Need to tell politicians what to do
Dearth of morality in government
OUR costly National Development Plan, crafted over many months, sets out benchmarks to evolve our economy and society, but is vague on exactly how (and how not) to pursue these goals. Unsurprisingly, ANC lawmakers largely ignore it, except when the finance minister dusts it off to impress international debt rating agency inspectors.
Since the ANC clearly cannot lead the country unaided, it must have the courage to call on the business world, non-ANC political groups, civil society and churches to re-establish a government of national unity. This government must restore proportionality, strip the presidency of absolute powers to appoint heads of state departments and parastatal entities, downsize and restructure our bloated government infrastructure, establish transparency and accountability in all departments and section nine institutions, overhaul government pay systems, root out government tax dodges and shady perks, and develop a professional civil service exempt from cronyism and answerable only to an independent Public Service Commission, also to be made a section nine institution.
The Zuma administration pursues not public interest aims, but its own short-term political ends for which it shamelessly uses the apparatus of government. Inept ANC policies on land ownership and private enterprise have created a climate of disinvestment and destruction of capital which may now threaten even our agricultural self-sufficiency.
It is folly to think that South Africa is invulnerable to a future such as Zimbabwe’s.
Equally foolish are the illusions that the state can replace private enterprise as primary development agent (see the experiences of India and China) and that we can count on being propped up by politically-engineered foreign alliances. Foreign investment in a developing country like ours, for uses other than extractive industries, tends to create a forex liability, as we’ll soon see with our Chinese and Russian friends, whose demand for foreign exchange is on track to impose further pressure on our already feeble balance of payments.
At the heart of the situation is the great frustrated progress myth, that is the story that the ANC tirelessly battles for a better life for all, but is tragically frustrated on all sides by obstructive forces: dead white men like Cecil Rhodes, capitalism, colonialism, apartheid, the Treasury’s obstructiveness, the Reserve Bank, hairstyles, etc. Power elites throughout history have always found convenient scapegoats to blame for their failures and cite as excuses to justify all manner of allegedly necessary actions.
The ANC’s myth is enabled by our society’s outsourcing of morality. It means abdicating moral responsibility for conditions by passing the moral buck to someone else.
Morality is thus outsourced to the marketplace, to lawyers, accountants, judges, politicians and others. “They” are precisely the people to whom we, the public, surrender our moral choices, thereby reducing ethics to economic and political transactions.
This results in behaviour which society strangely tolerates even though it is patently unethical. By valuing political sloganeering and expediency above morality, and bureaucracy over ethics, the ANC narrative normalises the stoic acceptance of problems like drug abuse, human trafficking, racism, child pornography and violence legitimised by political rhetoric, seeing these as social realities we must just learn to live with instead of as the eradicable evils that they are.
Surely no adult mind can now fail to see that South Africa is haunted by problems which are fundamentally moral and beyond the scope of bureaucrats alone. The ANC is no longer what it was in 1994, when it was led by men and women devoted to moral goals.
The post-apartheid world has cultivated its own crop of hypocrisy, corruption and moral decay which power interests all over the political spectrum try to manipulate to their advantage. Let us not be afraid to call again on religious vocabulary to reshape our national conversation.
Plainly we are dealing with moral evils. No politicians, least of all the present national government, can provide the moral direction for which South Africans hunger.
If this seems a forbiddingly big idea, well, it’s a time for big ideas, with room for more than one.
We need new moral purpose to tell our politicians not only what to do but also what not to do. Access to food cannot be imperilled.
The functioning of a healthy private sector – our national economic growth engine -- cannot be undermined. Our constitution cannot be violated by politicians with a taste for authoritarianism.
Government officers cannot be allowed to be above the law.
Many people believe South Africans are today all too aware of moral issues. Certainly an appearance of this is created by public debates about women’s rights, BEE, African solutions to African issues, Eurocentricity and so on.
But a penetrating moral sensibility is less evident when you turn to corruption in high places, environmental and economic sustainability, failed ideologies, the ANC’s unwillingness to appoint competent administrators, and the plight of the poor and ethnic minorities.
The recent elections are just a beginning. Policy initiatives at all levels of government must now focus on the moral rot behind the crisis of credibility that permeates the police, the trade unions and all levels of the ANC itself.