“What does citizenship mean?” the bishop asks. “Does it mean—Â�well,
you must be proud that you have an identity document? But that’s more
helpful to the police, to locate where you are!” Instead, “let citizenship
not start with the official documents, but start with the sharing of the resources.
. . . Citizenship should mean that I partake in the wealth of the
country!”
Here it is possible to observe a kind of convergence, in which the muscular
assertions of own�ership that we see in Julius Malema-�style resource
nationalism are being harnessed to concrete and universalistic distributive
claims, claims that are made both plausible and practical by the new
cash transfer apparatuses that deliver existing forms of social assistance.
And while I have tried to illustrate this sort of reasoning by dwelling on
one especially clear case (the recent Namibian big campaign), I emphasize
that the idea that universalistic cash payments might be reconceptualized
as a kind of share of a collectively owned mineral wealth is not
unique to Namibia. Indeed, a recently launched region-�wide campaign
argues for a basic income grant scheme that would be funded by levies
on mineral extraction, covering the entire Southern African Development
Community. The campaign’s argument begins by noting the regional
fact of “poverty alongside mineral wealth” together with “evidence from
countries such as India and Brazil” showing the effectiveness of cash
transfers in fighting poverty and then seeks to mobilize support for universal
basic income precisely under the banner of the rightful share. (The
slogan emblazoned on the campaign’s logo reads as follows: “Our Right—Â�
Our Wealth—Â�Our Share.”)34