Predatory Welfare

Predatory Welfare: How Finance Capital Profiteers from Social Grants is a powerful, eye-opening account of how social welfare, distributed in the form of cash transfers, shapes inequality in contemporary South Africa. In a narrative style, following individual stories, Erin Torkelson challenges the widely held belief that simply giving money to the poor can solve poverty. Cash transfers are often presented as a straightforward, humane solution embraced across the political spectrum, from global development agencies to progressive academics, to alleviate poverty. But this deeply researched and compelling book reveals a far more complicated and troubling reality.

Drawing on seven years of immersive fieldwork in South Africa - from grant payment queues and grocery stores to Parliament and the Constitutional Court - Torkelson shows how a flagship anti-poverty programme became entangled with predatory finance. Instead of offering relief, cash transfers are often leveraged by lenders as collateral, pulling recipients, especially Black women, into cycles of debt. The very survival strategies people are pushed into are later framed as personal failings rather than the result of long-standing structural inequality. In the process, individuals are racialised as inadequate managers of money and marked as risky financial subjects.

The book also traces how civil society campaigns forced the state in 2018 to reclaim control of the payment system from private companies. Yet even this victory revealed new challenges: austerity, weak infrastructure and ongoing financial pressures continued to expose recipients to hardship in new forms.

Blending sharp analysis with vivid storytelling, Predatory Welfare offers a bold rethinking of welfare, development and racial inequality. It argues that social grants cannot be understood as neutral or purely benevolent and that economic justice requires far more than cash alone. A timely and urgent intervention, Predatory Welfare asks readers to reconsider what real economic justice looks like - and what it will take to achieve it.

'Twenty-six cents. That was all that was left in Lerato's bank account when she went to collect her daughter's child support grant (CSG) at the Site B Community Hall in Khayelitsha on October 3, 2016. Instead of cash, Lerato clutched a receipt as if her life depended on it. This slip of paper was the only thing that offered some explanation as to why she hadn't received a cash transfer payment for her daughter that month

While many people got their cash transfers without difficulty, Lerato did not. When she complained to the CPS manager, he directed her to a shorter queue of people waiting to speak to a SASSA official. The official was on a two-hour lunch break, and the queue had ground to a halt.

When I sat down next to Lerato, she pushed her receipt into my hand, asking me to attend to its contents. The technician should have handed Lerato R350 - the amount of one child support grant. But, since his machine reported that her account was nearly empty, she was turned away with nothing. Her receipt stated that at 8:54 a.m. R350 was deposited in her account. At the same time, a nearly identical sum of money was removed from her account as "deductions" for airtime, electricity, a funeral policy, a loan repayment, and bank fees.'