From apartheid to neoliberalism: health equity in post-apartheid South Africa

Abstract

In 1994, the African National Congress (ANC) won South Africa's first ever democratic election. It inherited a health service that was indelibly marked with the inequities of the apartheid era, highly privatized and distorted toward the hospital needs of urban Whites. The ANC's manifesto promised major improvements, but this study finds only two significant health equity improvements: (1) primary care had funding increased by 83 percent and was better staffed; and (2) health care workers became significantly more race-representative of the population. These improvements, however, were outweighed by equity losses in the deteriorating public-private mix. Policy analysis of the elite actors attributes this failure to the dominance of the Treasury's neoliberal macroeconomic policy (GEAR), which severely limited any increases in public spending. The ANC's nationalist ideology underpinned GEAR and many of the health equity decisions. It united the ANC, international capital, African elites, and White capital in a desire for an African economic renaissance. And it swept the population along with it, becoming the new hegemonic ideology. As this study finds, the successful policies were those that could be made a part of this active hegemonic reformation, symbolically celebrating African nationalism, and did not challenge the interests of the major actors.