Maintenance for Children
By its very nature, the concept of maintenance should be quite easy to ascertain and acquire in law. A parent of a child is (especially, for the purposes of law, financially ) duty-bound and legally bound to support his or her child, whether natural or adopted parent. In a similar fashion, the law has created a set of reciprocal obligations between parents and children: children are equally bound to support their parents as parents are to support their children. In South Africa, especially because of, inter alia , the high birth rare, the law has been geared with a fool-proof Maintenance Act , Regulations, and Court. This is primarily because the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa ("the Constitution") is the highest law in the land and therefore equality before the law is an entrenched value in respect of all law created and regulating the country. However, the Maintenance system, particularly in Gauteng, is a system which is now essentially defunct: it