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”.

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. “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.

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.

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.

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