Equality for all

Sep 22, 2010 Editorial

The accusations come fast and furious. Law enforcement officers are involved in crimes of every shade and stripe: murder, robbery and extortion. The civilian criminal fraternity’s numbers swelled daily by youths from depressed backgrounds recruited by political types that believe their path to power is stymied by the rules of the game. The politicians – on whatever side of the divide – are no better: corruption in procurement; corruption in divestment; corruption in prosecution and corruption in opposition have become the norm. Even the relations between ordinary folks in the society are marked by distrust and an “every man for himself” ethos.
It is obvious that there has been a breakdown in our moral order, not just in a minority of lawbreakers, but in the society as a whole. We emphasise, as we have done before, that this breakdown has not suddenly burst upon us. It is the result of a steady disintegration of morality precipitated by a succession of ideological adventurism: first in “cooperative” socialism and now market fundamentalism. The first premised on the utopian notion that we are inherently “cooperative” and the second dystopian assumption that if every man is for himself and the devil takes the hindmost, the resultant order of the “haves” and the “have nots” is the best that we can do.
A community is nothing if not a moral order: for us to survive as a nation, there is unquestionably much that has to be done. But if those measures are not accompanied by a recommitment by our people to a set of core values that all can share and which can be a guide not only in our daily activities but as a standard for evaluating the policies and programs that impact so heavily on our lives. Where do we begin? What about the value of equality? As a people that came out of slavery and indentureship where they were absolutely denied to us, we should not only have no quarrel with equality being the sine qua non of our national wellbeing, but for us to consciously insist that it becomes the essence of our moral compass.
Can we deny that our national quest for equality has consistently been stymied and this refutation has contributed to acts that could be defined as “anti-social”? Right after the abolition of slavery, the British denied the promised equality by a slew of measures designed to keep the freed slaves tied to the plantations and its unequal social order. Indentured labour was imported to undercut their bargaining power for a living wage; land purchase laws were changed to prevent them from forming a wider independent peasantry and credit was denied to them thus killing any hope of equality through commerce. Any wonder that we developed “centipedes”?
The indentured labourers – the Portuguese, the Indians and the Chinese – while by some measures performed somewhat better – were placed in an untenable position by unwittingly being imported to compete with the freed Africans. Under the rules of the political game that promised to deliver “equality” to each group, they all became rivals in trying to share a pie that was always too small to begin with. The struggle for equality became a zero sum game where if one won another lost. We are still playing that zero sum game.
So we suggest that even as we bemoan our loss of our moral anchor, we can begin to regroup by starting the reconstruction of our moral community by insisting that equality be our talisman. Some will say that equality is already promised by the laws and coercive arms of our state. Well if that is so, how is it that we are so far away from the ideal – and in fact are drifting further from it? The market alone will never deliver equality either. That leaves us – the people – to buttress the other means by using the normative measures of education, leadership, consensus, peer pressure, pointing out role models, exhortation, and, above all, the moral voice of communities to insist that we be all treated equally.

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