scholarly journals Overview of the legislative protection of retirement benefits against transfer, reduction, hypothecation and attachment in South Africa

2021 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 1-29
Author(s):  
Clement Marumoagae

This article demonstrates that the retirement industry is fragmented, with different pieces of legislation which contain differently drafted provisions addressing the same issue. In particular, it illustrates that several pension statutes provide protection against creditors to retirement benefits held by retirement funds. Further, that, while held in retirement funds, retirement benefits are protected from assignment, transfer, cession, hypothecation, pledge, reduction, attachment and execution. Furthermore, that some of these transactions appear in some of the provisions of the pension Statutes whereas they do not do so in similar provisions of other pension statutes. This article argues that the differences in the way similar provisions in different pension statutes are drafted leads to the development of confusing jurisprudence regarding the protection of members' retirement benefits, which needs legislative intervention. This article calls for a uniform approach across all pension statutes regarding the protection of pension benefits against members' creditors. This article further examines whether retirement benefits can be declared realisable property to enable creditors to enforce payment of their debts from these benefits. It illustrates that while it is clear that legislative protection of retirement benefits is available before these benefits accrue to members, there is, however, controversy whether this protection remains intact when these benefits have accrued to members.

2020 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-48
Author(s):  
Whitney K. Taylor

When do individuals choose to advance legal claims to social welfare goods? To explore this question, I turn to the case of South Africa, where, despite the adoption of a "transformative" constitution in 1996, access to social welfare goods remains sorely lacking. Drawing on an original 551-person survey, I examine patterns of legal claims-making, focusing on beliefs individuals hold about the law, rights, and the state, and how those beliefs relate to decisions about whether and how to make claims. I find striking differences between the factors that influence when people say they should file a legal claim and when they actually do so. The way that individuals interpret their own material conditions and neighborhood context are important, yet under-acknowledged, factors for explaining claims-making.


Author(s):  
Motseotsile Clement Marumoagae

This paper discusses the challenge of the misappropriation of retirement fund assets by trustees, fund asset managers and retirement funds’ administrators. It demonstrates that retirement fund members lose substantial retirement benefits due to the illegal and unlawful conduct of those who manage and administer retirement funds. It evaluates whether the South African legislative framework offers retirement funds and their members adequate protection from activities that may compromise the delivery of the pension promise such as: mismanagement; fraudulent activities; gross negligence; and the outright looting of retirement fund assets. In particular, this paper illustrates that the law in South Africa does not deter would-be wrongdoers from acting in a manner that may compromise the benefits expected by retirement fund members when they exit their funds. It advocates the adoption of adequate preventative legislative measures that would make it difficult for anyone to act in a manner that would compromise retirement fund members' benefits in South Africa.


Obiter ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 70-83
Author(s):  
Carmel van Niekerk

Individuals are increasingly entering into informal agreements with known sperm donors in order to either circumvent the costs involved in using fertility centres or owing to personal beliefs and preferences. When they do so, the legal protection that ordinarily accompanies the use of a fertility centre is either sparse or lacking. The question is what happens when one of the parties reneges on the agreement, either by demanding parental responsibilities or rights in the case of the donor or, in the case of the recipient, by demanding that the donor assumes a parental role when this was never his intention. The position in South Africa is currently unregulated. This article, therefore, examines the position in a number of foreign jurisdictions with the aim of making recommendations for the way forward in South Africa.


Author(s):  
Hilde Roos

Opera, race, and politics during apartheid South Africa form the foundation of this historiographic work on the Eoan Group, a so-called colored cultural organization that performed opera in the Cape. The La Traviata Affair: Opera in the Time of Apartheid charts Eoan’s opera activities from its inception in 1933 until the cessation of its work by 1980. By accepting funding from the apartheid government and adhering to apartheid conditions, the group, in time, became politically compromised, resulting in the rejection of the group by their own community and the cessation of opera production. However, their unquestioned acceptance of and commitment to the art of opera lead to the most extraordinary of performance trajectories. During apartheid, the Eoan Group provided a space for colored people to perform Western classical art forms in an environment that potentially transgressed racial boundaries and challenged perceptions of racial exclusivity in the genre of opera. This highly significant endeavor and the way it was thwarted at the hands of the apartheid regime is the story that unfolds in this book.


