South Africans must defeat the tendency towards worshipping personal wealth, President Thabo Mbeki said on Saturday evening.
He was addressing the fourth Nelson Mandela annual lecture at Wits University in Johannesburg.
Personal wealth is becoming the distinguishing feature of the new citizen of the new South Africa, he said.
”Personal pursuit of material gain, as the beginning and end of our life purpose, is already beginning to corrode our social and national cohesion,” he said.
”Every day, and during every hour of our time beyond sleep, the demons embedded in our society, that stalk us at every minute, seem always to beckon each one of us towards a realisable dream and nightmare,” Mbeki said.
”With every passing second, they advise, with rhythmic and hypnotic regularity ‘Get rich! Get rich! Get rich!’,” he said to a clapping audience.
”And thus it has come about that many of us accept that our common natural instinct to escape from poverty is but the other side of the same coin on whose reverse side is written the words — ‘At all costs, get rich!’.”
Mbeki further remarked that there had been a tendency ”to pay little tactical regard towards what each one of us might do to assist our neighbour to achieve the goal of a better life”.
He said that the new South Africa had inherited from the old a well-entrenched value system that placed individual acquisition of wealth at the very centre of the society’s value system.
”In practise, this meant that, provided this did not threaten overt social disorder, society assumed a tolerant or permissive attitude towards such crimes as theft and corruption, especially if these related to public property.”
Mbeki said many South Africans had absorbed the value system of the capitalist market and come to the conclusion that personal success and fulfilment meant personal enrichment at all costs, and the most theatrical and striking public display of that wealth.
”What this means is that many in our society have come to accept that what is socially correct is not the proverbial expression — ”manners maketh the man” — but the notion that each of us is as excellent a human being as our demonstrated wealth suggests,” he said.
”I am arguing that, whatever the benefit to any individual member of our nation, including all those present in this hall, we nevertheless share a fundamental objective to defeat the tendency in our society towards the deification of personal wealth as the distinguishing feature of the new citizen of the new South Africa.”
Closing off, Mbeki said Sunday’s election in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) — the first democratic election in more than 40 years — was the best birthday present for former president Nelson Mandela, who 10 years ago had pleaded with leaders of that country to build a society based on ubuntu principles.
”Difficult as it may be for some fully to accept, what the people of the DRC have done and will do, is also helping to define a world of hope, radically different from the universe of despair, which seems to imprison the sister peoples of the Middle East.” — Sapa