Property and Freedom: Is Access to Legal Title and Assets the Path to Overcoming Poverty and Promoting Freedom in South Africa?

Featured Speakers

Paul Collier, Keynote Speaker, is Professor of Economics and Public Policy in the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford. He is also the Director of the Centre for the Study of African Economies at the University, and a Fellow of St Antony's College.  He holds a Distinction Award from the University of Oxford, and in 1988 he was awarded the Edgar Graham Book Prize for the co-written Labour and poverty in rural Tanzania: Ujamaa and rural development in the United Republic of Tanzania. Other books he has written include The Plundered Planet: Why We Must, and How We Can, Manage Nature for Global Prosperity and The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It.

Drucilla Cornell an American philosopher and feminist theorist, whose work has been influential in political and legal philosophy, ethics, deconstruction, critical theory, and feminism. Cornell is Professor of Political Science, Comparative Literature and Women’s & Gender Studies at Rutgers University. From 2008 to the end of 2009, Professor Cornell held the National Research Foundation Chair in Customary Law, Indigenous Values, and the Dignity Jurisprudence at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. She founded the uBuntu project in 2003, and continues to be the co-director of that project with Chuma Himonga. Recent books she has written include uBuntu and the Law: African Ideals and Postapartheid Jurisprudence and Law and Revolution in South Africa: uBuntu, Dignity and the Struggle for Constitutional Transformation

Lewis Gordon an American philosopher who has written extensively on race and racism, postcolonial phenomenology, Africana and black existentialism, and on the works and thought of W. E. B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon. Books he has written include Her Majesty’s Other Children: Sketches of Racism from a Neocolonial Age, winner of Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award for the Study of Human Rights in North America. He is currently Professor of Philosophy and Africana Studies, with affiliations in Judaic Studies and Caribbean, Latino/a, and Latin American Studies, at the University of Connecticut at Storrs.

Tim Harris South African politician, a Democratic Alliance member of Parliament's National Assembly, and a Parliamentary Counsellor to the Leader of the Oppositions Mmusi Maimane. He served as the Shadow Minister of Finance from 2012 to 2014. He is also the vice president for Africa on the bureau of Liberal International, the global group of liberal parties, and sits on the board of SiliconCape, Cape Town's technology industry promotion body.

Jeff Herbst an American political scientist and the 16th president of Colgate University. Herbst has written extensively on political and international affairs in Africa. His book, States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control, received the 2001 Gregory M. Luebbert Prize for the best book in comparative politics for the year 2000 from the American Political Science Association. It was also a finalist for the 2001 Melville J. Herskovits Award for the best book in African studies awarded by the African Studies Association.

Wilmot James a notable South African Member of Parliament and academic, as Senior Visiting Fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities at Bard College. He serves as the country’s Shadow Minister of Basic Education and is the Federal Chairperson of the Democratic Alliance. James is an Honorary Professor of Sociology (University of Pretoria) and in the Division of Human Genetics (University of Cape Town).  

Amy Kapczynski is an Associate Professor of Law at Yale Law School and director of the Global Health Justice Partnership.Her areas of research including information policy, intellectual property law, international law, and global health. She received her A.B. from Princeton University, M. Phil. from Cambridge University, M.A. from Queen Mary and Westfield College at University of London, and J.D. from Yale Law School.

Vincent Maphai has, since March 2009, been the Executive Director of Corporate Affairs and Transformation at SAB Limited. Previously he was Chairman of BHPBilliton Southern Africa. He holds a PhD from the University of Natal, an honours degree in international politics from UNISA and completed an advanced management programme at Harvard University.

Greg Mills heads the Brenthurst Foundation, based in Johannesburg, South Africa. From 1996-2005 he served as the National Director of the South African Institute of International Affairs. He has lectured at universities and institutions in Africa and abroad, is on the visiting staff of the NATO Higher Defense College in Rome, and is a Fellow of the London-based Royal Society of Arts. Books he has written include Poverty to Prosperity: Globalisation, Good Governance and African Recovery, The Future of Africa: New Order in Sight?, and Why Africa is Poor: And What Africans Can Do About It

Palesa Morudu a regular columnist in Business Day newspaper BDlive who writes from Cape Town. She is a marketing and communications specialist and her career spans a variety of global and SA management positions including sales and marketing director for AllAfrica Global Media in Washington, DC and deputy director at the Government Communication and Information Services. Her experience includes presenting technical concepts related to CSI and broad-based black economic empowerment.

