Nobel peace laureate Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu yesterday added his
voice to calls for a judicial inquiry into the multibillion rand arms deal.
In the prepared text of his speech for the Dullah Omar memorial lecture at the
University of the Western Cape, he said South Africans could not pretend
corruption was no longer a serious problem.
"We need to do something about the arms deal," he said.
"We owe it to those who paid a heavy price for our freedom, we owe it to
ourselves, we owe it to our future that a thorough independent judicial inquiry
happens as a matter of urgency.
"It is not going to go away."
He said the church had warned that South Africa's enemies were not military, but
rather poverty, disease and homelessness.
"To buy sophisticated machines we did not need, for which we did not have the
trained personnel, would be laughable if it was not so serious."
Corruption had to be dealt with vigorously. He said failure to do so would "ignite
a conflagration" that would not be easily controlled because people would
have lost their patience.
"As they wallow in squalor in ugly shacks, hungry and diseased, they see so many
others become affluent so quickly.
"The TRC in its final report warned that if the gap between rich and poor was
not narrowed quickly we might as well kiss reconciliation
goodbye. We are sitting on a powder keg,"
said Tutu.
Tutu also used the lecture to tackle a range of other issues. He called for a
review of the proportional representation electoral system and for the scrapping
of party lists.
"There was a good reason at a delicate stage of our transition to emphasise
proportional representation.
"Perhaps we could still have elements of this, but surely the time has come to
scrap party lists."
He said constituencies should elect their representatives directly and that
party lists had turned parliamentarians into "voting cattle".
"You won't be too awkward, asking embarrassing questions of the executive if you
want preferment and so party lists are a sure recipe for kow-towing," said Tutu.
In a veiled reference to the ANC's internal power struggle, he said South
Africans should be able to vote directly for their president, which would spare
the country the tensions caused by two centres of power.
He said South Africans had to reclaim the country from
criminals *1 and that visible policing was needed.
He said apartheid had contributed to black people's low self-esteem.
"This in part does explain the horrendous loss of reverence for life so that
there can be so much violence, rape, even of babies."
With acknowledgement to Sapa and Cape Times.
*1A goodly number of them are
sitting or have recently sat in the Union Buildings, Parliament and Shell House.
If it were not so, we would not have to reclaim the country from criminals.