BOKAMOSO
Accountability: Rise, South Africa, rise!
Accountability is like baking powder. If you’ve got it in the mix, the cake is bound to rise. If you haven’t, that cake is staying down no matter how great the other ingredients.
In South Africa, we can have impunity, or we can have progress. We cannot have both. All living systems act on feedback, human beings included. If you steal from your country and get reappointed or promoted, you keep stealing from your country. If you do a bad job and get away with it, you keep doing a bad job.
It’s really that simple.
South Africa needs to build a culture of political accountability, meaning that if there is corruption in a department, or if the department performs poorly, the political principal, the minister, is held to account. Currently, the litmus test is if corruption can actually be pinned on the principal, through a lifestyle audit. This is not enough. That is why outrageous crimes such as Marikana and Esidimeni can be committed against South Africans, and not a single politician is held to account.