Schedule

Monday, April 6th

10:00 AM Panel 

• Greg Mills
• Jeff Herbst  
• Drucilla Cornell              

11:45 AM Panel                                 

• Tim Harris
• Lewis Gordon                            

1pm-230pm Lunch Break

2:30 PM Panel                                   

• Wimot James
• Palesa Morudu

4:00 PM Panel

• Amy Kapczynski
• Panelist, TBA

6pm Keynote Speaker

• Paul Collier

Abstracts

Poverty and Inequality: how important are property rights? Paul Collier
The ascent out of poverty is, first and foremost, about the returns to labour. The main endowment of poor people that has potential economic value is their ability to work. The process which determines the productivity of their work time is therefore also the process which determines most of their income. The bedrock of productivity is scale and specialization. Achieving scale and specialization has two components, one micro the other macro. The micro component is the organizations which harness the labour of ordinary people into sufficiently high productivity that they can be paid a wage consistent with a decent lifestyle. I will term them ‘effective organizations’. Most African countries are acutely short of such organizations and in my talk I will briefly discuss why. The macro component is the cities which enable effective organizations to cluster close together, and enable workers to live close to their clusters of production. Think of them as ‘effective cities’. Most African countries are acutely short of such cities. Effective cities depend upon three distinct investment processes being coordinated: residential property, public infrastructure, and business property. In most of Africa investment in residential property has been disastrously inadequate. It is because ordinary people often lack marketable property rights on their homes, even if, informally, they consider themselves to be the owner. Because they do not have secure and marketable rights, they choose not to invest in decent housing, and nor, since such investments would not provide collateral, can financial institutions lend to finance them. The most visible manifestation of inadequate property rights is that African cities typically have huge slum areas of single-storey homes. In consequence, either population density is too low, or floor space per person is inadequate. If population density is too low, then the average distance to work needed to support a cluster of effective organizations is too high. What ‘too high’ means, is that the transport costs required for workers to get to the cluster would absorb too much of the productivity which work would generate for the cluster to be viable in competition with clusters elsewhere in the world. In many of the public housing schemes in South Africa, although ordinary people have acquired decent quality of housing, the location is so far removed from the opportunities for productive employment that the implied transport costs are indeed prohibitive. If instead, people sacrifice floor space in order to be close enough to employment clusters to work in them, living conditions cannot be decent. For example children will have nowhere to do homework, or to go to sleep before adults. Hence, the property rights necessary to enable residential investment not only have obvious direct consequences for the quality of life, they have important but non-obvious consequences for labour productivity. Property rights are related to other regulatory issues such as plot size. In many African countries, the minimum legal size of plot is far too high to be affordable by ordinary people. In consequence, the regulations are ignored, but in the process any structures built on an illegally small plot cannot be legally owned.

Property rights reform by regional government: a case study, Tim Harris
In his seminal 2000 work “The Mystery of Capital” Hernando de Soto found that, in Egypt, the wealth the poor have accumulated is worth 55 times as much as the sum of all direct foreign investment ever recorded there, including that spent on building the Suez Canal and the Aswan Dam. Evidence like this underpins his thesis that improving access to a legal system and information framework that records ownership of property is one of the most effective ways to growth wealth in the developing world. The implications of this theory are significant for a country like South Africa, with a recent past where asset ownership was restricted by law on the basis of race. Nevertheless, the opponents of individual titling of property are many: communal land rights persist in 17 million hectares of land in the former homelands - home to 21 million South Africans, shack-dweller movements like Abahlali baseMjondolo oppose individual title, and government inefficiency means that many rightful property owners never actually receive title deeds. For the past five years the Western Cape has been the only South African province not run by the ANC. Elected in 2009 on a platform that included a focus on reform of property rights, the DA-run government set out to tackle the province’s legal title backlog, reducing it from 36% to 27%. A review of this programme highlights how many challenges remain, but give hope for the transformative potential of reform.


Affirmative action and national cohesion in South Africa, Palesa Morudu
When apartheid ended in 1994, the democratic government put affirmative action policies at the center of its efforts to build a new South African nation based on the values of non-racialism, non-sexism and democracy. After 21 years of democracy, a sizeable middle class has benefited directly from the government’s broad approach to affirmative action. This should be a marker of progress, yet the national conversation about these policies is often charged and highly polarized. Moreover, affirmative action has often been conflated with another core government policy, known as “black economic empowerment”, the central objective of which is to establish a black business class. The paper will explore the historical necessity of affirmative action, the growth of a black middle class and the sustainability of the program into the future. Several related questions will be examined. Has South Africa developed indicators that can help gauge progress or failure? Is the government able to identify targets that need to be attained to declare such policies redundant? Is affirmative action benefiting a narrow elite at the expense of millions of South Africans? There will be three main themes: the politics of resentment as represented by the argument of reverse discrimination, the politics of entitlement that has taken currency in the form of a narrow African nationalism, and the politics of class development within South Africa’s black population.

Media

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