Gears in shift.

• Author: Shamapande, Yobert K.
• Position: Poverty in South Africa

For South Africa, the struggle is far from over. The country has gone through three and a half centuries of struggle for political freedom and social justice, and nearly half a century of struggle against apartheid - an obnoxious doctrine of racial separation and oppression. With the demise of apartheid in 1994 and the establishment of a new democratic South Africa, the struggle for economic and social justice has taken on new vigour. Expectations and aspirations have been raised to phenomenal levels by the introduction of the new political order.

On 21 August 1997, South African civil organizations, in cooperation with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), declared war on poverty, stressing that in the post-apartheid era the country's most important priorities and greatest challenges were poverty eradication and redressing of inequalities. "We dedicate ourselves to concrete actions and real commitments to create a world in which humankind can live in peace and justice, and to declare war on poverty and inequality that it may be eradicated from our land", said the Declaration, endorsed by the Government of South Africa as a framework for national mobilization and action to combat poverty and deprivation.

The country's new constitution, adopted in May 1996, also entrenched the poor's fundamental socio-economic rights, long denied them under apartheid, such as the right to gain access to basic needs - adequate housing, basic health care, education, nutrition, clean water, and the right to family and parental care for young children, among others - elevating them to equal status as the rights to political freedom and citizenship. In addition, the Constitution has put in place powerful safeguard instruments, principally the Human Rights and Gender Equality Commissions to monitor national performance relating to the promotion and protection of those rights among all South Africans.

South Africa is a vast country occupying the southern extremity of the African continent. It has a land area of 470,689 square miles (1,219,080 square km.) and a population of 37.9 million, according to the 1996 census. It is also a land of extremes and contrasts, where the legacies of apartheid still run deep. Ostentatious wealth, grinding poverty and extreme inequalities in South Africa exist side by side.

Poverty and inequality are widespread and manifest themselves in high rates of unemployment, extreme land hunger and lack of access by the overwhelming...