Many people say that South Africa’s Constitution changes their lives. But for the poor, change is starting to feel more and more like legal recognition without any real change. Rights are confirmed, violations are made illegal and policies are changed, yet the situation of inequality remains largely unchanged.
This doesn’t mean the ideas behind the Constitution have failed. It is a failure of how the ideas are put into action. Our Constitution is good at finding people who break the law.
It is much less effective at fixing the damage that the violations cause. This means changing policies and procedures and setting deadlines. People don’t often talk about the harm that has been done to people who went through years of deprivation, while the government didn’t do anything about it.
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In practice, equality often means that the rules are followed fairly and justice has been done. This idea doesn’t work in a place like South Africa, where there is a lot of inequality. Being neutral about unfair situations doesn’t help; it makes them worse.
The dynamic is clear in lawsuits about social and economic rights. If housing projects or basic services stop working, the courts might have to step in and fix them. But most of the time, the fixes are for the future.
They want to make the system better in the future but they don’t say much about what should be done for the people who had to pay for the long-term failure. A community that had to wait 10 years for housing didn’t just sit around. Children grew up without a safe place to live. Families had to pay for things that the state did.
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