We need a new type of citizenship

‘If others can make use of the situation, then why shouldn’t I? Convent morality’s dead and gone. We’re now living under a market economy …” So said Carmina Evangelista, a character in the 1995 novella: The Return of the Water Spirit by Angolan novelist Artur Carlos Mauricio Pestana dos Santos, popularly known as “Pepetela”.

The feisty Carmina – a (former) socialist, member of parliament and central committee member of the ruling party – has abruptly interjected her husband, Joao Evangelista, a civil servant who has escaped into the fictitious world of computer games, to cope with the vexing post-convent morality world with which he is unable to identify.

Joao is trying, wholly without success, to dissuade his wife from entering into a transaction to procure and sell arms to the government in violation of an international arms embargo imposed upon the government and belligerents in a civil war.

Excited and smelling instant riches, Carmina will have none of Joao’s anachronistic rationalisations. “We’ve won the jackpot. Finally, we’re rich. Yes, my darling, rich,” she charges.

About the small matter of the embargo: “There’s one way of resolving the question,” says Carmina. “Certain companies that have nothing to do with the government will buy arms and munitions on behalf of the government from companies in countries that don’t even produce arms.

“Of course, the company that does this for the government will receive a commission, a small percentage because, after all, this is for a patriotic cause. Except that a small percentage in a business deal involving millions is thousands of dollars hundredfold.”

Adds the (former) socialist: “Dollars, not kuanzas or rubles or escudos. Dollars.”

One was reminded of Pepetela’s novella and other post-colonial African literary output this week as the media began to report on the theft of food parcels as the lockdown continues to exert itself, especially on the most vulnerable, for whom the parcels are meant. In some cases, some of the alleged thieves are said to be local government councillors, the closest public representatives to communities.

One found oneself in exasperation, sometimes engaging in a moral relativist monologue: how can a person steal at this, of all times? An exercise in convent morality, perhaps.

Then, in a related but slightly different incident, two police vehicles and an ambulance were torched in Boikhutso township, Lichtenberg, North West, after two children were run over and killed in two separate vehicle accidents, one involving a police van.

The destruction of public property as a form of protest in South Africa has reached epidemic proportions which, like the moral question and its implications on governance, cries out for serious social inquiry and discussion, lest the country descend into internecine strife and chaos whose ultimate loser is bound to be the nation as a whole.

Both issues – the nation’s moral fibre and the self-injurious destruction of public property – are the subject of daily reports and condemnations. There lacks, however, a concerted political and societal programmatic response. The moral regeneration campaign which was once led by the government died somewhere and was buried, no one knows where. Nary a mention of it is made today.

Nevertheless, the strengths and limitations of the political environment beg the tendentious question whether the institution of government is necessarily always best-suited to lead such campaigns.

For how would Ms Carmina Evangelista, MP, with her decidedly contemptuous regard of matters moral, have responded to calls for moral regeneration? No doubt, she would have waxed lyrical, fired blanks pell-mell from her empty moral drawer with hypnotic but little substantive effect.

A pirate of public resources herself, the silent Look Who’s Talking response she would provoke amongst the people would be enough to kill the noble idea of a society that lives within the self-regulatory bounds that are the stuff of moral codes and, sooner or later, probably further inflame passions of social anomie that manifest in the wanton destruction of public property such as we see today.

But this is but one view among many.

Those who are following the effects of the Covid-19 global crisis on our country and the world would have undoubtedly come to the conclusion that we have entered an unprecedented economic space. While some of the economic manifestations are obvious, some, especially the social and political dimensions within and between countries, will be discovered along the road ahead.

It is likely that social and political relations will assume a different complexion for a considerable period of time, if not for good.

What happens, for example, when the monetary social protections extended to the indigent, especially the unemployed, come to an end in six months’ time? How will the beneficiaries respond in a context of an economy that was already troubled before the lockdown and is now in a worse off position? Will the Ms Carmina Evangelistas, MPs of our country, help us to navigate the likely choppy waters?

We turn, once again, to post-colonial African literary output. In Ayi Kwei Armah’s novel, The Beautiful Ones are Not Yet Born, the protagonist, known only as “The man”, sums up what had become of the Ghanaian post-colonial project in macabre prose:

“So this was the real gain. The only real gain. This was the thing for which poor men had fought and shouted [and died]. This was what it had come to: not that the whole thing might be overturned and ended, but that a few black men [and women] might be pushed closer to their masters, to eat some of the fat into their bellies too. That had been the entire end of it all.”

While he cannot be ignored, if Armah passes as gloomy, we can surely turn to his fellow Ghanaian and African patriot, Kwame Nkrumah: “Africa needs a new type of citizen, a dedicated, modest, honest and informed [person]. A [person] who submerges [the] self in service to the nation and [hu] mankind. A [person] who abhors greed and detests vanity. A new type of [person] whose humility is [their] strength and whose integrity is [their] greatness.”

But who leads the effort remains the challenge.

Mukoni Ratshitanga.

• Ratshitanga is a consultant, social and political commentator. (mukoni@interlinked.co.za)

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