Hunger is not only a shortage of food. That is what it looks like from the outside, and what our policy language has taught us to see: a gap between calories required and calories delivered, closable by a better grant or a fuller plate. But chronic, structural hunger is something else. It is the foreclosure of a becoming, meaning the closing-down of a future the self was entitled to grow into.

The isiZulu word ngisazophumelela – I am still becoming; I am still going to succeed – carries in its grammar one small, stubborn word: still. Hunger negates the still. And because the self is formed within a web of care, structural hunger does not merely weaken a body. It tears the relational web through which personhood is constituted. This is what I mean by flourishing denied: not only a material harm, but a constitutional and an ontological one.

Not the residue of a crisis passing through

The scale of the denial is a matter of public record. The Human Sciences Research Council’s recent Food and Nutrition Security Survey (2024) finds 63.5% of South African households food insecure, and 17.5% severely so. These figures are not the residue of a crisis passing through. They are the ordinary, annual output of the arrangements we have made, which is why the language of emergency, with its implication of exception, flatters us.

Our Constitution knows this. Section 27(1)(b) guarantees everyone the right of access to sufficient food and water; Section 27(2) then qualifies the guarantee by ‘progressive realisation’ within the state’s ‘available resources’. Section 28(1)(c), the child’s right to basic nutrition, carries no such qualification. For the child, the Constitution names a threshold owed not at the horizon of fiscal convenience but now. Lawyers are trained to read that asymmetry as a drafting quirk. I read it as a confession.

It is the constitutional text conceding, in the case of the child, precisely what our courts have as yet failed to concede: an immediately owed minimum below which the self cannot form. In the housing rights case, Government of the Republic of South Africa and Others v Grootboom and Others (2000), the Constitutional Court declined to read the child’s right to shelter as a directly enforceable claim upon the state, locating the primary duty with families. Irene Grootboom herself died in 2008, still living in a shack. In Minister of Health and Others v Treatment Action Campaign and Others (No 2) (2002), it exchanged the minimum core for the softer discipline of ‘reasonableness’. The threshold was acknowledged but no court has named what, at minimum, the state must provide, to whom, and by when. A right without measurements: nothing against which a budget could be held. No recognised minimum core.

Exploring the bounds of socioeconomic rights

Thirty years into the constitutional era, a scattered body of judgments has begun to explore the bounds of socioeconomic rights.

In Equal Education and Others v Minister of Basic Education and Others (2020), the court refused to let the state, under cover of the pandemic, allow the school nutrition programme to lapse for children no longer physically at school. Nutrition, it held, attaches not to attendance but to the child.

In Institute for Economic Justice and Others v Minister of Social Development and Others (2025), the court tied the qualifying threshold for social assistance to the food poverty line, refusing to let the indignity of hunger be excused by a plea of unaffordability – the Constitution disciplining the budget, rather than the other way about. The case is before the Supreme Court of Appeal on 25 August; whether a court may hold the shape of the state’s purse to the shape of the poverty line is, as I write, undecided.

Most recently, on 23 June 2026, in Friends of South Africa Early Childhood Development Forum and Another v KwaZulu-Natal Department of Education, the High Court in Pietermaritzburg named a right our law had not before named: that every child holds a right to early childhood development, and that a province’s failure to pay the modest per-child subsidy on which community crèches depend was not an administrative lapse but an infringement of that right. The court did not merely order payment; it bound the province to account, centre by centre, until it complied. Because the province neither opposed nor appeared, the reasoning is thin and the ruling untested. But the order locates a direct, supervised state duty at exactly the point Grootboom left us: not where the family has vanished, but where poor families sustain their children’s earliest becoming through community institutions that cannot survive without public support. The crèche is where the constitutional threshold is met or missed. The subsidy is the thread by which the state holds, or drops, the web of care.

Hunger is not the poor’s misfortune, it’s a wound in the common life

Set beside one another, these cases are moments in which courts have begun to treat the child’s nutritional and developmental threshold as a floor rather than a horizon – immediately owed and structurally enforced. Each case turns on whether a child is permitted to become. The minimum core, on this reading, is not a quantum of calories. It is the material condition of a self that can still say I am still becoming and be believed because the food, the care and the classroom that make the sentence true are actually there.

Here ubuntu does constitutional work that the liberal idiom of the solitary rights-bearer cannot. If personhood is relational, then a polity that engineers scarcity does not merely fail an individual claimant; it corrodes the relations through which any of us becomes a person. Hunger is not a private misfortune that befalls the poor. It is a wound in the common life. It is not a fate we suffer but a distribution we choose, renewed in every budget that defers the child’s threshold to a more convenient year.

And if the obligation is relational, it cannot stop at the state. Hunger in South Africa is priced. The Pietermaritzburg Economic Justice and Dignity Group, which tracks shelf prices in the same city that produced the crèche judgment, put the household food basket at R5 502 in June 2026, and the cost of feeding one child a basic nutritious diet at R977 a month – against a Food Poverty Line of R855 and a Child Support Grant of R580. Nor is the pricing innocent: the producers of bread once fixed the price of the staple; cartel conduct for which Competition Commission v Pioneer Foods (Pty) Ltd (2010) exacted its penalties. Section 8(2) of the Bill of Rights binds private actors where the nature of a right permits, and the right to food – a right that passes, at every point of its realisation, through corporate hands – permits a great deal. A jurisprudence of becoming must learn to say so: through competition law, through the accountability the Human Rights Commission’s inquiry has begun to demand of retailers and producers, and, in time, through the horizontal application of Section 27 itself. The web that ubuntu names is not woven by the state alone; those who profit from its strands answer for its tearing.

I am still becoming

Nor is South African hunger sui generis. It is, in part, the afterlife of colonial extraction – of land and labour and food systems reorganised to feed others first. The right to adequate food in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966) still speaks the grammar of the individual claimant against the individual state. Ubuntu offers a different grammar – obligation that is relational and, in the end, planetary; in which no one flourishes while another is starved, and no nation’s plenty is quite innocent of another’s want. That is not yet the law. But it is the direction in which a jurisprudence of becoming must travel.