Part V — The argument

After the Judgment

A documented case, told from reporting on what followed the judgment that opens Part I.

The families evicted from Wallacedene in the winter of 1999 took their case to South Africa's Constitutional Court under the name of one of them, Irene Grootboom. The judgment of October 2000, written by Justice Zak Yacoob, declared what the state must do. The question of temporary housing for that community had already been settled between the government and the community on the second day of argument, as Yacoob later recalled. The community received building materials, a patch of land on which to build and basic services, and its members were assigned to phase four of a ten-phase housing development.^[1]

Irene Grootboom died in her self-built shack on the temporary relocation site in 2008, almost eight years after the judgment. The reports place her death at the end of July or in the first days of August. The Mail & Guardian reported that she died still homeless and penniless, and quoted her lawyer, Ismail Jamie: "the fact that she died homeless shows how the legal system and civil society failed her".^[2] Mawethu Sila, a community leader with her at the time, said in 2020 that he and most of the others in the case had received state housing by 2011. The house she would have lived in was built after her death, and members of her family live in it.^[1:1]

What failed is disputed. Yacoob put it down to corruption, greed, selfishness and lack of attention to poor people, which he said the Court could not have foreseen.^[1:2] Jamie said he was sorry that they had not done enough to follow the case up after judgment was given in her favour.^[2:1] Neither account is tested here.

Part V draws the book's arguments together and ranks where the design could fail. A right declared and a house built years later are different facts, and the distance between them is the measure this Part holds the design to. A constitution can name who owes the house, what evidence would show it arrived and who must act when it does not. Whether anyone builds it belongs to the second book, and it is the first failure the last chapter ranks.