Course content Legal Training Programme Legal Training Programmes Materials

Rethinking Democracy

South Africa boasts the highest inequality globally, despite three decades of democratic governance. Landlessness, exploitation, poverty, racism, violence, corruption, and service collapse persist. Politics faces mounting distrust, associated with elitism, patronage, and divisive agendas. Different explanations and answers to these challenges are presented. As the 2024 elections approach in South Africa and 64 other countries globally, political parties take centre stage: each representing different – or perhaps similar – explanations and answers to a countries challenges. Through delving into these challenges, explanations, and proposed paths to a better future, this course navigates South Africa’s past, present, and potential futures: exploring themes of African solidarity, critically assessing 1994’s significance, integrating global democratic perspectives, and scrutinizing elections’ role in participatory democracy.

Designed specifically for community-based paralegals and fieldworkers who provide a range of services to the communities they serve – including information access, support with gender based violence cases and matters, assistance with evictions, labour, consumer and social security matters as well as different kinds of dispute resolution – this course will locate the historical roots of the day-to-day issues that advice offices contend with and contextualize them within broader contestations, resistance and imaginations about democracy.

Woven through the course are these questions:

What do the realities that community-based paralegals deal with on an ongoing basis reveal about the texture of South Africa’s democracy?

How can we explain the persistent and growing inequalities and injustices that dominate South Africa today, nearly 30 years into democratic rule?
What are some of the big struggles waged in South Africa today? What do they teach us about democracy, resistance and imagination?
What does a democracy for the many, not a few, look like? What can we learn – from the past and today – about attempts to craft expansive and radical notions of democracy?

Rethinking-Democracy-2024-Programme-Final Module One

Rethinking-Democracy-Module-2-Final Module Two

Events Video

06/02/2021

Will Expropriation give life to a failing Land Reform programme?

Since the introduction of the phrase “expropriation without compensation”, the debate on the land question has never been the same. Pressure on government to deliver land has intensified, while urban masses have resorted to land occupations in response to growing landlessness, poverty and unemployment as a result of COVID-19. In 2020, government published a new Expropriation Bill, which sets out how government might carry out expropriation, in line with Section 25 of the Constitution (which has yet to be amended). With the Expropriation Bill currently open for a second round of public comment, Tshisimani is offering a series of briefings which will cover the history and politics of expropriation, and look closely at the content of the Bill, with the aim of ensuring the dynamic participation of activists, organisations and communities in the public participation process.

Session 3: Unregistered land rights: does the Expropriation Bill provide enough?

Date: Saturday 6 February @ 14:30

Live Stream of Session 3:

Unregistered land rights: does the Expropriation Bill provide enough?
Since the introduction of the phrase “expropriation without compensation”, the debate on the land question has never been the same. Pressure on government to deliver land has intensified, while urban masses have resorted to land occupations in response to growing landlessness, poverty and unemployment as a result of COVID-19. In 2020, government published a new Expropriation Bill, which sets out how government might carry out expropriation, in line with Section 25 of the Constitution (which has yet to be amended). With the Expropriation Bill currently open for a second round of public comment, Tshisimani is offering a series of briefings which will cover the history and politics of expropriation, and look closely at the content of the Bill, with the aim of ensuring the dynamic participation of activists, organisations and communities in the public participation process.
Posted by Tshisimani – Centre for Activist Education on Saturday, 6 February 2021

Session 2: Will the State’s approach to the Expropriation Bill speed up Land Reform? – Unpacking the Expropriation Bill and its Contentious Points.

Date: 30 January 2021

Live Stream of Session 2

Will the State’s approach to the Expropriation Bill speed up Land Reform? – Unpacking the Expropriation Bill and its Contentious Points.
Will the State’s approach to the Expropriation Bill speed up Land Reform? – Unpacking the Expropriation Bill and its Contentious Points. Since the introduction of the phrase “expropriation without compensation”, the debate on the land question has never been the same. Pressure on government to deliver land has intensified, while urban masses have resorted to land occupations in response to growing landlessness, poverty and unemployment as a result of COVID-19. In 2020, government published a new Expropriation Bill, which sets out how government might carry out expropriation, in line with Section 25 of the Constitution (which has yet to be amended). With the Expropriation Bill currently open for a second round of public comment, Tshisimani is offering a series of briefings which will cover the history and politics of expropriation, and look closely at the content of the Bill, with the aim of ensuring the dynamic participation of activists, organisations and communities in the public participation process.
Posted by Tshisimani – Centre for Activist Education on Saturday, 30 January 2021

Session 1: Locating Expropriation in Historical and Political context – Adv. Tembeka Ngcukaitobi & Prof. Ruth Hall

Date: Saturday 23 January 2021

Live Stream of Session 1

Will Expropriation give life to a failing Land Reform programme?
Since the introduction of the phrase “expropriation without compensation”, the debate on the land question has never been the same. Pressure on government to deliver land has intensified, while urban masses have resorted to land occupations in response to growing landlessness, poverty and unemployment as a result of COVID-19. In 2020, government published a new Expropriation Bill, which sets out how government might carry out expropriation, in line with Section 25 of the Constitution (which has yet to be amended). With the Expropriation Bill currently open for a second round of public comment, Tshisimani is offering a series of briefings which will cover the history and politics of expropriation, and look closely at the content of the Bill, with the aim of ensuring the dynamic participation of activists, organisations and communities in the public participation process. Session 1: Locating Expropriation in Historical and Political context – Adv. Tembeka Ngcukaitobi & Prof. Ruth Hall
Posted by Tshisimani – Centre for Activist Education on Saturday, 23 January 2021