Human stability and progress depend on a concept called co-existence. Co-existence means living together in harmony or peace. The best known form of co-existence is interdependence, which refers to when people identify and respect the fact that nobody can provide for all their needs and that we depend on other people to satisfy some of our needs. It relies, though, on the observance of two principles, among many, by each of the integral parts of the whole.

The first of the two principles is that each integral part will contribute equitably to the health and wellbeing of the whole. The second principle is that the resources and opportunities available in the environment will be seen and believed, by at least a majority, to be distributable on the bases of both legitimacy and fairness. In our society, apartheid and neglect have left us with a society where fairness is a form of anathema and many people are consistently reminded of this in their daily lives. On the other hand, people with no ability or desire to do good occupy all sorts of privileged positions and use inflated words and languages to pull wool over the eyes of clueless citizens while in reality feathering their own nests.

Many people hold different views regarding what the problems of our society are and how they can be addressed. The following, among others, are mentioned constantly as solutions to our problems: education, money, love, imprisonment and even capital punishment. Predictably, education remains many people`s favourite solution. For sure we must invest in education for the long term. But we must build institutions, mechanisms and programmes now to address issues of accountability before our country picks up speed down the slippery road to oblivion. A very critical matter that we must not forget as a society is that South Africa has been experimenting with democratic power or rule for only fifteen years.

The biggest question we face is whether we are, as a collective, smart enough to learn fast and do what other nations throughout the world and history failed to do. Ghana is starting to be celebrated as a promising democratic state on the African continent. But it took Ghana almost fifty years to get used to democracy and achieve the relative stability it enjoys today. President Barack Obama visited Ghana a short while after he entered the White House, partly to offer his support and encouragement to the people of Ghana for being the leading light on the path to full and mature democracy on the African continent.

Countless other African countries, including Ivory Coast, Kenya and Nigeria are still battling age-old demons that should have been defeated many decades ago. They have not been able to defeat the demons because of some intractable challenges associated with a society`s movement or development from imperialism to democracy. Among them, their educational and developmental institutions lack the capacity to cultivate and accelerate a significant change in the behaviours and capacities of their people in order to move their countries forward at the desired speed.

Part of the challenge is that their institutions, including those intended to nurture and protect democracy, battle to find competent individuals in sufficient numbers who can lead by example and inspire confidence in ordinary people. But the irony of this matter is that competent people themselves in numbers large enough to make a telling difference in a society can only be produced by sound and solid institutions. It is a perfect chicken and egg story and requires tons of patience and wisdom to unravel.

The greatest challenge of our society as South Africans is lack of accountability. It is without doubt lack of accountability that allows our society to become a training ground for delinquency, incompetence, criminality and corruption. It is lack of accountability that allows lazy and unproductive people to rise to positions of power and become millionaires while forcing our best and talented people to live in out their lives in economic wastelands.

Our constitution is hailed as being among the best in the world. But the constitution is merely a foundation upon which a real dwelling still has to be built to provide shelter and good life for the rightful beneficiaries. We need men and women who possess what it takes to read and understand the various tenets of our constitution and write our rules of behaviour from them. Those rules of behaviour, once agreed upon by all the relevant stakeholders, must be given to men and women of integrity and competence with appropriate authority to enforce with the full support of the majority in our society.

Accountability is not an attempt to embrace an impossible dream of pursuing perfection. It is an attempt to set standards and reject the incredible amount of hubris, corruption, pleasure-seeking tendencies and other corrosive behaviours in our society. It is an attempt to maximise the resources of our society by preventing wastage and deploying them profitably. The creative sacrifices and trade-offs we make between our rights and our responsibilities as enshrined in our constitution will determine the level of accountability we can get out of each of our citizens. But creativity and sacrifices require courage and time will tell whether we command enough of that as a society.

Certainly education receives the highest level of attention because it alone has the greatest potential to deliver on change. But education without clear and enforceable rules of behaviour is like a cart without a harness. The cart is loaded with all sorts of valuable things to take to the market in order to earn income. But there is no equipment to harness the available animals to the cart. In the end, even the most disciplined and loyal of animals will turn around and start feeding themselves from the valuables in the cart, which were intended for the market in order to serve everybody.

South Africa needs to decide fast which one between education and accountability is needed now and can be put firmly into operation and which one is a long-term investment whose results will only be seen in decades to come. Currently, everybody is talking about education and nobody is doing much about accountability and leading by example. What is even worse, that long term investment in education also seems to be floundering as we battle to get proper rules of behaviour formed and followed for parent, teacher and student alike.

In the domain of law enforcement, there are two popular concepts: the certainty of punishment and the severity of sentence. And they come in that order. But many people commonly call for the severity of sentence each time a crime is committed. What they fail to appreciate properly is that where there is no certainly of punishment, severe sentences are impossible or useless. Wrong-doers first need to be identified, arrested and brought to court before they can be convicted and given heavy sentences. Education, money, love and even imprisonment itself will make no difference if there are no real enforceable sanctions or disincentives to correct or punish unacceptable behaviour.

Each time we speak to politicians about their organisations losing direction, the retort is that their organisations do not have this or that tradition and that they do not and will not suffer from the particular problem. Each time we speak to soccer authorities about the poor quality of today`s playing standards, the retort is that the current players are not committed and are overpaid. Older generations in communities and organisations also lament the scourge of young people who are poorly disciplined. But nobody seems to be able to do anything about these dire indictments against our society.

Cultures and traditions will always evolve to take mankind forward to strange times that cannot be imagined from the current age. They will bring with them behaviours that are not in tune with our traditional values or long-held beliefs and practices. Progressive societies work hard to put mechanisms in place to ensure the baby is not thrown out with the bathwater when change happens, which nobody can prevent from happening.

It is not very difficult to see why ordinary people in our communities have lost confidence in the ability of their leaders to change things for the better for everybody. But there are two scary issues about the whole matter. The first one is the illegal methods ordinary people employ to influence change and the fact that those in authority seem to be powerless to stop the illegality. Those two phenomena alone leave even the strongest people in our society very worried.

Human beings are creatures of habit. If we allow the majority of our people to cultivate the habit of seeing nothing wrong with irresponsibility, incompetence, criminality and naked corruption, we will reap a whirlwind of a society that no midwife or nanny will handle. Our society must take steps now to stem the tide of excessive lawlessness and replace it with one where accountability is embraced by both individuals and organisations. This must happen not only to combat the prevalent mixture of inertia and corruption in our society but must happen also to put our country on its rightful path to recovery and prosperity.

Without appropriate mechanisms to ensure accountability guided by where we want to go as a society, no home, no church, no school and no workplace, individually and collectively, can produce people with the ethical and technical competence we need to change our society. In the final analysis, we must all either rise to assume our share of accountability or acknowledge that we are nothing but accomplices in a heinous crime of murder against our beloved society. We must remember, whichever we choose, that many people sacrificed their lives to grant our country the possibility it now has to take its rightful place among the nations of the world.

Gibson Sakong
Executive Chairman – Montshepetja Academy