Know Your Constitution: a challenge to students

The South African Constitution is widely regarded as one of the most progressive in the world. However, many people in South Africa are unaware of their rights and their lives do not reflect the values of dignity and equality that the Constitution guarantees.

In a recent study, the Foundation of Human Rights found that less than 10% of South Africans have read the Bill of Rights or have had it read to them.

The Know Your Constitution (KYC) campaign was launched at the end of 2013 as a response to this by civil society organisations. The campaign attempts to put pressure on the government and the South African Human Rights Commission to promote the Constitution.

Students for Law and Social Justice (SLSJ), founded in 2007, has supported and been involved in the KYC campaign since its inception and we intend to extend our involvement in the year 2015 by actively taking up the KYC campaign at branch level in numerous ways.

As an organisation which has 12 branches stretching from the Western Cape across the country to the North-West, SLSJ can reach a great number of different people. We intend to host workshops in which we teach the Constitution in an easily understandable and useable way. We will also be facilitating public debate about the Constitution by contributing to university blogs, speaking on community radio stations and writing articles for local newspapers.

The shortage of copies of the Constitution – particularly in languages other than English – poses a serious problem and we will petition the Department of Justice for more copies in all national languages, and braille. In the year 2015, the Department plans to print only 11,000 copies of the Constitution – 1,000 in each national language other than English, and 1,000 in braille. In a population of more than 50 million people, this is not nearly enough, especially if we want to develop a culture of constitutionalism.

Constitutions should be readily available in public spaces such as post offices, clinics and schools instead of being distributed in an ad hoc manner.

We hope to be joined by a great number of students, who will take up the mantle left by famous South African lawyers, who too were once law students like ourselves.

We must make full use of the Constitution, spreading it to every corner of the country, to ensure that people can take ownership of the Constitution and insist on the fulfilment of its promises.

Mazower and Steytler are law students, members of Students for Law and Social Justice, and former chairpersons of the Wits and Stellenbosch branches of SLSJ respectively. They are members of the Know Your Constitution campaign and interns at SECTION27.

The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author(s). No inference should be made on whether these reflect the editorial position of GroundUp.