The Jacob Zuma affair is the latest indication of what is wrong with our technocratic political culture.

For the past five years we have laboured under the impression that public problems have technical solutions. This has been generally the case with virtually every major public policy problem — from the bricks-and-mortar approach that gave us the Reconstruction and Development Programme houses, to the Washington Consensus underlying our economic policies and technical questions about whether HIV causes AIDS. The corruption discourse reflects the dichotomy between legal-technical and social rationality.

One of the things I was taught in my criminology class at law school was the idea that people’s responses to and compliance with the law are best understood within the context of the political and social relations in a society. As a society we would in the long term be better off educating people about the law than relying purely on enforcement or “teaching them a lesson”, which seems to be the driving motive behind calls for Zuma’s blood.

I was reading the Freedom Charter at the weekend, and was struck by the relevance of one of its clauses for the Zuma trial. Under the clause, All Shall be Equal Before the Law, the charter reads “imprisonment shall be only for serious crimes against the people, and shall aim at re-education, not vengeance.” There is no doubt in my mind corruption is a serious crime against the people — a pilfering of public money and a violation of the public trust. But I am also struck by the reconciliatory approach of the document to law breakers — provided, of course, they are prepared to mend their ways.

I have written in the past about the disjuncture between the politics of racial reconciliation and the jurisprudence of punishment in our society. The desire to punish must be tempered by the broader theme of restoration. In a sense I am suggesting the notion of restorative justice may well be the best weapon against corruption. But for that to happen we would have to make a shift from technocratic to sociological approaches to law enforcement.

However, restorative justice requires acknowledgement of wrongdoing by the other party. While a legal-technical defence could indeed get Zuma off the hook, and while he would still get the support to become president if he were found not guilty, he too would have to factor in sociological considerations in any decision on whether to run for the presidency or not. How effective would he be as president of the country and a divided African National Congress (ANC)?

In other words, he would have to take to heart his own counsel that the ANC is larger than the single individual and decide whether that is in the interest of the party. After all, were he acquitted, he could simply declare he would not run for the presidency. That would certainly make him look good. He could then pledge his support to someone else, and become a power broker in the ANC elections in 2007. In politics that is sometimes more powerful than holding formal office.

Perhaps it is that very knowledge of the powerful role Zuma could play that makes a political solution unlikely, and a temptation to punish him through the legal process irresistible.

A legal-technical solution is, however, unlikely to solve this impasse, or the longer-term campaign against crime. For that we need a completely new way of governing with much less reliance on technical models and more reliance on sociological affinities around what constitutes good and bad public behaviour in a democracy, with greater emphasis on what the Freedom Charter calls “re-education, not vengeance”.

In the long run the best troops against corruption are the very people mobilising behind Zuma, only if they could embrace the idea that reconciliation comes with responsibility.

Just the other day I participated in a radio debate on whether ethnicity is still a factor in South African politics. My response was that SA has done remarkably well in building transcendent identities — mainly through the mobilisation provided by the liberation movement. We should not, however, wallow in those achievements.

I often feel the politics of direct address and coalition-building that were at the heart of our national imagination have been replaced by a consumerist, technocratic culture that pits people against each other. As in the case of corruption, ethnicity will rear its ugly head when there is an absence of a politics of community.

With or without Zuma, the ANC will have put that politics of community on its agenda if it is to bridge the divide between the technical rationality and the social rationality that is breaking it apart. No narrow legal solutions will suffice.

Mangcu is executive director for social cohesion at the Human Sciences Research Council and nonresident WEB du Bois fellow at Harvard. He writes in his personal capacity.

With acknowledgements to Xolela Mangcu and the Business Day.