Maravi

Young people and corruption

Young people and corruption
By Editor
Tuesday June 03, 2008 [04:00]

The efforts by the Anti-Corruption Commission to educate young people on the evils of corruption deserve encouragement and support. Our young people are growing up in a very difficult world that is characterised by unbridled consumerism. And this consumerism that, in our part of the world, is accompanied by poverty makes them very vulnerable to corruption if their bearings are not correct.

It also should be borne in mind that the individual does best, young people grow well in strong and decent communities of people with principles and standards, common aims and values.

The future of our children, the type of country they will grow and live in, will be that which we ourselves are able to create for them. If today we are going to create for them a country where greed, vanity, selfishness, banditry, corruption and all sorts of evils dominate, then that will be the Zambia they will have.

Our daily deeds as ordinary Zambians must produce an actual Zambian reality that will reinforce our belief in honest dealings, strengthen our confidence in the nobility of the human soul and sustain our hopes for a glorious life for all our people, especially the young ones.

We should, somehow, by God’s grace, turn this around. We should give these young people a decent future. We should take away their despair and give them hope by showing them that ours is a nation of honest and upright men and women, a nation where people care for each other and not one of hyenas, jackals and wolves. We should ensure that the work that is going on in our country today will not just benefit a few, those with long and sticky fingers.

No section of the community has all the virtues, neither does any have all the vices. We are quite sure that most of our people try to do their jobs as honestly and as best as they can, even if the result is not always entirely successful. It is said that he who has never failed to reach perfection has a right to be the hardest critic.

There can be no doubt, of course, that accountability and incorruptibility is good for people and institutions that are part of public life. No individual or institution should expect to be free from the scrutiny of those who give them their loyalty and support, not to mention those who don’t. But we are all part of the same fabric of our national society and that scrutiny, by one part of another, can be just as effective if it is made with a touch of gentleness, good humour and understanding. This sort of questioning can also act, and it should do so, as an effective engine for change of behaviour and attitude.

Our lives teach us who we are. We have to teach the young people that in this life we get nothing lasting save by effort. Freedom from effort in this life merely means that we are living on what we have not earned. And this is dangerous because it means that we are living on corruption, on theft. Living on unearned income is a prima facie case of corruption.

We should teach our young people not to fear a strenuous life, the only national life which is worth leading. We should teach our young people not to believe in that cloistered life which saps the hardy virtues in a nation, as it saps them in the individual; or else they are wedded to that base spirit of gain and greed which recognises in commercialism the be-all and end-all of national life, instead of realising that, though an indispensable element, it is after all but one of the many elements that go to make up true national greatness.

No country can long endure if its foundations are not laid deep in the material prosperity which comes from honest work, from thrift, from business energy and enterprise, from hard work, unsparing effort in the fields of industrial activity; but neither was any nation ever yet truly great if it relied upon material prosperity alone.

Our country, with its very high poverty levels, calls not for a life of easy, but for one of strenuous endeavour. In this century we entered over seven years ago, the fate of many nations will be decided. If we stand idly by, if we shrink from the hard contests where men must win through honest work, then others will pass us by and will win for themselves all that there is to be won.

Let us therefore be resolute to do our duty well and in an honest manner; resolute to uphold righteousness by deed and by word; resolute to be both honest and brave, to serve high ideals, yet to use practical methods. This is the only way we will triumph in the effort to implant hope in the breasts of the millions of our people.

There are, in the body politic, economic and social, many and grave evils, and there is urgent necessity for the sternest war upon them. There should be relentless exposure of and attack upon every evil man and woman whether politician or businessman or woman, every practice, whether in politics, in business, or in social life.

We hail as benefactor every person who with merciless severity makes such attack, provided always that he in his turn remembers that the attack is of use only if it is absolutely truthful. The liar is no whit better than the thief, and if his mendacity takes the form of defamation, he may be worse than most thieves.

It puts a premium upon knavery to untruthfully attack an honest person, or even with hysterical exaggeration to assail a bad man with untruth. An epidemic of indiscriminate assault upon character does not good, but really great harm. The soul of every scoundrel is gladdened whenever an honest person is assailed, or even when a scoundrel is untruthfully assailed.

Our plea is, not for immunity to but for the most unsparing exposure of the politician who betrays his trust, of the big business person who makes or spends his fortune in illegitimate or corrupt ways. There should be a resolute effort to hunt every such person out of the position he or she has disgraced. Expose the crime, and hunt down the criminal; but remember that even in the case of crime, if it is attacked in a sensational, lurid, and untruthful fashion, the attack may do more damage to the public mind than the crime itself.

It is because we feel that there should be no rest in the endless war against the forces of evil that we ask that the war be conducted with sanity as well as with resolution. The men and women with the muck-rakes are often indispensable to the well-being of society, but only if they know when to stop raking the muck, and to look upward to the celestial crown above them, to the crown of worth endeavour. There are beautiful things above and round about them; and if they gradually grow to feel that the whole world is nothing but muck, their power of usefulness is gone.

If the whole picture is painted black, there remains no hue whereby to single out the rascals for distinction from their fellows. Such painting finally induces a kind of a moral colour-blindness; and people affected by it come to the conclusion that no man is really black, and no man is really white, but they are all grey.

In other words, they neither believe in the truth of the attack, nor in the honesty of the person who is attacked; they grow as suspicious of the accusation as of the offence; it becomes well-nigh hopeless to stir them either to wrath against wrong-doing or to enthusiasm for what is right; and such a mental attitude in the public gives hope to every knave, and is the despair of honest people.

These are the things we should try to always bear in mind as we make our contribution to fighting corruption. And it should be on these terms that we encourage young people to work hard for their income and to avoid corruption and indeed to recruit them in the fight against corruption.

Labels: ACC, CORRUPTION, YOUTHS

posted by MrK @ 7:52 AM