Reparative histories, the welfare state, and the future of income assistance for working-age adults in South Africa

Applying Gurminder Bhambra’s reparative history framework, this paper examines the historical institutionalisation of income protection for working-age adults and asks how this can inform contemporary debates about welfare reform. A ‘reparative frame’, Bhambra argues, ‘brings together consideration of the broader histories responsible for the configuration of contemporary structures of inequality’ (Bhambra et al., 2024: 4). This paper situates South Africa’s basic income movement in the broader history of income assistance for working-age adults in South Africa. It focuses specifically on the development of the Unemployment Insurance Fund (UIF) throughout the 20 th century and its reform in the early 21 st ; the emergence of the basic income debates in the late 1990s; and, finally, the introduction of the Social Relief of Distress grant and the subsequent reemergence of the earlier basic income debates. It illustrates how unemployment insurance was used to aid the White minority state in pursuit of racial segregation and the reproduction of racialised capitalism. In doing so, the Fund was characterized by racialised, gendered and classed exclusions that continue to impact access to unemployment insurance in contemporary South Africa. Social policy reform following the transition to democracy in 1994 failed to adequately address the gaps in the unemployment insurance system and access to income assistance for working-age adults continues to be stratified by race, class and gender. In highlighting the stratifying function of the South African welfare state, I make the case for the introduction of a basic income grant and propose alternative sources of financing for the increased budgetary requirements that such a grant would require.