Books and Book Chapters (Political Studies)

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Politics and higher education in East Africa from the 1920s to 1970
(Sun Media Bloemfontein, 2012) Mngomezulu, Bhekithemba Richard
The development of higher education in East Africa has a long history. For many years, the process was characterised by political wrangling, negotiations and compromises by black and white constituencies. What eventually became the federal University of East Africa (UEA) in 1963 was a saturation point of a process initiated by British authorities as part of the colonial thinking about imperial integration from the 1920s – an initiative that was later embraced by East Africans in the late1950s. During the inter-war period the British Colonial Office started formulating a standard policy on African education for its African territories. As part of this initiative, on 24 November 1923, the Duke of Devonshire, Secretary of State for the Colonies, appointed a Commission under the chairmanship of W.G.A. Ormsby-Gore, Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies, and tasked it to investigate and report on matters of Native Education in the British Colonies and Protectorates in Tropical Africa. The main goal was to advance the progress of education in those Colonies and Protectorates. The Commission concluded its work and submitted its Report to Devonshire early in 1925. The latter subsequently published the Report as Command Paper No. 2374 in March 1925. This marked the early stages of the process of developing higher education in East Africa. One of the key recommendations of the Ormsby-Gore Commission was that the time was opportune for some public statement of principles and policy which would prove a useful guide to all those engaged, directly or indirectly, in the advancement of native education in the African continent. Thus, although the primary focus of the Ormsby-Gore Commission was not East Africa per se, this memorandum laid a solid foundation for the development of higher education in East Africa.
Informality disallowed: State restrictions on informal traders and micro-enterprises in Browns farm, Cape Town, South Africa
(Pan-African University Press, 2019) Piper, Laurence; Charman, Andrew; Petersen, Leif
This chapter examines the impact of regulations and law enforcement on the economic activities of informal traders and micro-entrepreneurs in marginalised communities on the urban periphery. Our case site is Browns Farm, Philippi, a township in the City of Cape Town, South Africa, where a micro-enterprise census and business operator survey was conducted in 2011 (Charman et al, 2015). The chapter argues that despite the signi¿cant number of informal businesses in South African townships, the state continues to pursue efforts that either prevent formalisation or circumscribe informal activities. At the heart of our argument is the assertion that the informal economic practices of the urban poor constitute a ‘lived economy’ whose
Tenderpreneur (also tenderpreneurship and tenderpreneurism)
(UCL Press, 2018) Piper, Laurence; Charman, Andrew
‘Tenderpreneur’ is a South African colloquialism for a businessperson who uses political contacts to secure government procurement contracts (called ‘tenders’) often as part of reciprocal exchange of favours or benefits. The term is a portmanteau of ‘tender’ (to provide business services) and ‘entrepreneur’. Today, ‘tenderpreneurs’ are associated with corruption, nepotism and clientelism. This is because the award of many tenders is driven by informal interests and/or political affiliation, rather than the requirements of formal procedure. The informality of ‘tenderpreneurship’ thus resides in these extra-legal social and political relationships.
The tale of two publics: Media, political representation and citizenship in Hout Bay,
(HSRC Press, 2017) Piper, Laurence; Anciano, Fiona.; von Lieres, Bettina
This chapter makes the case that access to the spaces of public debate in post-apartheid South Africa is about the challenge of political representation as much as it is about the challenge of access to communication technologies. These representational issues centre on the racialised and partisan nature of state-society relations framed, in part, through identity discourses and, for many poor citizens, patronage politics linked to local governance. In the urban setting this often also takes a spatial form linked to the neighbourhood or community, and involves local leaders who invoke the exclusive right to mediate for poor and marginalised groups in the name of liberation nationalism and service delivery – elsewhere termed the politics of the ‘party-society’.
Introduction: The Crucial Role of Mediators in Relations between States and Citizens
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) Piper, Laurence; von Lieres, Bettina
This book sets out to answer a deceptively simple question: how do citizens and state engage in the global south? The answer is not simple; it is indeed complex and multifaceted, but we argue that much of the time this engagement involves a practice of intermediation. From local to international level, citizens are almost always represented to the state through third parties that are distinguished by the intermediary role that they play. These intermediaries include political parties, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), community-based organisations, social movements, armed non-state actors, networks and individuals. For its part, the state often engages citizens through intermediaries from private service providers to civil society activists and even local militia.
