Where is our moral compass?

Nothing is sacred anymore. Standards and norms have its lines blurred, with non-existing values.

Corruption does not move us; sex scandals where ministers share girlfriends and their bedroom secrets are Sunday tabloid fodder. Schools are now labour wards as teenage pregnancy rises.

Femicide and paedophilia are soaring and child rapists confess to drug consumption with their mothers.

Where is our moral compass as a nation? Where are we headed?

I heard someone on the radio say what South Africa needed was not law and order, but order and law. Because how can you maintain the law if you have no order to begin with?

On paper we have laws, but in reality we have a country that runs on autopilot. The perfect way to prove this? The former public protector having to go to court to have her powers enforced on the then president, of all people.

If a president violates the laws of the country, contests the constitution and violates his oath of office, how are the rest of us meant to abide by the same laws?

South Africa needs laws that are implemented, free from passion. It should have no special treatment for the affluent or sympathies for those of disadvantaged backgrounds.

The law should remain unmoved; it should not be gender or racially biased; there should be no such things as white privilege.

We need to realise that by conducting ourselves in orderly fashion, we will be able to uphold the law. Some reformed criminals say: “I did it because I had a choice: go hungry or hijack and kill.” But how many people of integrity do actually go hungry?

And why is it easier to pay for the latest fashions than for further education which enables you to leave the criminal world? Is it because, inherently, order on a personal level does not exists? How then will the law be maintained?

We cannot as a nation continue this way. We must rein ourselves in. As the home rots, the rot escapes and seeps into the community at large and other people and families must survive this.

Our moral compass is off. This is something we must remedy.

Kekeletso Nakeli-Dhliwayo.

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