affecting the cost of living. Doctors and paramedics went on strike over pay packages because they were being grossly underpaid when taking into account their qualifications as well as market forces. The question is: what market forces operate in the selection of politicians? Surely politics is not a scarce skill in South Africa, considering that there are no objective qualifications required for the job. We are now nineteen years into democracy and the democratic parliament has not once considered a revision of the job evaluation system in the country, hence the huge differences in remuneration across operations in the public sector. Has anyone asked why?
There is an asymmetry in the response of political actors across parties to moral issues, firstly, because of the inherently selfish nature of politics and, secondly, because of the elevated position of politics in the South African psyche, a psyche generated by the specific historical experiences of South Africans in general and black South Africans in particular. The resultant perception is that access to public office is an opportunity for material and therefore social wellbeing. Despite the long history of a political struggle led by a liberation movement with impeccable public moral credentials, mediating factors such as the politics of co-optation and the politics of compromise gained the ascendancy. In the process, it is public morality that has suffered with the electorate as the ultimate loser.
The third explanation is found in what Parish refers to as “value pluralism” as propounded by Max Weber. Value pluralism implies that “The various value spheres of the world stand in irreconcilable tensions to one another.”18 Weber believed that “these and other values bear some relation to one another, certainly, but they cannot be cashed out into a single common currency, as Mill had believed as true of utility, nor can any standard be given comprehensive priority over rival elements as Kant had thought true of the superior standard of beauty.”19 John Stuart Mill had argued that “the full explanation of the rightness or wrongness of an action or policy depends exclusively on the consequences for human happiness which that action tends to produce,”20 termed a utilitarian or consequentialist notion of morality, a notion akin to the dictum that the end justifies the means. Arguably, this notion is riddled with problems. For example, who decides what constitutes human happiness? A large Gini co-efficient? And what of instances where the happiness of individual public representatives is at odds with that of the general public? The list can go on indefinitely.
In contrast, Immanuel Kant’s position was that “only those actions done from a motive of moral duty can be considered truly valuable from a moral point of view.”21 According to Kant, principle was primary in making moral decisions, and this did not necessarily render the purpose worthless for the purpose is part of the facts factored into the decision. Only it should be subjected to the bounds of moral permissibility. It was, therefore, the principle rather than the nature of the problem at hand that prevailed, hence the label “deontological morality”. Value pluralism would thus most probably find reconciliation in the consequentialist version of morality, but how different would this be from expediency, realising that what is of value would itself be contested? And what does this say to South Africa’s public morality?
South Africa is not only a plural society; it has a singularly unpleasant history as well, where racial superiority and the attendant prejudices were superimposed on the plural formations. Further, the struggle for political and economic emancipation was predicated on this plurality where antagonisms were constructed along racial lines despite the non-racial conception of the ANC as the leading component in the liberation struggle.
At CODESA this pluralism was recognised in the number and type of organisations that participated in the negotiations. The result was an electoral system that gave recognition and acknowledgement of this plurality, a system loaded in favour of representativeness, the party list system or proportional representation.
Evidence from political science research suggests that though policy decisions within this system reflect preferences of a broad spectrum of voters, it is weak in accountability as voters have no power to remove office bearers whose performance they deem unsatisfactory. Further, the negotiations culminated in a diluted form of a presidential system of government where the electorate has no direct influence on the election of the president of the country. Political science theory postulates that where the president is directly elected by the electorate, the ensuing presidential regime “leans towards accountability because it concentrates executive powers in a single office directly accountable to voters and provides checks and balances through a clear separation of executive and legislative prerogatives.”22 This was not to be the case in South Africa.
Political science theory further posits that where public officials rely less on the electorate for their positions but more on the party, they become less accountable to the electorate and that, because of this, proportional representation encourages political rent extraction by public office bearers. This lack of accountability to the public is demonstrable in South Africa in that corruption among public elites has become common place. South Africa’s corruption perception rating dropped by 20 points from 34th position in the world in the year 2000 to 54th in 2008, according to Transparency International, an international research body on corruption.
Thus a combination of historical, cultural and political variables backed up by a favourable electoral system have conspired to produce ideological and political conditions that have provided the ANC, as the leading actor in government, with an indefinite period to negotiate a new public morality. Official inaction over allegations against public officials are often brushed aside or dismissed either as a continuation of the erstwhile rulers to undermine the integrity of former subordinates, or as pronouncements by reactionary or counter-revolutionary forces. The same rationale is advanced against critics of government performance who are easily labelled as being against transformation where the politics of transformation has created a new moral hegemony where the principals cannot err in the name of the sovereignty of the masses. This immediately puts critics on the defensive since they do not wish be seen as counter-revolutionaries acting against transformation. The result is silence.
The value pluralism has different and disparate sources all drawing influence from the three sets of roots and all operating from different conceptions of entitlement. Within the ruling elite from whom a majority of public officials are drawn through the party deployment process, there is a specific morality of restitution derived from their social standing and past experiences. It is this culture of entitlement that results in contradictory moral poles. We thus have, among the ruling elite, some government ministers buying expensive vehicles on grounds that it is policy, thus bringing into fruition a self-fulfilling prophecy. Despite this, the Minister of Finance from the same political stable pursues a line of moderation and opts for a cheaper vehicle almost half the price compared to that of his colleagues.
At the level of ordinary citizens, major fault lines exist with regard to the balance between citizen rights and obligations, with the balance tilted in favour of rights at the expense of responsibilities. This is nowhere more noticeable than in the culture of non-payment of rates and service charges, an indication of the disregard of civic responsibilities by the populace. As if this were not enough, town and city councillors are among the worst culprits, a demonstration of either immaturity or a lack of capacity on the part of political elites to appreciate the responsibilities of leadership and good governance. Ramphele refers to this phenomenon as the inability on the part of the formerly disenfranchised to own the freedom that they have won.23
Simultaneously, while the formerly disenfranchised have not fully owned the freedom they have won, there still exist some significant elements among those formerly enfranchised who have not fully accepted a shared citizenship based on common values. This is expressed through a peculiar residual social Darwinism typified by scepticism, among white people, regarding the ability of black people to function effectively in a complex modern society. Evidence of this is found in corporate, government and academic institutions where the old order uses oblique approaches to issues, creating the impression that norms are being flouted, when, in actual fact, they are sceptical of the ability of the new black leadership to lead effectively.
A
