This past Saturday marked 30 years of SA’s sovereign Bill of Rights. As per tradition, the president would take to the podium and share a message of hope and resilience.
Under the theme The Bill of Rights at 30 - Making Human Dignity Real, South Africans were reassured that “everyone is equal before the law and has the right to equal protection”. But for ordinary citizens this day presents a moment of reflection and soldiering on.
Perhaps one should lean on the reassuring words of Isithwalwandwe/Separankoe, Nelson Mandela, that: “To deny people their human rights is to challenge their very humanity.”
To bring this closer to home, my colleague, a single parent, tells a familiar story of how the cost of living is increasingly becoming an epidemic. She recalls how on an ordinary afternoon she stood at her neighbourhood supermarket till in Johannesburg, with a basket of essentials, doing a quick math, and quietly putting something back when the total cost climbed higher than expected.
Evidently, when a powerful firm can inflate/increase prices or make it harder to get essential goods, the impact isn’t abstract - it lands in household budgets, in choices, and in human dignity. This, therefore, depicts a practical link between competition law and human rights.
In a normal discourse, we usually talk about human rights in big terms - equality, freedom, dignity. But the Bill of Rights calls for practical: access to healthcare, enough food and water, and social security. These fundamental rights require collective action. Competition law can’t deliver those rights on its own, but it can surely change market behaviour on reducing households burden on the cost of living.
The Covid-19 pandemic made that link obvious. Demand for masks and sanitisers shot up, and so did some prices of essential food products. In the Competition Commission v Babelegi Workwear and Industrial Supplies case, the Commission pursued alleged excessive pricing tied to face masks. Along with cases similar DisChem’s, it put a simple message on the table:“If you have market power, you don’t get to use a national crisis as your payday”.
The point wasn’t to ban profit, but to stop price-gouging when people needed to stay safe.
You see the same pattern in later Competition Tribunal decisions too. In April 2023, the Tribunal fined BlueCollar (Pty) Ltd, supplier of bulk hand sanitiser, for excessive pricing, calling the conduct “shocking” given the wider harm it could cause. Overcharging for essentials isn’t just a numbers game, it can mean fewer supplies, tighter budgets, and more strain on the people who depend on them.
And it’s not only about sudden price spikes. Sometimes rights get blocked quietly. Let’s take mobile data as an example. If you can’t afford to get online, study, job-hunt and even stay informed, it gets harder.
The Commission’s Data Services Market Inquiry dug into why data prices stayed high and competition stayed weak. It wasn’t a single courtroom fight, but it helped push affordability and access to the centre of the conversation, because today, connectivity is a gateway to economic participation.
Healthcare makes the point even sharper. When the product is medicine, a pricing decision can quickly become a human rights decision. The Commission has pursued and referred matters in pharmaceutical markets where the allegation is that prices for critical medicines were excessive.
One well-known example is the referral involving breast cancer medicine trastuzumab (Herceptin), where Roche faced such allegations. The economics can get complicated, but when a life-saving medicine is priced out of reach, the harm isn’t only financial, it strikes at access to healthcare.
If there’s one thread running through all of this, it’s power. Competition law is one of the few tools that can rein in private power when it’s used to squeeze the public or shut others out especially in markets for essentials.
So, as we mark another Human Rights Day, the plain takeaway is that human rights aren’t protected only in courts and speeches. They’re also protected in everyday markets, when we insist that nobody should be able to corner a crisis, lock people out of opportunity, or price dignity like a luxury.
That’s the Competition Commission’s mandate in human terms: to make sure the market doesn’t become another place where dignity is unaffordable.
- Makunga is spokesperson for Competition Commission SA
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