Author(s):  
Christopher Hanlon

Emerson’s Memory Loss is about an archive of texts documenting Emerson’s intellectual state during the final phase of his life, as he underwent dementia. It is also about the way these texts provoke a rereading of the more familiar canon of Emerson’s thinking. Emerson’s memory loss, Hanlon argues, contributed to the shaping of a line of thought in America that emphasizes the social over the solipsistic, the affective over the distant, the many over the one. Emerson regarded his output during the time when his patterns of cognition transformed profoundly as a regathering of focus on the nature of memory and of thinking itself. His late texts theorize Emerson’s experience of senescence even as they disrupt his prior valorizations of the independent mind teeming with self-sufficient conviction. But still, these late writings have succumbed to a process of critical forgetting—either ignored by scholars or denied inclusion in Emerson’s oeuvre. Attending to a manuscript archive that reveals the extent to which Emerson collaborated with others—especially his daughter, Ellen Tucker Emerson—to articulate what he considered his most important work even as his ability to do so independently waned, Hanlon measures the resonance of these late texts across the stretch of Emerson’s thinking, including his writing about Margaret Fuller and his meditations on streams of thought that verge unto those of his godson, William James. Such ventures bring us toward a self defined less by its anxiety of overinfluence than by its communality, its very connectedness with myriad others.


Author(s):  
Mathilde Skoie

This chapter introduces yet another European ‘repossession’ of Virgil that generally remains outside the scope of most volumes on translation and reception. Skoie focuses on three Norwegian translations of Virgil’s Eclogues and analyses the way they exhibit tendencies towards two complementary processes that have been labelled, in recent theories of translation, as ‘domestication’ and ‘foreignization’; and they do so as the language of translation becomes politicized and engaged in debates about Norwegian identity. Skoie explores the use of Virgilian pastoral idiom in a foreign language and the juxtaposition between rural and urban voices in the context of language politics.


2004 ◽  
Vol 60 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
P.G.J. Meiring

The author who served on the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), focuses on the Hindu experience in South Africa during the apartheid years. At a special TRC Hearing for Faith Communities (East London, 17-19 November 1997) two submissions by local Hindu leaders were tabled. Taking his cues from those submissions, the author discusses four issues: the way the Hindu community suffered during these years, the way in which some members of the Hindu community supported the system of apartheid, the role of Hindus in the struggle against apartheid, and finally the contribution of the Hindu community towards reconciliation in South Africa. In conclusion some notes on how Hindus and Christians may work together in th


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-5
Author(s):  
Carolyn E. Holmes

ABSTRACT This article explores the ethical difficulties that arise because of the interaction between fieldwork practitioners and their sites, in terms of the positionality of the researcher. What are the ethics of blending in or of standing out? This question stems from my experience of 12 months of fieldwork in South Africa in two distinct locales and among two different populations, one in which I could “pass” and another in which I was marked as various degrees of “outsider.” Drawing on this fieldwork, as well as an overview of the literature in political science on positionality, I argue that our discipline—because of the way it shapes interactions and research outcomes—must take positionality seriously in ethical training and practice.


2021 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 170-183
Author(s):  
Chung-ying Cheng

Abstract This article is to argue that virtue is experienced and understood in Confucian ethics as power to act and as performance of a moral action, and that virtue (de 德) as such has to be onto-cosmologically explicated, not just teleologically explained. In other words, it is intended to construct an integrative theory of virtues based on both dao (the Way 道) and de. To do so, we will examine the two features of de, as the power that is derived from self-reflection and self-restraining, and as the motivated action for attaining its practical end in a community. Only by a self-integrated moral consciousness can one’s experience, action and ideal remain in consistency and coherence, which leads us to the Aristotelian notion of virtue as excellence (aretê) and enables us to see how virtue as aretê could be introduced as a second feature of de, namely as the power for effective action in the whole system of virtues, apart from the first feature of de as self-restraining power. We will conclude that reason and virtue are practically united and remain inseparable, and that taking into account the onto-cosmological foundation of virtues, reason and virtue are inevitably the moving and advancing forces for the formation and transformation of human morality just as they are motivating and prompting incentives for individual moral action.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document