Human Rights Day Brings More Empty Promises From ANC Leaders

Each year on Human Rights Day, theANC-led government says the same things and makes the same promises. But what we get is a worsening socioeconomic crisis, and with it, the countless and many-sided violations of the provisions in the Bill of Rights, argues

Ebrahim Harvey

This is an area I know very well, as a result of my studies for both my Masters and PhD, which is about access to adequate water and sanitation or the lack thereof, in the townships of Johannesburg. Daily access to an adequate amount of water and flush sanitation, which I argue is the only decent and healthy form of sanitation, is arguably at the heart of the 1996 Constitution.

But none of the speeches in celebration of Human Rights Day, on the 21 March, held in DeAar, Northern Cape, and addressed by a wide range of speakers, including President Cyril Ramaphosa, dealt with the biggest failures of our Constitution. In fact, Ramaphosa's speech was a whitewash of the utterly deplorable conditions today of basic services in black townships across the country and the tragic failure to implement socioeconomic rights in the Constitution's Bill of Rights.

There is no bigger indictment of the governingAfrican National Congress (ANC) and a sharp contradiction of the purportedly best Constitution in the world we are said to have than the undeniable fact that we have today the highest levels of black poverty, unemployment and social inequalities we have ever had since our watershed 1994 elections.

Betrayal

That these are the stark and shocking realities in SouthAfrica underANC rule, in terms of the promises and commitment they made in the Freedom Charter of 1955 and the Reconstruction and Development Plan of 1993, which was, in fact, largely its electoral manifesto in the 1994 elections, is sadly most striking today

If we add to those commitments the provisions in the Bill of Rights, such as access to basic municipal services, such as water and sanitation, electricity, health, housing and education, and compare them to the devastating impacts of the unprecedented socioeconomic crisis we have today, the departure from all these provisions and in fact many argue betrayal of them is flagrantly clear

The undeniable fact is that this has been the situation for many years.Already in 2000, at the third Bram Fischer lecture, the then president of the Constitutional Court, Judge Arthur Chaskalson, said that SouthAfrica was in danger of not realising the vision of the Constitution. He said that "the government must give effect to its obligations under the Constitution to show respect and concern for those whose basic needs have to be met".

In fact, which showed how far the ANC government had already in 2000 departed from those 1996 constitutional obligations, it went to court to appeal against a Western Cape High Court ruling in December 2000, which compelled it to provide homeless children with shelter They appealed on the grounds that the government could not financially afford to bear this responsibility

As a result, in a 2000 column in the Mail & Guardian, titled "A mockery of our Constitution", I wrote: "While the ruling party would probably argue with this assessment, it is clear that if we compare the human rights provisions in the Constitution with the actual socioeconomic conditions of the majority of people, there exists a chasm that separates words from reality Worse still, a chasm that widens all the time." Indeed, that is why today the socioeconomic crisis is much worse than it was in 2000.

Same promises made, year after year

But no leader of theANC, and certainly not Ramaphosa in his speech on Human Rights Day, said a word about what has happened to the Bill of Rights since 1996.And to show you the brutal cynicism of theANC government in regard to those rights in a Constitution, which is regarded as the supreme law of the land, you will find that each year on Human Rights Day, they say the same things and make the same promises, which is the similar to what happens to the goals stated and promises made at theANC’s January 8 statements, as is also the case at their national conferences.

Instead, the socioeconomic crisis worsens and deepens all the time, and with it, the countless and many-sided violations of the provisions in the Bill of Rights. Each and every day, in the various forms of the media, we read and hear how the rights declared in the Bill of Rights and the provisions of the Freedom Charter are regularly violated with impunity

But neither did Ramaphosa say a word about the biggest caveat in the Constitution, of which he was the co-author, Section 27 (2): that the state will take "reasonable legislative and other measures, within its available resources, (own italics) to achieve the progressive realisation" of rights. This is a very serious neoliberal limitation in our Constitution.

What Section 27 (2) does is to in advance place conservative neoliberal macroeconomic budgetary constraints on fulfilling those fundamentally important human rights.This is a selffulfilling prophecy, meaning that the implementation of any and all rights would be subject to this onerous limitation, providing a safety escape valve, with which to explain away the failure to realise any of the socioeconomic rights in the Constitution, no matter how important the fulfilment of those basic human needs are for the affirmation of human rights.

Terrible living conditions

What makes these repeated failures to realise those very important rights in the Bill of Rights since the Constitution was implemented in 1996 more unacceptable is that over this long period the conditions of life in the black townships, where the majority of people live, have grown worse.Today, as a result, the living conditions there are, in fact, considerably worse than they were during the apartheid years.

It is no exaggeration whatsoever to say that the black townships today are in a total mess, with even raw sewage running down the streets where people walk and children play. Black children have fallen into and died in pit latrines and there is a generalised infrastructural crisis in every respect where the vast majority of the population of this country resides.This is the socioeconomic circumstances that Ramaphosa and theANC government said very little, if anything, about when they celebrated and commemorated Human Rights Day on 21 March.

Why is drawing attention to those deplorable and inexcusable living conditions in black townships so important on Human Rights Day?

Key and critical to this emphasis is the question of human dignity, the thing Chaskalson spoke much about in his Bram Fischer lecture in 2000, when he urged the government to honour the socioeconomic rights in the Bill of Rights.

Those terrible conditions in black townships, which is the severest assault on the dignity of people living there, also comes at a time of the biggest unemployment and cost-of-living crises there ever in post-apartheid SouthAfrica. Alongside those ugly realities, we have had the worst load shedding electricity crisis, water and sewerage crises in our entire history over the past two years.

JTo obscure and conceal these horrific living conditions and how they fundamentally contradict and undermine the Constitution by singing its praises instead is nothing less than tragic.This is what Ramaphosa and otherANC leaders did on Human Rights Day

For some glaring examples, look at the horrific living conditions today in Mangaung in the Free State, where theANC was born in 1912, and Kliptown, in Johannesburg, where the Freedom Charter was birthed in 1955.There lie the starkest contradictions of both the ANC's commitments and our Constitution.

That is why to say, as Ramaphosa did, that there is much more work to do in the fulfilment of the Bill of Rights is a monumental understatement and, in fact, a camouflage of the extent of the hideous crisis conditions in black townships. Neither did he talk much about the estimated over R2 trillion stolen by his fellowANC "cadres" from the public purse since the passage of the Constitution in 1996 and which could have made major changes to people's lives in black townships.

Instead, in anticipation of the 2024 elections, he praised theANC government for the "achievements" we made since the Constitution was adopted in 1996, and thereby added insult to the injuries the daily violations of the Constitution inflicted over this period.

I was not only not impressed by the whitewashing of living conditions and human rights in black townships by Ramaphosa and otherANC leaders, but found that it reeked of stark hypocrisy Under apartheid, the white working and middle classes enjoyed among the highest municipal standards in the world.

- Dr Ebrahim Harvey is an independent political writer, analyst and author of 'The Great Pretenders: Race and Class under ANC Rule', published by Jacana in 2021. - News24 -