THULI MADONSELA SPEECH HIGHLIGHTS

THULI MADAONSELA SPEAKS ON ETHICAL CONSTITUTIONALISM AT UCT SUMMER SCHOOL 2019

Thuli Madonsela – The Ex Public Protector who challenged the Zuma administration.

(The full speech will follow soon)

“I want to engage you this afternoon on the issue of ethical governance and constitutional ethics. And as we can see, my first topic is, “Who derailed our democracy?”. It’s something that I find to be a constant dinner conversation. Everyone is concerned about who derailed our democracy. Why are things not the way we expected them to be at the dawn of democracy about 25 years ago? Why have things changed? Why is there so much corruption? Why are we not making headway on ending poverty and inequality? Why is service delivery not up to the standard we expect it to be? For example, why are we fighting over a few schools that are doing well when about 75% of the schools are not doing well. Why are the other 75% schools not doing what we expected them to do? When we started the journey to democracy around 1994, we thought 25 years later, which is now, things would be looking differently.

The book every South African should read now, “Out of the Maze”. How do we get out of this maze? How do we find any cheese that we thought belonged to us and what are we going to do? And that’s Spencer Jones’ book, which is what are we going to do, beyond analysing want went wrong, which is we do, a lot.

Laws are not always ethical. Ethical government is doing the right thing for the right reason.

Ethics is a system of accepted beliefs that control behaviour, and there is something that worries me though sometimes when we think about ethics, when people think its only ethical if the code of ethics says so. The reality is, some codes of ethics….”

Please watch the video for the rest of the speech. The full speech will follow soon.