‘Leave no community behind’ – the stories we will tell in 2023 and why they should matter to you

Over the Christmas holiday this year I went hiking in the upper reaches of the Drakensberg mountains. Ironically, amid resplendent natural beauty, it felt comforting that the danger I faced came only from falling off basalt cliffs, getting lost on overgrown paths that are away from the reach of ever-intrusive cellphone signals, or from an Alpine cold that can suddenly descend even on a hot summer’s day.

These dangers are natural dangers. Sadly, they are still everyday dangers for poor people in some remote parts of the world. But they felt different and far away from the man-made dangers of inequality, femicide, genocide, poverty, crime, corruption, climate catastrophe and war (including possibly nuclear war) that are part of our “normal” lives and which, in one way or another, face now almost all of humanity.

Confronting these man-made dangers, and turning them into opportunities, is going to be humanity’s challenge for 2023 and beyond. 

Humanity begins at home

Activists at President Cyril Ramaphosa's address during the second Presidential Summit on Gender-Based Violence and Femicide. (Photo: Siyabulela Duda / GCIS)

Countering division and disinterpretation

Writing on rights

• How Eskom’s load shedding and load reduction is impacting on communities and lives. Why? Because while much of the media focuses on the economic impact and inconvenience of load shedding, as usual it is the most vulnerable who are worst affected. The relationship between access to electricity and a multitude of rights is something the Constitutional Court recognised in an extremely important judgment handed down on 23 December 2022, which noted that the decision (to cut off electricity to whole communities) “has had an adverse impact on the residents in that it has resulted in the breach of several of their rights protected by the Bill of Rights: the right to life, the right to dignity, the right of access to water, the right to basic education and the right to an environment that is not harmful to health or well-being”;


• The right to an identity document (ID). Why? Home Affairs is one of the most corrupt and mismanaged government departments. Yet people depend on it for vital documentation, particularly IDs, without which it is not possible to live. Without an ID, for example, you can’t vote, get a social grant, open a bank account or register for school. This makes the fact that there are an estimated 15 million people without IDs even more egregious. We aim to shine a light on the dark recesses of Home Affairs throughout the year with the aim of ensuring that this situation changes;


• The trials and tribulations of children under six. Why? There are an estimated eight million children six and under in South Africa – that is 15% of our total population. Because they are not adults they do not have political rights. They depend on us! Yet millions of them are hungry, denied access to early childhood development, and vulnerable to abuse. We aim to help give them a voice; and


• The human right to have access to money. Why? Millions of people in South Africa are prevented from having any formal income because of mass unemployment. Most barely survive on social grants, begging and sometimes stealing. In the modern world, money has been made as indispensable to life as water or food. This is the context in which, across the world, the idea of a Basic Income Support/Grant is gaining ground, an issue we have focused on extensively through a series of articles by Hein Marais and others. We will continue to focus on the human and economic dimensions of this issue and why the constitutional right to social security (section 27 of the Bill of Rights) must be made real.

A crowd protests against femicide outside Parliament in Cape Town on 29 August 2020. (Photo: EPA-EFE / Nic Bothma)