SELF-DETERMINATION: MK SEEKS REPEAL OF CONSTITUTION SECTION 235

SELF-DETERMINATION: MK SEEKS REPEAL OF CONSTITUTION SECTION 235

• 29 March 2026
• Parliament
• SA Legal Academy

uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK) MP Mzwanele Manyi has gazetted a notice announcing his intention to table a Bill in Parliament proposing the repeal of Constitution section 235, which deals with a community’s right to self-determination subject to specific conditions. Input is sought by 26 April 2026.

Serving as the Bill’s procedurally required pre-tabling explanatory summary, the notice summarises the thinking underpinning this proposal – which is that:

• the Bill of Rights already safeguards the freedom to:
  • use a language of choice
  • participate in a cultural life of choice, and
    • practise a religion of choice.

This is noting that protection is also assured regarding the freedom to exercise those rights:

• ‘with other members of a cultural, religious or linguistic community’, and
• by joining and maintaining ‘associations and other organs of civil society, in a manner that is consistent with the Bill of Rights’.

In that context, the notice asserts that, in MK’s view, the Constitution’s section 235:

• ‘introduces confusion, contradictions and ambiguity into the constitutional framework by providing a theoretical basis for (the) self-determination of communities’, therefore
  • creating ‘the false impression that the Constitution allows cultural enclaves or semi-autonomous entities’, and
  • allowing ‘these enclaves or entities to operate in a manner inconsistent with the Bill of Rights’.

This is ‘despite the (constitutional) requirement that this notion of a right to self-determination of a community must be determined by legislation, which would subject such determination to public scrutiny and parliamentary input through a legislative process’.

Constitution section 235 provides that: ‘The right of the South African people as a whole to self-determination, as manifested in this Constitution, does not preclude, within the framework of this right, recognition of the notion of the right of self-determination of any community sharing a common cultural and language heritage, within a territorial entity in the Republic or in any other way, determined by national legislation’.

• Government Gazette notice
• Constitution

Published by SA Legal Academy Policy Watch

Follow us on X @SALegalAcademy (you can also join us on LinkedIn and Facebook)

If you use this information in articles, reports and social media posts of your own, please acknowledge SA Legal Academy Policy Watch as your source

0 COMMENTS

LEAVE A COMMENT