The South African Civil Society Information Service
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
Pierre de Vos -
It is not always easy to hold an unpopular or minority view. It is even more difficult to hold a minority view on the emotive subject of religious belief and organised religion. When you happen to be a vulnerable and impressionable child, indoctrinated by parents and subjected to relentless peer pressure, it becomes even more difficult to hold any opinion of your own on the matter. It is for this reason that the right of children not to believe in a specific God or in specific religious...
Richard Pithouse -
At a public discussion on the land question in Johannesburg on Friday, February 27, Dikgang Moseneke, the Deputy Chief Judge of the Constitutional Court, began his remarks with a well-known quote from Frantz Fanon: “For a colonized people the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity.”
He spoke about the centrality of the land question to the struggle against apartheid and argued...
SACSIS caught up with constitutional law expert Prof. Pierre de Vos, author of the blog, Constitutionally Speaking, to talk about how the South African constitution could be applied to deal with South Africa’s most pressing challenge, our country’s inequality.
On the question of whether our constitution could be applied to encourage more redistributive measures, de Vos argues that the constitution doesn’t have the power to change South Africa’s economic policies....
Dale T. McKinley -
If the publicly expressed opinions of many opposition politicians, lawyers, academics, journalists and political commentators are to be believed then South Africa has already had several ‘constitutional crises’ and there are more hovering on the horizon.
Cast your memories back a decade and the messy saga involving then President Mbeki and his highly controversial attempts to protect his Police Chief Jackie Selebi. Claims flew thick and fast from several...
Steven Friedman -
The more the courts do to fix poverty and inequality directly, the more likely is it that people will remain poor and unequal.
For some time, an important debate has been raging between legal academics who want our courts to help the fight for social justice. It has been confined to law journals and has hardly registered in the public debate. This is a pity, since it addresses a crucial question: how can the courts help to combat poverty and inequality?
The constitutional court has...
Leonard Gentle -
There is a very cynical, old apartheid era joke about English-speaking whites in South Africa to the effect that, ”Most supported the Progs (Helen Suzman’s old Progressive Party); voted UP (the old United Party of De Villiers Graaf) … and thanked God for the Nats”.
Meaning that it was okay to be disgusted by the racism and repression, but hell those Afrikaners knew how to run the economy -- and they kept everything functioning nicely.
With the exception of the...