The Inkatha Freedom Party: Between the Impossible and the Ineffective.
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) Piper, Laurence
From the perspective of the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), the 2004 election was remarkable in two ways. First, the IFP fared worse than ever. Formed by Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi in 1975, the party is rooted in rural Zulu people of the KwaZulu-Natal province. During the apartheid era, the IFP virtually was the KwaZulu government. After 1994, it was the leading party in the province, and a governing partner of the African National Congress (ANC) at the national level. The 2004 election saw the IFP lose its thirty years of dominance in KwaZulu-Natal to the ANC, and with it, the party’s stake in national government.
Mediation and the contradictions of representing the urban poor in South Africa: The case of SANCO leaders in Imizamo Yethu in Cape Town, South Africa.
(Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2014) Piper, Laurence; Bénit-Gbaffou, Claire
The formal system of local governance in South Africa has the ‘ward’ as its lowest and smallest electoral level — a spatial unit consisting of between 5,000 and 15,000 voters. The ward is equivalent to the ‘constituency’ in much of the rest of the world. Notably, the history of South Africa means that the vast majority of people live in ‘communities’ or neighbourhoods that are far smaller in scale than the ward, and most of these are the site of multiple claims of informal leadership by a variety of local organisations and their leaders. For example, the Cape Town ward, in which our case study is located, includes at least five different communities, distinguished in racial and class terms.
Faith-based organisations, local governance and citizenship in South Africa
(University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2009) Piper, Laurence
Small parties and independents – from also-rans to kingmakers
(SUN Press, 2012) Africa, Cherrel; van Rooyen, Garth
Small parties and independents play an important role in South Africa’s democracy. It is on the level of the local that these small parties and independents have some chance to make indents in terms of winning a few wards that could turn them into council kingmakers, or at least represent some particular local constituency needs. This chapter examines the multitude of small and micro-parties, as well as independent candidates in the 2011 local government elections. It first features classification-based endeavours to ‘make sense of this multitude of often-neglected but crucial political players in South Africa’. The classifications use the number of contesting candidates and election outcomes as the two classificatory principles. The chapter also explores the increase in contestation by independent candidates. Thereafter it investigates the details of their results, and the reasons for their largely dismal displays in local election 2011. The chapter concludes that while these political actors remain largely in an underworld of small and micro-parties, they retain enthusiasm for electoral contestation, thus continuing to add value to multi-party democracy in South Africa.
Further from the people – bipartisan ‘nationalisation’ thwarting the electoral system
(SUN Press, 2012) Piper, Laurence
This chapter argues that local government elections offer a unique opportunity in South Africa’s political system for voters to practice forms of democracy that are more local, plural and accountable in character than at provincial or national level. A key reason for this is the mixed electoral system where half of all councillors are directly elected from the wards in which they live. The 2011 election supplied significant evidence of voters attempting to make use of this opportunity, particularly around the candidate selection process of the major parties, and through the accountability talk that dominated public debate. However, analysis of both ‘supply’ (party behaviour) and ‘demand’ (voter choice) suggests that this democratic potential was outweighed by bipartisan politics between the ANC and DA which affirmed the national over the local, a choice between two parties over many, and reinforced identity-based political loyalties over the direct accountability of politicians. In short, the 2011 elections were rendered a proxy for a national competition, frustrating much of the unique democratic potential that local government elections offer, effectively taking local politics further from the people. The proposal to hold national, provincial and local elections simultaneously in the future will further impede the democratic potential of the local electoral system.
Popular mobilisation, party dominance and participatory governance in South Africa
(Zed Books, 2010) Piper, Laurence; Nadvi, Lubna
This chapter seeks to explore the character of popular mobilization in South Africa, mostly at the local level. This is done through exploring the interaction of two independent processes. The first concerns the relative empowerment of political parties and the disempowerment of civil society (especially social movements) by the democratization process in South Africa. The second concerns the introduction of new institutions of public participation in local governance. Hence, while the latter are portrayed as ‘invited spaces’ in which communities can engage the local state constructively, the poor design of these spaces, a lack of genuine will on the part of elites and the relative power of key social actors mean that, in practice, they are either meaningless processes or simply co-opted by political parties. Notably, civil society has tended either to disengage from the local state and focus on provincial and national levels, or to resort to forms of popular protest to be heard by local government – the non-governmental organization (NGO) sector usually favouring the first approach and social movements the second.

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