VIRTUE IN POLITICS

Submitted by MF Cassim

Shared values engender trust and confidence and bind people together. It is clear to everyone that South Africa’s highest and most urgent political need at the moment is for political parties and leaders to commit earnestly to higher ethical standards. In the words of Dr Barney Pityana, it is time to practise ‘Virtue in Politics’. Moral principles must not only be preached but practised and upheld. Where vision and values remain clear, politics will serve the people, especially the poor, and make for a better life for all. While the officials and functionaries of state need to get things perfect, political leaders have themselves to be perfect. Values and ethos are the only tools by which political leaders can make a better life for everyone. Take this away and all that is left is empty rhetoric and equally empty promises. This point is powerfully evoked in the words of Dwight David Eisenhower who famously observed: A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both. Isn’t this point pertinent to what is happening in our politics at present? 

The need to return to principles and values is urgent and imperative as can be. If whatever was occurring in our politics was above reproach, if whatever the majority party was doing was still the flavour of the month, if the interest of the poor and the homeless was really being addressed, if health and education were being taken care of as priority concerns, the convention that took place at Sandton would not have been necessary. But when people take down their pants at a meeting instead of raising up their hands to make a point, when leaders resort to intemperate and vile language verging on hate speech without stern rebuke or repudiation, when rhetoric and threats of violence replace discourse and debate, when respect for age is flouted, when Ubuntu in its true spirit no longer prevails, when the very spirit of our Constitution is compromised through expediency, good men and women have to stand up for the sacred values that they believe in and cherish - lest by doing nothing everyone loses everything. Therefore if we share the values inherent in Ubuntu and in our Constitution it is those values that we must now strive to defend. The common complaint today is that everyone speaks but after the occasion has passed. Let us not be afraid of the consequences of speaking out but let us be indeed be fearful of the consequences of saying nothing when we should have given voice to our feelings about the national estate. 

The new movement is not about who is the fairest in the mirror on the wall. It cannot be. It is about shared values and how those values can be preserved and protected for our security and well being. As such, every party can easily align itself with these values. The fact that so many opposition parties did precisely that, knowing that they could lose support in the next general election, and were perfectly willing to make such a huge sacrifice, says a lot. This is indeed a rebirth and a renewal that is taking place. Spring is in the air and it is appropriate that the new movement is arising, after the winter of discontent, in the warm season of growth and fertility. Nothing could be more auspicious than that. The very spirit of spring is stirring within the new organisation that seeks to make a pact with society and keep faith with society by endorsing the primacy of debate, free speech and free assembly.  

For too long ambition and success in politics was all that mattered. If only everyone who entered politics could have been faithful to the following dictum formulated by the brilliant Albert Einstein: ‘Try not to become a (wo)man of success but rather try to become a (wo)man of value’. To subscribe to such a belief would help immeasurably to put Virtue back into Politics.

The South African Democratic Congress, from the sentiments expressed by all its leaders and delegates, is working enormously hard to become a party wherein people of value will participate, striving to achieve and uphold value in order to deliver true value to the people of South Africa. The people of South Africa have always been asked to submit to hegemony, at the heart of which has been self interest, rather than value. Hegemony serves no other interest but its own. People who hold values should now start sticking up for those values without ever passing these into the safe keeping of others. Together we must advance our values and together we must protect them. We are one people with one destiny and we must forge a solidarity that supersedes our diversity so that we can go forward knowing that we are who we are because of our fellow beings, and knowing also that everything that we are is also on account of our fellow citizens.  

 

 

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