In a country where millions are already supporting entire households on fragile incomes, the mere idea that the law could compel brothers and sisters to mandatorily maintain each other exposes something far bigger than a legal technicality
Image: File
THIS week, South Africans were in a tizzy after the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) announced that siblings may have a legal duty to financially support one another. Naturally, people were quick to interrogate the notion.
In a country where millions are already supporting entire households on fragile incomes, the mere idea that the law could compel brothers and sisters to mandatorily maintain each other exposes something far bigger than a legal technicality — it exposes a society where the responsibility for survival continues to shift away from the state and onto struggling families.
To be clear, this is not a new law. The principle that certain family members have a duty to support one another has existed in South African common law for decades. The troubling part is the public emphasis on such a duty.
In a country already riddled with corruption, exploitation and deep economic vulnerability, highlighting a legal obligation like this does not exist in a vacuum. It risks legitimising a culture where financial pressure, manipulation and coercion within families become easier to justify. When survival is already precarious, the law can easily be weaponised in deeply personal ways.
One of the quieter dangers of framing sibling maintenance as a legal duty is how easily it could deepen the already unequal burdens placed on women. In many households, women are expected to hold families together — emotionally, physically and financially.
They are often the caregivers, the ones who send money home, stretch their incomes to support younger siblings, ageing parents and extended relatives. Turning that social expectation into something enforceable by law risks formalising pressure that already falls disproportionately on women.
In a society where women still earn far less than men, face higher unemployment, and carry the bulk of unpaid care work, legally compelling them to support siblings may simply reinforce a pattern where women are expected to sacrifice more and absorb the fallout of economic hardship while the state quietly steps back.
None of this is to suggest that family responsibility is inherently wrong. For many South Africans, family support is a daily reality, popularly known as “black tax”. Across the nation, countless households are sustained by one working person supporting parents, siblings, nieces, nephews and cousins.
Money made in the cities often quietly sustains rural homes. Young professionals carry school fees for younger relatives. Grandmothers stretch pensions to feed entire communities of grandchildren. For generations, the extended family has acted as a crucial safety net where formal systems fall short.
But there is a fundamental difference between voluntary family solidarity and legal obligation. One emerges from care, mutual understanding and shared struggle. The other carries the weight of enforcement, courts and legal consequences. When the state begins to formalise family responsibility in this way, it forces a harder question about who is really meant to carry the burden.
South Africa is already a country where the social contract feels dangerously thin. Official unemployment perpetually hovers around crisis levels, and for young people, it is even worse. Many households survive on a single income — if they have one at all. In this context, redistributing financial responsibility among family members risks ignoring the structural conditions that created this pressure in the first place.
The danger is that legal interpretations like this quietly shift the conversation away from state accountability. When the state emphasises what families owe each other, it can obscure what the state owes its citizens. Access to housing, healthcare, education and social protection should not depend on the financial capacity of one’s relatives. Yet that is increasingly what survival in South Africa looks like.
There is also a deeper cultural tension at play. Many South Africans already experience enormous pressure within extended family networks. The expectation that a single employed relative must “carry” the family can be emotionally and financially overwhelming.
For some, it means postponing personal ambitions, delaying home ownership or living in constant financial anxiety. For others, it can create resentment, conflict and strained relationships that fracture families rather than strengthen them.
Introducing the spectre of legal obligation into this environment risks intensifying those pressures. Even if cases remain rare, the mere possibility changes family dynamics. What was once a moral expectation can begin to feel like a legal threat. In a society where financial desperation is widespread, that line matters.
None of this means the principle itself is unreasonable. Where vulnerable individuals have no other support, the law may serve as a last resort to prevent destitution. Few would argue that a person should be abandoned if a family member has the means to help. The instinct to protect the vulnerable is not the problem.
The real concern is the broader context. South Africa’s inequality crisis cannot be solved by quietly expanding the financial duties of families. The scale of the problem is too large. When millions are unemployed, and public services remain strained, expecting households to absorb more responsibility is far from sustainable.
Ultimately, the debate sparked by the NPA’s comments reveals something deeper than legal confusion. It exposes a society grappling with the limits of familial care in the face of systemic failure. Families can support one another, and often do so with extraordinary resilience. But they cannot replace a functioning state.
If anything, this moment should force a more uncomfortable conversation: not about what siblings owe each other, but about what the state owes the people it is meant to serve. Because when the burden of survival is pushed further into the private sphere, it is rarely the powerful who carry it.
It’s ordinary families, already exhausted, already giving everything, who are left holding up a system that has failed them.
* Tswelopele Makoe is a gender and social justice activist and editor at Global South Media Network. She is a researcher, columnist, and an Andrew W Mellon scholar at the Desmond Tutu Centre for Religion and Social Justice, UWC.
** The views expressed here do not reflect those of the Sunday Independent, IOL, or Independent Media.