Ubuntu, Rights, and Neoliberalism in South Africa

Abstract

The juridical constitutional order of the South African postcolonial state grants socio-economic rights and the right to life and acknowledges the humanity of all human beings. However, these rights are simultaneously threatened with annulment by the neoliberal socio-economic structure, which is based on macro-economic policies that promote growth, stability, and privatisation. These policies concentrate wealth and income in an economic oligarchy and, simultaneously, lead to deadly poverty which wreaks havoc on the rights of the majority of black Africans. I will use Ramose's unexplored Ubuntu reconstitution account to show that the protection of rights in postcolonial states is possible, on the condition that the socio- economic institutional order is reconfigured. This needs to be done in a way which constructs a dual economy, consisting of (1) a community public sector economy, which generates wealth and income for the protection of socio-economic rights and the right to life and (2) the private sector economy, for individualistic accumulative practices.

Keywords:

• Ubuntu
• neoliberalism
• rights
• socio-economic institutional order