Moral compass left spinning
In a report in The Times, South Africa’s cabinet ministers are asking for guidance to find clarity on the ethics of receiving gifts.
“Cabinet raised the issue… Maybe we need to look at the ethics handbook to make sure there is proper guidance,” he said. “Ministers will always be given gifts and as the new cabinet we should discuss how these things are handled.”
This follows the astounding case where the new Minister of Transport, S’bu Ndebele was given lavish gifts, including a top of the range Mercedes Benz worth over R1.1 million, by contractors to the Transport department. The sheer chutzpah of publicly handing over this bribe is astounding enough and is only surpassed by the astounding stupidity of accepting it. Ndebele then went on to defend this utterly indefensible action.
S’bu Ndebele accepting his car
Faced with a public outcry, he chose to seek guidance from that paragon of virtue, Jacob Zuma, who lives under a cloud of 783 unanswered corruption charges. Predictably, JZ told him: “Of course you should accept it, old boy. Why ever not. I mean, if your friends are feeling generous, why spoil their fun? Just jot it down in the gifts book, and you’re good to go.” Or something like that. Zacob would have to say that, wouldn’t he? His defence for receiving the bribes paid by his friends is that they were just gifts and loans. Not that he ever entered them into the gifts register, though.
What cretin would accept “gifts” like that? Has the man no moral compass at all? Didn’t something at the back of his mind send out even the slightest alarm? Even the most acute sociopath would at least intellectually recognise the gross error in accepting these blatant bribes. But not our friend, S’bu. What hubris does he possess? It took an irate public (who he would be inclined to ignore) and political allies (who he can’t ignore) to force S’bu to hand the “gifts” back.
But now the public and the press are full of praise for this genius! They are congratulating him and treating him like a hero! He has clearly, unequivocally demonstrated that he possesses no integrity, has the ethics of a sewer rat and has the feeling of entitlement only bred from extreme hubris. And this is the man that is now being thanked. In any sane country he would be thankful he wasn’t chucked out of government by the ear or facing corruption charges.
And now we know he is not alone. His cabinet colleagues are all at sea, and don’t have the faintest idea on the ethics of public office. This is what you get when you elect as your leader a deeply flawed man, who has legally been found to be in a corrupt relationship with a convicted fraudster, and though the bullying tactics of his supporters got the corruption charges against him dropped. Who in his circle would not feel that he was entitled to pocket a lavish “gift” from adoring suppliers?
Another Zuma tactic – get rid of your persecutors – has resulted in the demise of the one body that could investigate and root out this sort of corruption, the Scorpions. The crooks in government will now feel that they can plunder the public purse with impunity.
It is now left to the press and the public to step up the scrutiny on it’s elected officials. We are alone and unprotected. It is not the time to thank corrupt officials for handing back their ill-gotten gains when found out. It is up to the press and the public to stop that moral compass spinning wildly.
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