IN A stirring speech last week Deputy President Jacob Zuma spoke of the urgent need for South Africans to pull up their moral socks. Saying that the government was determined to use every resource to deal with crime, corruption and other forms of moral decay, Mr Zuma used the opportunity to announce yet another in the long line of “summits”, those hideously expensive
gatherings of professional hangers-on and carpetbaggers, the hosting and financing of which has become a speciality of his government.
This one will be a “Moral Regeneration Summit” to be held in November, providing, of course, that we haven’t all rotted away in our own vileness by then. Estimated cost of said summit: R45-million – small beer when a nation’s morality is at stake.
Several encouraging thoughts were prompted by Mr Zuma’s tub thumping. He said, for example, that the “moral decay of society included a lack of respect for human life, a breakdown in parental control over children”; which was quite amusing coming, as it did, from the deputy leader of a political party that has shown itself coldly indifferent to the preventable deaths of literally tens of thousands of babies.
Mind you, there is a sort of bleary African National Congress-type logic in withholding drugs like nevirapine: if the government nonchalantly can allow four to five thousand babies to die unnecessarily every month, these will be babies who won’t grow up into four or five thousand children suffering from a breakdown in parental control. As Dr Nono Simelela patiently explained on television, you can’t just pop a pill into some mother’s mouth just before she gives birth, the whole “health packet” has to be in place first. It’s not only formula feeding and counselling that have to be factored into the overall cost of the nevirapine intervention. You also have to include the cost of moral regeneration summits.
When it came to what Mr Zuma called “the weakening of the family institution”, his secondary message was again clear: HIV-positive babies don’t live long enough to be able to weaken a family institution. In response to this obvious fact, the ANC government’s health ministry has been painstaking in its efforts to let the mother-to-child HIV-infection rate run completely out of control. The HIV-positive mothers, themselves, have been denied follow-up drug therapy so they have died along with their babies. As a further consequence of our general moral turpitude, Mr Zuma said a large percentage of the mothers didn’t know who the fathers were anyway.
No surprise that Mr Zuma was particularly anxious about the harmful effects on society’s moral fibre of explicit sex and violence in television programmes. He suggested that broadcasters might consider dumping material that was “not conducive to good conduct”.
Here was yet another in the ANC’s brilliant ongoing impersonations of past National Party successes. In their heyday the Nats didn’t want any television at all. They even had a Cabinet minister, one Albert Hertzog, dedicated to blocking its introduction. He called television a “little bioscope” and warned that, if allowed, television would lead to the total collapse of all the Western-style moral values to which his own government had always faithfully aspired.
Now that television’s decadent overspill is busily dissolving our moral fibre, it is encouraging to see that efforts are being enjoined to, at the very least, inhibit the process. For a start, a decrease in sexually explicit television shows will lessen the chances of some pervert getting so aroused he has no alternative but to rush out and rape a baby. As a direct result of the ANC’s forward-looking public health strategies there are currently far more vulnerable babies available, unprotected but for grannies and older siblings. Morally irresponsible television broad- casters must, therefore, take their fair share of the responsibility for these vicious crimes.
In rattling on about sexually explicit television shows, Mr Zuma increased the feeling of déjà vu. If there was anything the old Nats loved more than repugnant racist policies, it was censorship. Censorship was a cornerstone of apartheid. Once censorship was put in place, ostensibly to obliterate all the nude bodies and violent crime movies, it could easily be used to obliterate dangerous contradictory political ideas as well.
An obvious distinction needs to be drawn between what Mr Zuma was saying about the need for urgent moral rearmament, as opposed to what he has been known to say about a similarly urgent need for military rearmament. He’s as passionate about that one, too. As we all are aware, South Africa is under threat of imminent invasion by forces far more bent on our destruction as a morally upright people than mere sexually explicit television programmes.
When you add up all the internalities and complexities of the whole HIV/Aids/Zimbabwe/arms deal affairs you begin to realise just what a signal triumph of government disasters they have been.
And there you were, thinking the ANC government doesn’t think ahead, doesn’t have a long-term vision. We should be grateful to the deputy president for making his subtext so unambiguous.
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