Challenges to Judicial Enforcement of Socioeconomic Rights in Africa: Comparative Lessons from Ghana and South Africa

It has become increasingly fashionable for many countries especially those in the developing world to include extensive Bills of Rights in their constitutions. The inclusion of socio-economic rights in such Bills of Rights has also been on the increase. While the developing world, particularly emerging democracies in Africa, have been keen on paying special attention to socio-economic rights in their legal systems, the opposite is what generally pertains in the developed world, at least in the United States and under the Strasbourg human rights regime in Europe. The beautifully crafted rights promise economic prosperity and social wellbeing. Courts are granted wide mandates to enforce them. But after several years of constitutional democracy, the majority of the populations in countries with such Bills of Rights are still poor and disillusioned. Disenchanted and frustrated, the masses lash out at the Courts. But, are the Courts really to blame? This chapter examines the above question and argues that the idea of enforcing socio-economic rights through the judicial process is misconceived as courts are ill-suited for the task. That judicial enforcement should at best be a complementary approach to be employed under the most compelling circumstances to aid a political mechanism of enforcement. To illustrate and buttress this point, the chapter reviews the seminal cases on socio-economic rights from Ghana and South Africa. It concludes that a modified form of the monitoring system used at the international level in the implementation of human rights treaties should be adopted at the national level.