SA’s socioeconomic rights are enshrined in law, but feel fragile in everyday life

Nomsa got to the clinic a little after five in the morning. It had already taken two taxis to get there. She knew the wait would be long, so she brought her clinic card and a bottle of water. She was still sitting on the bench at ten o’clock. A nurse came out just after noon and said that the clinic was full. People who hadn’t been seen yet would have to come back another day.

There was no explanation after that. Nomsa didn’t fight. She put her stuff in her bag and left.

There was nothing wrong that had happened. There was no official refusal on record. But something important had slipped away.

It’s not that the law failed that makes times like this so scary; it’s that the system acted just like it always does.

The Constitution of South Africa lays out a very ambitious and very human vision. It promises respect, access to medical care, decent housing and humane conditions for people who are in our correctional facilities.

These are not just ideas in the air. They are supposed to change the everyday lives of people like Nomsa. But for a lot of South Africans, socioeconomic rights are much more obvious in laws and court decisions than in real life.

The problem is not that people don’t have rights. It is the way that responsibility fades away when those rights are supposed to be given.

Over the past 30 years, South Africa has built one of the most advanced frameworks for socioeconomic rights in the world. The courts have said many times that these rights are real and can be enforced. Judges have told the state that it must act fairly, openly, and in good faith. These decisions are important. They have stopped the decline and made dignity a basic constitutional value again.

But for many people, not much has changed.

Quiet failure

This is because rights don’t often fail when they are outright refused. More often than not, they fail quietly, due to delays, gaps in administration and tired institutions. People don’t hear “no” very often. They are told to wait instead. They are sent somewhere else. They are told to return the next day. Waiting starts to do the work that denial used to do over time.

This is a common pattern in public healthcare. Patients wait in line for hours, only to be sent away. It takes months to get a referral. Files go missing. Clinics are under a lot of stress, and the professionals who work there are doing their best in systems that are already too full. The damage isn’t always very bad. It builds up slowly. Trust goes away. Things get worse. Dignity is slowly being lost.

Housing goes through a similar process. Families stay on waiting lists for years, often without getting any useful information or clear timelines. Applications disappear into administrative systems that don’t give feedback or explanations. The right to housing is firmly established in law, but its realisation relies on institutions that frequently fail to respond.

Conditions in prisons are an even better example. The Constitution protects people from being detained in ways that violate their dignity, such as failing to receive the medical care they need. But overcrowding, bad hygiene, and long waits for medical care are still common. Reports are put together. Oversight groups sound the alarm. There are promises made. But putting it into action is slow and uneven. In the meantime, people are still living in conditions that don’t meet constitutional standards.

What ties these experiences together is not obvious lawbreaking, but repeated failures of the system that go unpunished. When systems keep breaking down, and no one is held accountable, dysfunction becomes the norm. Failure eventually becomes a normal part of everyday life instead of being seen as unusual. People who are best able to fix things slowly lose responsibility.

Bureaucratic delay is not neutral. It protects those in charge of institutions from being looked at closely and puts the blame for failure on those with the least power. Every referral, every internal handover and every unanswered question spreads responsibility a little more. In the end, no one seems to be directly responsible, even though everyone knows the system isn’t working.

Socioeconomic rights are often discussed in public debate as a clash between ideals and resources, or between the courts and the executive. These discussions are important, but they don’t talk about where rights most often work or don’t work. That is not the courtroom or the policy document. It is how the state works on a day-to-day basis.

Courts can’t run clinics

Courts can protect rights, but they can’t run clinics. Policy frameworks can make promises, but they can’t fill empty jobs or fix broken administrative systems. Litigation is still important, but it can’t replace basic institutional competence or long-term accountability.

This is where the conversation needs to change.

Socioeconomic rights are more than just legal rights. They are moral obligations regarding the treatment of individuals reliant on public institutions. When dysfunction becomes normal, people don’t lose their dignity in big ways. It is slowly being worn away. A missed meeting. An application that was lost. A job that hasn’t been filled. Every little failure sends a message about who is important and who can wait.

If institutions fail and nothing happens, rights lose their meaning. They still exist on paper, but not in real life.

Judgments and speeches don’t really test South Africa’s constitutional promise. It depends on whether those in power are held responsible when systems let down regular people, especially when that failure is slow, procedural, and easy to explain.

Nomsa will go back to the clinic. She will have to wait again. It depends on whether institutional failure is allowed to continue without consequences, if her rights are to remain theoretical or become real.

That is the question that South Africa must now answer. DM

Nathanael Siljeur is a legal practitioner and researcher with a background in constitutional law, social justice and ethics. His work engages questions of accountability, institutional integrity and the intersection of law, public policy and human dignity. He writes in his personal capacity.