Our Constitution is failing the poor

Equality without repair isn't justice. The supreme law is good at finding people who break the law. It is much less effective at fixing the damage that the violations cause

- Nathanael Siljeur

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.

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.

Things like historical dispossession, spatial exclusion, administrative neglect and institutional failure that never go away make poverty worse.

Being neutral about unfair situations doesn't help; it makes them worse.

The dynamic is clear in lawsuits about social and economic rights.