South Africa faced a beast with two heads — greed and drunkenness for power, business magnate Saki Macozoma said on Tuesday.
Macozoma, who is also a member of the African National Congress’s National Executive Committee , was speaking at a Cape Town seminar organised by the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation.
”People often want all the power at all costs because they see that as the only opportunity for them to grab, for them to loot, for them to steal, and for them to create a system that actually tolerates all those kinds of behaviours,” he said.
Paraphrasing TS Eliot, he said that if there was a ”rough beast” slouching out of Bethlehem to be born, it was a two-headed creature.
”Part of it is greed, the other part of it is drunkenness for power,” he said.
He also asked why people spoke in ”parables” when they talked about these issues.
”We do know who we are talking about, we do know the people who are doing these things, but we choose to speak in parables. Is it because we are afraid to confront these issues?”
He said if good was to triumph over evil in our society, South Africa could not rely only on ”bedrock morality” and the spirit of ubuntu.
”We have to actively teach values, values of service to others, the pursuit of excellence, and we have to fight the installation of the values that we oppose.”
Macozoma condemned those who sought short cuts to wealth, saying it was important to teach the value of hard work.
The township dweller who dreamed of winning the lottery was no different from the stock exchange analyst who punted the notion that the only way to build a society and economy was to post ”unnatural profits” every quarter, regardless of the social cost.
South African Communist Party deputy secretary general Jeremy Cronin, also speaking at the seminar, said that rather than simply chanting the word ”ubuntu” 20 times, people should ask themselves whether what they were doing was contributing to the tide of self-aggrandisement and self-enrichment.
He said the ANC itself had ”caved in” to this tide some time after 1994, when it decided that the only way forward was to stabilise the capitalist market and get it to grow, and sidelined the moral imperative of development and reconstruction.
He said he agreed with President Thabo Mbeki’s call for an ”RDP [Reconstruction and Development Programme] of the soul”.
However the problem was that people tended to think of an RDP of the soul, and the issue of morality as different from the actual reconstruction and development programme.
”Sidelining development doesn’t make sense in terms of addressing the systemic challenges we’ve got, economically and politically, [and] also it’s immoral.
”To disconnect growth from development is not just an economic policy, it’s to disconnect economic policy from morality. I think that is the challenge, and I think that is the mistake that’s been made in the last 12 years.”
He said the notion of ”historically disadvantaged individuals” epitomised the paradigm South Africa was operating in.
The notion of individual disadvantage implied that the system was acceptable, and that any problems could be dealt with by advantaging individuals.
”And when you call it historic disadvantage, then you’re even saying … the problems are just history, they’ve gone away …
”At what point does a black multimillionaire cease to be historically disadvantaged? Well, within this discourse, never, as long as black is black and history is history.” – Sapa