My dissertation, Taken for Granted: Geographies of Social Welfare in South Africa, explores the collision between normative assumptions about cash transfers as public goods and the lived experience of cash transfers as private debts. While most global development theorists assume cash transfers are easy, apolitical monetary instruments, I argue that they are not value-neutral at all, and are increasingly used to conscript poor people into a financialized economy through indebtedness. Through three years of fieldwork, I show how South Africa’s cash transfer program was outsourced to a private company, Net1 UEPS Technologies, which compelled recipients into using their grants as collateral for loans. Such loans were risk-free for the lender, who built a segregated and monopolistic banking system and ensured recipients could not default. The financial technologies of the social grant program did not merely bring grantees into the same banking system as the rest of the country, but confined them within an entirely separate domain, and subjected them to private indirect rule without public oversight.

My argument builds on the multivalent meanings of debt embedded within the grant program, as economic, political, cultural, and familial obligations. While the post-apartheid social contract – between citizens and the state – is predicated on equality before the law, the indebtedness produced through the social grant program provided a new basis for racialized and gendered differentiation. Since grants were targeted toward poor Black women in their roles as mothers and grandmothers (85% of all recipients), debts were passed on to this population at the very site of familial care-giving. In post-apartheid South Africa, where political independence has not guaranteed social justice or economic freedom, this redistributive program was intended to consolidate national legitimacy. Yet, the government consistently used social grants to sustain a liberal democratic order that continually reproduces racialized and gendered inequalities. Such contradictions enabled social grant delivery to become a potent struggle over “who owes what to whom?”