Human insecurity: The problem of poverty, unemployment and social exclusion

Notes

• The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not reflect the position of the Department of Justice and Constitutional Development
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• Mamdani , M . 2001 . Making sense of non-revolutionary violence: some lessons from Rwandan genocide , 1 Westville : University of Durban Westville . …violence in which different groups of more or less equally impoverished and disempowered people are pitted against each other. Fanon called such people the wretched of the earth. When the wretched of the earth divide into contending groups that take it out on one another, that violence is non-revolutionary’, in, See also F Fanon, The wretched of the earth, New York: Grove Press, 1963
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• Magdof , F . May 2008 . “ The world food crisis: sources and solutions ” . In Monthly Review , May , New York : Monthly Review Press . http://www.monthlyreview.org/080501magdoff.php#Volume(accessed 18 August 2008) ‘Of the more than 6 billion people living in the world today, the United Nations estimates that close to 1 billion suffer from chronic hunger. But this number, which is only a crude estimate, leaves out those suffering from vitamin and nutrient deficiencies and other forms of malnutrition. The total number of food insecure people who are malnourished or lacking critical nutrients is probably closer to 3 billion -about half of humanity. The severity of this situation is made clear by the United Nations estimate of over a year ago that approximately 18 000 children die daily as a direct or indirect consequence of malnutrition
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• Sections 26 and 27 of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996 In terms of the Constitutional Laws Act, 2005 (Act 5 of 2005) which came into operation on 27 June 2005, the Constitution will now simply be known as the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996 and not as Act 108 of 1996. In view of its status as the supreme law of the Republic, and since the Constitution is more than merely an Act of Parliament, it gives the wrong impression if the Constitution is just a numbered Act in a series of Acts
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• During the 1870s Engels contributed to the polemics unfolding in Germany's press on the shortage of housing available to workers because of their influx into industrial centres. The crux of Engels's argument for solving this problem was that the revolutionary point of view of the industrial proletariat cannot be replaced by reformism. He argued that the abolition of capitalism, eradication of the antithesis between town and country and solving of the agrarian problem were the only possible ways of solving the housing question
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• There have been many legal challenges with regard to evictions and the realisation of the right to housing. The Constitutional Court has on many occasions made pronouncements on the legal enforceability of socioeconomic rights. In the Government of the Republic of South Africa & Others v Grootboom & Others 2000 (11) BCLR 1169 (CC) the court was emphatic on the position held in the First Certification case that socioeconomic rights cannot exist nominally. The link between socioeconomic rights and political/civil rights was noted in the Grootboom case and the fact that ‘affording economic and social rights to all people enables them to enjoy the other rights in Chapter 2’ (the Bill of Rights). It is also important to note that South Africa is a signatory to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Therefore the South African state has a constitutional and an international duty to observe and protect socioeconomic rights. In the Grootboom judgment the respondents (510 children and 390 adults) were rendered homeless as a result of being evicted from their informal homes around the Cape metropolitan area. They applied to the High Court for an order requiring government to provide them with adequate basic shelter or housing until they obtained permanent accommodation and were granted relief. They based their action on section 26 of the Constitution (housing), which places a duty on the state to take reasonable legislative and other measures within available and limited resources to ensure progressive realisation of these rights. In section 26(3) the Constitution further provides that ‘No one may be evicted from their home, or have their home demolished, without an order of court made after considering all the relevant circumstance. No legislation may permit arbitrary evictions.’
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• A Xhosa word for father
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• Mazrui , A . 1984 . Nationalism and the new states in Africa , London : Heinemann .
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• Marx , K . 1977 . A contribution to the critique of political economy , 21 Moscow : Progress Publishers .
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