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 antipoverty programme became entangled with predatory finance. Instead of offering relief, cash transfers are often leveraged bylenders 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.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Originally from Arizona, Torkelson is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Geography at the University of the Western Cape and holds a doctorate in geography from the University of California, Berkeley. As a scholar and an activist, her work sits at the intersection of political economy, critical development studies, critical race theory, feminist kinship studies, and science & technology studies. She has published academic pieces in World Development, Society and Space, and the Journal of Southern African Studies. Her popular articles have appeared in Counterpunch, Znet, GroundUp, The Daily Maverick, and The Mail and Guardian, and she made a documentary film for The Cutting Edge on SABC1. She works with the Black Sash, Open Secrets, and Institute for Economic Justice on the South African social grant system and has presented her research to the Constitutional Court-appointed Panel of Experts, the National Credit Regulator, the South African Social Security Agency, and the Department of Social Development

'Predatory Welfare: How Finance Capital Profiteers from Social Grants' is published by Jacana Media