South Africa needs to rediscover its moral compass as a nation

I watch the sun rising over the ocean. The rays of light splay out across the water. The scene is one of great tranquillity, but I know that the real world out there is anything but calm and orderly.

I reflect on the juxtaposition of serenity and our long, slow descent into anarchy. I am con fronted with two pieces of reality, and neither speaks to each other.

It is surreal. I wonder if I am losing my mind. How can it be so tranquil, when I know that out there, undercurrents of discontent advance like the relentless ooze of a lava flow across the landscape, consume all in its path?

Destruction and hope

Unstoppable. Predictable in its destruction, yet at the same time underpinned by the hope that our community will somehow be spared.

Miracles happen. I have witnessed them in my own life, when we rose as a nation and collectively decided to end a protracted conflict by negotiating a new constitution that was inclusive of all.

That was a moment of triumph, for a nation teetering on the edge of the abyss, fighting not to fall into the terrifying void below.

Is ‘Ubuntu’ real?

South Africa has always lived with the seething undercurrents of anarchy, deftly masked by the undeniable beauty of the landscape, and the mythical be lief in utopian ideals like Ubuntu. I find myself asking whether Ubuntu is real.

We throw the concept around in everyday dis course, as if it actually exists, but like the elusive tokoloshe, many know of it but few have ever seen it.

Flashbacks

I find myself flashing back to the ’80s and ’90s, for that is where I think we are heading in the near future. I recall, as a young soldier, called out in support of the riot police, to an incident in which a person had been necklaced.

I remember that in the crowd of thousands, not one person lifted a finger to help that poor victim. I recall the shock of witnessing the total lack of empathy in the milling crowd, all of whom were profoundly aware that a human being was being burned to death in their presence.

It was there that I realised Ubuntu is nothing but a myth that we have conjured up, like a security blanket, to make us feel good about ourselves. Where is the Ubuntu in our present leadership structure?

Where is the empathy for the plight of the growing number of unemployed? Where is the Ubuntu in the decision to invest a tourism budget into a British Premier League football club?

Where is the moral high ground that allows our embattled regime to publicly align themselves with Russia, an international pariah shunned by the law-abiding citizens of the free world?

Where is the empathy when we are once again seduced into compliance by the words, “my fellow South Africans”, that starts a rambling conversation expressing shock at not knowing how yet another catastrophe could have befallen the hapless people, but delivered by a billionaire oligarch devoid of integrity.

Propaganda

We live our lives under the manipulation of propaganda, delivered by a predatory government, whose sole purpose is to plunder the public purse at the direct expense of the growing army of destitute citizens.

We are hostage to a system of sophisticated extortion, over which we have no control as individuals, wrapped up in a blanket of soothing language that has filtered out the sharp edges of words of criticism, re placing them with concepts like Ubuntu.

That security blanket is not our friend, for it preselects what we can say, think and articulate. It soothes our inflamed rash of discontent, by attenuating the worst of our impulses to shout out – enough! But, I feel profoundly liberated, for I know what needs to be done.

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For South Africa to pros per once again, we must reclaim our right to use words with sharp edges. Words designed to cut.

Words that are capable of precision messaging. As Africans, we must be guided by what we observe in the bush, when the hyaenas approach a fresh kill made by a pride of lions, and contestation over the spoils becomes literally a question of survival.

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Predators

Those spoils are being dominated by predators who have purloined the resources on which an entire society needs to feed. We must rise and break the shackles of the Stockholm syndrome.

We must call it out the way we see it. Theft is theft, right is right and wrong is wrong, but wrong can never be right.

We need to rediscover our moral compass as a nation. Most of our leaders are weak and predatory, but we also have latent leadership with growing credibility, possibly ready to throw their hat into the ring.

South Africans are incredible people. We are the only nation in the world where a sitting government voluntarily relinquished power in the belief that it would prevent a civil war.

We are the only nation where a prisoner of conscience looked at his jailer, saying you are as much a victim of the system as I am.

We are the only nation that possessed weapons of mass destruction – chemical, biological and nuclear – which we voluntarily relinquished in the interests of a better future for all.

We are the only nation that attempted to reconcile, by bringing victim and perpetrator face to face in the quest for justice, even if the final result disappointed many. But we have been lulled into a dangerous sense of complacency.

Enabling

We are enabling our long slow descent into anarchy, by allow ing ourselves to be deceived by vicious predators, dressed in Armani.

The only thing we truly own are our thoughts and the way we weaponise those is through the messaging we use, packaged in words. So, words matter and we need to claim back the right to use them wisely, no longer fearful of any backlash.

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-Turton is a scientist specialising in water resource management.