This is, of course, a key question of this book as well as an animating
theme of the emergent “distributive politics” that it seeks to identify in a
range of developments across the southern Africa region and beyond. This
chapter discusses the limitations of the ways that this question has been
approached in traditional Leftist politics and seeks to show that different
and perhaps more po�liti�cally promising approaches to wealth-�sharing
may be emerging out of the distributive practices of what I have termed the
region’s new welfare states (especially South Africa and Namibia). In the
wake of the conjunctural collision of new and expanded programs of cash
transfer with fierce populist demands for the sharing of national resources,