Duty of all of us to keep SA honest

Passion of citizens in other lands to defy the status quo is inspiring

LAST week, I had a call with a friend based in Washington, DC. She was telling me about her master plan to challenge the executive orders President Donald Trump recently put in place. She believes the current resistance movement needs to go beyond merely protesting — hence her passion for developing a master plan.

When I asked her where her passion to take action came from, she said that, as an American citizen, it was your constitutional right to resist when you believed those in power were not acting in the best interests of the country. She was uncomfortable with merely accepting the status quo.

In the same week, I found myself similarly intrigued by the passionate commentary of my tour guide while visiting the Amazon jungle in Brazil. Aside from sharing with us interesting facts about the world’s largest tropical rainforest, he also expressed his excitement over the number of private- and public-sector leaders who had recently been arrested for corruption and misuse of state funds.

In a country notorious for its high levels of corruption, here was a man, in the middle of the jungle, who still retained hope that the status quo could be changed.

According to him, thousands of politicians and business people were facing arrest, with more to follow. He was constantly on his cellphone, giving us the latest news updates on the corruption scandals, the latest breakthrough having been on Monday, when Eike Batista, once Brazil’s richest man, was arrested on bribery charges.

It is interesting how both the friend from a not-so-corrupt developed country and the guide from the very corrupt developing world shared the same level of passion for holding others to account when the occasion called for it. I contrast this to our experience in South Africa.

There are countless reports on corruption in our country, dating back many years, from state capture to white monopoly capital exposés. We are quick to express our anger and outrage at dinner tables, but are we as passionate about being part of the solution? Have we fallen into the trap of accepting the present reality as the status quo, instead of challenging it?

I am sure there are anti-corruption measures in place, increasingly so over the past few years, but I wonder if the average South African feels responsible for these measures.

We are quick to feel entitled to live in a country that is fair to all citizens, and rightly so. However, this entitlement must also come with a sense of responsibility. Our leaders are responsible for the success of our state, as are we as individual citizens. We cannot expect entitlement to the benefits when we are not prepared to take personal responsibility for solving the challenges that plague our country.

Perhaps it is time for a mentality shift. We must realise there is a state towards which we are all accountable — not the government, not the leading party, not big business, but our own country.

I hope for a country in which the average citizen is passionate about seeing our system get cleaned up — not because they are for or against any movement, but because we all care about the kind of South Africa we would like to leave behind for generations to come.

A number of brave individuals have received much media attention in the past year or so as they challenged and exposed the true levels of corruption in our system. I hope one day we can live in a country where their actions are seen as normal — not brave, but normal. That can be possible only when more of us see it as our personal responsibility to challenge that which is crippling our economy and thus overall investor sentiment.

The Corruption Perceptions index report from watchdog Transparency International was released recently. South Africa is still fortunate to have lower levels of corruption than the rest of the Brics countries and most African countries. Thanks to the progressive actions seen last year, our rating has improved slightly, from 44 in 2015 to 45 in 2016 (where 0 is highly corrupt and 100 is very clean).

Despite this, our overall ranking is deteriorating, down three places to 64th out of 176 countries. We need to aspire for better results and be more passionate about challenging the status quo.

South Africa’s story was built on the basis of hope for a better country. We need that hope to feed into the solutions that feed our everyday lives.

Sikhakhane is an international speaker and an executive at Circle Food Group, with a business honours degree from the University of Cape Town and an MBA from Stanford University