South African Nobel laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu has launched a searing indictment of the new rainbow nation, saying it was losing its moral bearings.
Tutu, who asked former deputy president Jacob Zuma to relinquish his bid for the country’s top job after Zuma admitted to having sex with a young HIV-positive woman, said South Africans were erring in their daily lives.
”What has come over us? Perhaps we did not realise just how apartheid has damaged us so that we seem to have lost our sense of right and wrong,” he said in a lecture late on Tuesday at the University of Cape Town.
”Is it not horrendous … for an adult man to rape a nine-month-old baby?” he said, referring to a recurring problem in one of the world’s most crime-ridden nations.
”We are not appalled that some of us can chuck people out of moving trains because they did not join [a strike].”
”What has happened to us? It seems as if we have perverted our freedom, our rights into licence, into being irresponsible.
”Rights go hand in hand with responsibility, with dignity, with respect for oneself and for the other,” he said, delivering the Steve Biko Memorial Lecture.
Tutu underlined that the need to break laws ended with the demise of apartheid in 1994, saying it was justified then as ”we wanted to make South Africa ungovernable”.
”We have achieved our goal. We are free … We have an obligation to obey the laws made by our own legislators. We should be dignified, law abiding citizens … proud of our freedom won at such great cost,” he said.
”We should not devalue it. We should not abuse our children, our womenfolk.”
Tutu repeated his opinion that ”black consciousness did not finish the work it set out to do,” and said his countrymen had ”lost our deeply African reverence for life”.
He also made an impassioned appeal for a greater civic sense.
”Can you tell me why we think it is okay to litter? Many of us will chuck a banana/orange peel, a paper wrapping on the ground next to a dustbin. Why? Why are we so unmindful of our environment?
”We must tell those who do this that littering is a crime but it is also a sin. We despoil God’s creation of which we are supposed to be stewards, caring for it on behalf of God.” – Sapa-AFP