Sandile Swana
Election season is one of those periods when political opportunists and careerists come to the fore and promise people many wonderful things, including unconstitutional things.
Gayton Mckenzie and the Patriotic Alliance (PA) promised to return God and prayer to the schools and all workplaces (putting God first etc), return the death penalty and conduct large scale deportation of “illegal” foreigners, among other wild claims.
Our courts have curtailed these wild ideas, for example, in the latest attempt to get rid of Zimbabweans.
Advocate Thembeka Ngcukayitobi and retired deputy chief justice Dikgang Moseneke both have tried to educate us that section 25 of our constitution is not the obstacle to comprehensive land reform.
Political compromise and corruption by the ANC have meant that land reform and its partner agrarian reform have been stunted and largely neglected when not sabotaged by the governing elites.
However, the crucial point is that the land question would have been substantially resolved by now without changing the constitution. The same goes for the entire bill of rights, which has been neglected by the elected government. The dropping standards of living are testimony to that.
Every political party needs to study the constitution and ask itself which priorities it chooses and not try to invent another country when the one we agreed to build in 1994 has not yet been attempted or realised.
That idea of building formal houses for the masses is entailed in both the Constitution and the Freedom Charter. Adequate housing is a fundamental human right, not shacks and ghettos. Section 26 of our constitution states:
Housing 26
“Everyone has the right to have access to adequate housing. The state must take reasonable legislative and other measures, within its available resources, to achieve the progressive realisation of this right. No one may be evicted from their home, or have their home demolished, without an order of court made after considering all the relevant circumstances. No legislation may permit arbitrary evictions.”
The reality is that after the 2007 ANC conference, the large-scale formalisation of human settlements and abolition of slums was abandoned, slums and squatter camps are now the norm.
Our political parties and their coalitions are vague on this matter – the abolition of slums and squatter camps.
Yet, any South African of sober habits would embrace the refrain of our ancestors in the Freedom Charter, hence it is a unifying call:
There shall be houses, security and comfort
“All people shall have the right to live where they choose, be decently housed, and to bring up their families in comfort and security.”
It follows that any serious political manifesto must address two things. In which year will all the slums and squatter camps be abolished. Second, the number of squatter camps that will be abolished in the period 2024 to 2029 and how many families will be properly housed and given decent jobs as per the constitution.
The matter of education remains a complete disgrace. The number of African university graduates as a proportion of the African population in the country remains a quarter of the proportion of the white graduates versus the white population.
Our nation has enough financial resources to provide all the tertiary education needed, especially university education.
Education 29
“Everyone has the right— (a) to a basic education, including adult basic education; and (b) to further education, which the state, through reasonable measures, must make progressively available and accessible.”
The state cannot stand at a distance and shout that people must go to school; it must make sure that every district has affordable high quality tertiary education. Universities must have branches across the land and bursaries readily available to all qualifying students. The Freedom Charter gave clear and incontrovertible direction on the matter:
The doors of learning and culture shall be opened
“The government shall discover, develop, and encourage national talent for the enhancement of our cultural life; education shall be free, compulsory, universal and equal for all children; higher education and technical training shall be opened to all by means of state allowances and scholarships awarded based on merit.”
All in all, our constitution is a progressive and activist constitution, that does not make the state a spectator but a decisive actor. What is left is for all coalitions and individual political parties to embrace this constitution and create teams to implement it fully and with speed.
- Swana is a political analyst, an academic and a member of the 70s Group
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