Akhona Ngcobo is a lecturer in leadership development and management at Stellenbosch Business School Executive Development.
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Akhona Ngcobo
Something quietly catastrophic is deepening in our world. Not in the spectacular, headline-grabbing way we have grown accustomed to, no single event, no footage on loop. Instead, it is a slow erosion that reveals itself in small moments: the way a manager speaks to a subordinate, the silence of someone who has learned not to object, the posture of a person told in a thousand subtle ways that they do not count. What we are living through is a dignity deficit.
Unlike economic deficits, it does not appear as a number. It appears in people. And as South Africa marks Human Rights Day, 30 years after human dignity was written into law, this is the reckoning we cannot postpone.
What dignity actually is
We often use the word dignity as though its meaning is obvious. It is not. Dignity is one of the most philosophically contested yet viscerally understood concepts in human life. You may not be able to define it, but you know with absolute clarity when it has been taken from you.
The philosopher Immanuel Kant argued that dignity is not conferred by rank or status. It is inherent to personhood itself. Every human being possesses it not because of what they achieve or accumulate, but because they are capable of choice, reason and moral agency.
Martha Nussbaum extended this argument by showing that dignity must also be materially supported. A person denied education, safety or the ability to participate fully in society is not merely disadvantaged. They are structurally denied the conditions necessary for dignity to flourish.
African philosophy has long recognised this reality. The idea of Ubuntu - umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu - reminds us that our humanity is realised through one another. In this view, dignity is not something we possess in isolation. It exists in relationship. It is recognised, affirmed and sustained between people.
The Paradox the powerful have never understood
Here is a truth societies repeatedly fail to grasp: when you strip another person of their dignity, you do not gain power. You diminish your own humanity.
The manager who humiliates a colleague in a meeting is not demonstrating authority. He is demonstrating a failure of self-knowledge. The parent who withholds warmth as discipline may believe they are building character, yet they are eroding trust in the process.
Steve Biko understood this with clarity. Colonial domination did not simply dispossess people of land; it attempted to colonise their sense of self. Liberation therefore required psychological reclamation — the refusal to accept the diminished identity imposed by oppression.
Winnie Madikizela-Mandela carried this truth in her own life. Subjected to banishment, imprisonment and systematic attempts to erase her personhood, she refused to surrender her sense of worth. “You have touched the women,” she declared in 1976, “you have struck a rock.” This was not rhetoric. It was a declaration of being.
Both figures point to an uncomfortable truth: dignity cannot ultimately be granted by institutions. Titles, recognition and legal protections may affirm dignity where it already exists, but they cannot create it. This is why societies can write inspiring constitutions and still live with everyday indignity. The laws may advance faster than the people responsible for living them.
What indignity looks like
Indignity rarely arrives as overt violence. More often it appears as ordinary behaviour. It is the woman whose idea in a meeting goes unnoticed, only to receive applause when repeated by someone else. Over time, silence becomes habit. Habit becomes self-doubt.
It is the domestic worker who has cared for a family’s children for years but is never invited to sit at the table she cleans each evening. The family may not consider themselves cruel. But thoughtlessness can also erase a person. It is the bright child in an under-resourced school whose potential goes unrecognised. By the time he leaves school, he no longer believes in the intelligence he once carried so naturally.
None of these moments break the law. They require no malice. They are failures of recognition — the inability to encounter another person in their full humanity.
And this failure is not confined to any class or community. It exists in penthouses and informal settlements, in boardrooms and bedrooms alike. Indignity is a human condition. Which means its remedy must also be human.
Three ways we begin
First, cultivate dignity within. A person who constantly diminishes others is often someone who has never learned to be at ease with themselves. The question worth asking is simple but uncomfortable: what do I truly believe about my own worth? The answer quietly shapes how we treat everyone around us.
Second, practise recognition.The philosopher Axel Honneth argued that recognition - the experience of being truly seen - is a fundamental human need. In everyday life, this means attributing ideas to their source, making eye contact intentionally, and noticing who is absent from our attention. These gestures may seem small, but they form the architecture of dignity.
Third, design environments that affirm humanity.Dignity is also shaped by systems. A feedback process that never changes anything is not participation; it is managed frustration. A school with broken infrastructure sends a message about how society values its students. Institutions communicate dignity or its absence every day through the environments they create.
The work that has no end
South Africa’s Constitution speaks with moral clarity. Section 10 states: “Everyone has inherent dignity and the right to have their dignity respected and protected.” Yet the distance between that principle and daily reality remains vast.
Closing that gap will not come from policy alone. It requires an internal shift — in leaders, managers, parents and citizens — to recognise that dignity is not a slogan or a legal clause. It is a practice. Imagine a country where this principle becomes the operating system of institutions. Businesses would consider whether suppliers treat workers with respect. Boardrooms would actively seek the voices that are usually overlooked, not merely for fairness but because unseen perspectives strengthen decisions. An economy built on human dignity would recognise domestic workers, informal traders and factory labourers not as expendable inputs but as participants whose wellbeing strengthens society as a whole.
None of this should require an economic justification. Dignity is a moral imperative, not something to be earned through productivity or performance. And yet, even on these terms, the case is clear. Employees who feel respected are more engaged, more productive and more likely to stay, while those who experience disrespect withdraw effort or leave. Poor workplace treatment is estimated to cost the global economy $1 trillion annually in lost productivity. Organisations that foster dignity are not only more just; they are more innovative and perform better. Dignity, in this sense, is a proven driver of performance, stability and long-term economic success.
The evidence is increasingly clear: societies that invest in dignity — through education, healthcare and fair working conditions — are not only more just. They are also more innovative, resilient and economically successful. Dignity, it turns out, is both a moral and strategic imperative.
The philosopher Simone Weil once wrote that attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. To truly attend to another person — to recognise their reality as fully as one recognises one’s own — is an act of profound respect.
That is what dignity ultimately asks of us.
Not perfection. Not performance. Simply the willingness, practiced every day, to meet another human being as though their life matters as much as our own. Because it does.
*Ngcobo is a lecturer in leadership development and management at Stellenbosch Business School Executive Development.