what is placed under the rubric of human rights are merely social constructs dependent upon time and space. Viewed in terms of justice such conceptions of human rights would be found wanting.
One day I went to draw money from an automatic teller machine. The queue was long. A woman drew money from the ATM. She took the money, opened her bag and put it in, and started to read her statement. She took some time, conceivably long enough for two people to used the ATM after her and completed their business. It felt like an eternity. Bothered by this avoidable delay I intervened: “Would you not have done better to read your statement on the side and saved the queue?” “It is my right,” she responded. Irritated by the shallowness of her understanding of human rights, I decided not to let her get away with it. “It is not your right to delay the queue. What about common decency and a bit of consideration for others?” She sulked and left. This is just a simple illustration of the potential conflict between a superficial and one-sided conception of human rights and justice, as it so often happens in a more serious arena in South Africa.
When South Africa attained democracy in 1994 we achieved freedom and fraternity but lost out on equality, firstly, because it is more difficult to achieve. Secondly, we lost out on equality because democracy is merely an arrangement of systems, and a means to nobler ends or values and not an end in itself. Recognition of equality requires a moral conscience that encompasses obligations within its conception of rights. This calls for nobler concepts such as justice and, in political terms, distributive justice. Lower levels of distributive justice result in higher levels of inequality. This will become clearer in the chapters that follow.
The subject of this book is public morality. You could ask what significance public morality has in the sociology and politics of a country or its government. Given that South Africa has experienced both external and internal colonialism for over a period of three hundred years, its attainment of freedom and the way it conducts itself as a democracy is of special significance to itself and to the world. Africa is regarded as the basket case of the world, and, as a beacon of hope, South Africa can ill afford to go the same route. In their book, Adam et al affirm: “Of course a moral discourse on the recent history of South Africa, as well as its current transition, is necessary if only to remind us of the values that have been undermined and the need to reaffirm them for the future, values such as tolerance, respect for life, objectivity, freedom, responsibility, accountability and transparency.”2 The main purpose of my book is to address how the public, the elite and officials have translated and internalised the values of responsibility, accountability and transparency, for these constitute the core values in the allocation and distribution of resources in a society. Adam et al maintain that not only do these values need to be affirmed, but they need constant probing and analysis particularly regarding “their applicability to the problems of transition South Africa is encountering.”3 The intention of my book is to help situate decision-making within the domain of the Freedom Charter as the vehicle that articulates the meaning of what South Africans believe constitutes social justice, or the common good. While the Freedom Charter may not be the moral bible for South Africans, it translates their corpus of values, including what true uhuru means, into wishes and aspirations.
Public morality refers to the values and norms that inform the behaviour of public officials and politicians in the course of their official duties. The colonial experience is pertinent in that during this period a specific moral order determined the code of conduct of public officials, and also prescribed the relationships between colonisers and the colonised. Over this protracted period, South Africa experienced first a comprador public morality imposed by the British colonial experience and later an apartheid public morality sanctioned by a self-protective and self-promoting Afrikaner ethos. Rooted in the Afrikaner fear of the aspirations of the majority African population, apartheid was an attempt to justify a policy that was pronounced internationally as a crime against humanity. When the new dispensation took over in 1994, a new public morality evolved. It had roots in both the colonial and apartheid experiences, as well as in an internal African ethos tempered by Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman traditions.
Public morality as used throughout this book refers to the moral behaviour of public institutions and public officials. The term excludes the private morality of the general citizenry. The reason for this distinction is that the general citizenry acts for itself, and is not a representative body. There are sufficient institutional and legal mechanisms to address issues of private morality. Our legal systems appear to be more capable of handling transgressions of private morality than when public officials or public institutions engage in acts that the general public deems morally reprehensible. There is often no recourse to, or it is difficult to access, avenues of redress. This disjuncture could be the reason for the perception that the moral problem in South Africa lies in the domain of public rather than private morality.
For instance, in a comparison between Nigeria and South Africa, Ali Mazrui attests: “As for the insidious pathology of corruption, South Africa is still basically at the stage of elite and corporate corruption, rather than pervasive bribery from grassroots to the pinnacle of society.”4 In the light of the above discrepancy he may be right, but in essence the moral problem is pervasive, ranging from a callous disregard for life, a tendency towards rape and theft in ordinary citizens, to bribery, fraud and corruption by petty officials through to the elite and corporates. However, it is to the public officials in the vanguard that we turn our attention.
Ideally, the moral imperatives of service and equity regulate the behaviour of public officials. Because public officials, political or bureaucratic, occupy positions of influence and are responsible for the allocation and distribution of key resources, they exert control on the destinies of the populace. So there is a moral imperative that they discharge this function equitably and efficiently. Also, as public officials occupy positions of leadership, the imperative is that they should lead by example. It is no wonder that their actions, as individuals and as a collective, are subjected to close scrutiny.
As elected representatives, the political leadership faces the democratic imperative to act accountably. It was in this context that Caesar felt that his wife had to be beyond reproach. Indeed, most moral cultures from Confucianism, Buddhism, Judaism and Christianity to ubuntu carry this quality of actual and symbolic cleanliness in respect of their public representatives. With regard to the bureaucracy, it is the quality of justice that is of paramount importance in the course of discharging its duties. Public morality thus demands both honesty and justice as key requisites for public institutions and public officials. It is an interesting observation that the political head of a government department is referred to as “Minister”, a title carrying the concept of service, and in isiXhosa the incumbent is referred to as “uMphathiswa”, literally meaning he or she who is given a task to carry out or to discharge. This implies a relationship of accountability, with the minister as both custodian and carrier of the obligation.
The relationship between public morality and the qualities of service and accountability is axiomatic and resides in the power relations between leaders and the body politic. The leadership is protected from abuse by the body politic by their power to command the repressive state apparatus. Conversely, the body politic is protected from the leadership withholding their due entitlements, firstly, by the moral precepts operating in society and, secondly, through recourse to the legal system in terms of the constitutional arrangements. Public morality thus becomes the first line of defence for the general population against tyranny, personal greed and other ills by the leadership in instances where the latter gets corrupted. Public morality exists within a normative system informed by the philosophical and religious traditions of a people, and it is these traditions that provide both the norms and guidelines that proscribe the behaviour of public officials thus laying the precepts for civic relations. Admittedly, this approximates an ideal situation. But there has to be an ideal against which the actual is measured and evaluated otherwise the concept of standards would not exist. In practice, there have been and still exist leaders who by universal ethical guidelines have been immoral. They might have commanded popular support within their polities, but generally they have not been able to withstand universal moral approbation. This is probably the main attribute that separates political from
