence drawn from an ethnographic study, the paper argues that patronage politics and clientelism creates descrepancies between service delivery policies and implementation. This produces a fractured citizenship characterised by contestations over the scarce resources and the forging of and contestations over (new) identities like inzalelwane (born and bred) and abantu bokufika (newcomers) deployed to justify unequal distribution of state resources. Furthermore, these identities inform how state resources are allocated.