A country not grounded on deep-rooted ethical/morality moorings is unlikely to withstand immoral storms invading it and may in time become a desert of immorality where rules and laws are rendered obsolete.
A society that fails to build or form communities that value laws and regulations, and respect its institutions, is doomed to fail, and in thousands of years will remain impoverished of justice and goodness, and will produce rogues as leaders, as is now happening in our country.
The sad reality is that even the electorate, even as they are short-changed of good governance, will time and again revert to bad and corrupt leaders for -guidance and solution – and for political leadership.
Some political parties and their leaders, have not covered themselves in glory, and have time and again used shrewdness of political power to escape moral judgement.
VBS Mutual Bank has been razed to the ground by, among others, allegedly by high-ranking political principals, and the law should not pussy foot around that reality.
We ought to be glad some of the bank’s leadership have begun to serve long jail terms.
Implicated political leadership should follow suit – be tried as soon as possible and then be forced to enjoy their comeuppance in jail.
We cannot, and should not, think of the VBS Mutual Bank scandal, in which poor persons’ savings were looted by the wealthy and powerful, in isolation of the crookedness of some politicians.
As a parenthesis, I might add, a representative of the political leaders embroiled in the in the scandal, suggested, when interviewed by a television station host, that journalists should desist from describing the stolen loot as belonging to “the old and impoverished people”, but should “rightly” be described as looted from the bank, for the money belongs to the bank, and not “the poor old people”.
Why should we make that distinction? Are politicians ashamed that they may have looted money belonging to the “old people” they claim to represent?
This shows how callous things have turned out to be. Journalists are told, when reporting on this matter, to say “it is not the poor who suffered from the scandal, but the mutual bank, the owner of the assets, that has suffered loss”.
Apartheid and colonialism were evil systems. They were corrupt. They created laws that deliberately sought to impoverishing black people keep them out of the wealth of this country.
Black people were not allowed to own banks; were not allowed to become bank managers; were not allowed to have a say in the running of the economy, because in the words of the apartheid architect, Hendrik Verwoerd, all they were capable of doing was to become “hewers of wood and drawers of water”.
But with the onset of democracy in 1994 the tables were turned. Black people began to assert themselves. They became, defying Verwoerd’s injunction, anything they wished to achieve in life. They also became chairpersons and leaders of mutual banks, such as the one allegedly black political elite, using sleight of hand, destroyed, which Verwoerd never imagined black people could own.
Now the evil man smiles in his grave, “Did I not tell you that the black people are only meant to be hewers of wood and drawers of wood?”
In the end, central to what happened to the mutual bank, and the loss of coffers amounting to close to R2-billion, all boils down to the breakdown of morality and ethical behaviour, driven by greed and political indifference.
Societal morality breakdown is an intolerable scandal that destroys the potential of nations. If this is true, it calls for society to fight for its demise.
But to achieve this, it also requires that society becomes impartial in its judgement of the sin of injustice – for looting the people’s resource as VBS Mutual Bank ought to be seen – represents a grave sin of injustice by those who wield political power.
Which is to say that no one should be treated differently, and that “each individual interests are equally important; and that no one should get special treatment”, how important such individuals may think of themselves.
Sin, stripped of its biblical meaning, means shameless immorality in which the powerful and political connected see themselves as beyond reproach who should escape criminal censure.
The justice system must leave no stone unturned to punish those responsible for the demise of such an important societal asset.
- Mdhlela is a freelance journalist, an Anglican priest, an ex-trade unionist and former editor of the South African Human Rights Commission journals
