Jeremy Waldron, God, Locke and Equality, Cambridge University Press, 2002
Professor Jeremy Waldron’s latest book is an examination of the theory of equality put forward by the seventeenth century English philosopher John Locke. This is a subject that is highly relevant today as the widening social gulf between the super rich and the rest of the population increasingly undermines the political institutions that have been based on the maintenance of at least a measure of social and economic equality. Under these conditions a study of equality as a theoretical principle is to be welcomed.
Locke has some claim to be one of the key sources of modern theories of equality and any discussion of the political implications of social inequality needs to be well grounded in his work. In his Two Treatises of Government Locke maintained that all men were naturally in a state of perfect liberty and equality. He envisaged that by common consent they had agreed to join together into a political or civil society, which ought to be governed by majority decisions. On entering civil society they granted their right to enforce justice to some form of government but they retained the right to resist this government and, if necessary, to overthrow it by force of arms.
The fact that almost a century after his death American revolutionaries could regard it as self-evident that all men were equal was in large part due to Locke’s influence. Whole phrases from the Second Treatise appear in the Declaration of Independence, as though Thomas Jefferson either had the book open on his desk as he drafted the document or had so thoroughly internalised its ethos that its language came most naturally to him. Even when he changes Locke’s words, as when he substitutes “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” for Locke’s “Life, Liberty and Property”, Jefferson shows a profound understanding of Locke’s thought and the way in which it needed to be modified to make it most relevant for his own times. In this form the ideas that Locke defended became part of the subsequent development of democratic theory.
This history makes Locke the inescapable starting point for any consideration of equality as a modern political concept, but at the same time he himself is not a modern thinker. He was born in 1632 and grew up during the English Civil War (1642-48), was at school in Westminster when Charles I was executed a few hundred yards away and went to Christ Church College, Oxford just after the victorious parliamentary forces had purged the academic staff. His youth and early adulthood experiences were shaped by a political struggle that was expressed in a religious form and in which the Bible was regarded as a political handbook. Often this historical background to Locke’s thought is elided in the works of modern political theorists, but it certainly influences his thinking since for Locke human beings are equal because they are made in the image of God and are all sent into the world to do his business. Waldron’s book attempts to reinstate the religious foundations of Locke’s political theory in what he aims to make an historically sensitive account.
In recognising that the roots of Locke’s thought lie to a great extent in the revolutionary struggles of the English Civil War, Waldron is able to give more emphasis than is often the case to the radical aspects of his writings that are easily obscured when he is seen in a later context. Waldron recognises Locke’s debt to the most plebeian elements of the English revolution and thinks that he is closer to the Levellers than is often supposed. He rejects the argument put forward by C. B. Macpherson who suggested that Locke thought, “members of the laboring class do not and cannot live a fully rational life.” [1]
Locke has a very distinctive view of labour that relates both to his political and economic theories. Labour, for Locke, is the source of value and the basis of property rights since people could, in his view, only own that which they had appropriated through their labour. Waldron traces Locke’s conception of labour to his religious outlook, specifically to his attitude to the Fall of Man. Waldron quotes Locke’s comment that when Adam was expelled from Paradise, “God sets him to work for his living, and seems rather to give him a Spade into his hands, to subdue the Earth, than a Scepter to Rule over its Inhabitants.”
Rather than being doomed to a state of original sin, humanity is obliged to work for a living in Locke’s version of the Fall from Paradise.
The picture of Locke that emerges from Waldron’s pages is not of a defender of the seventeenth century status quo, but of someone who was prepared to challenge orthodox ideas and the existing property relations. Ever since the Putney debates of 1647 the way in which economic inequality inevitably undermines political equality had remained an insoluble problem that the Levellers had never managed to resolve. Waldron sets Locke’s discussion of equality in the context of this seventeenth century debate about the relationship between political and economic equality. He concludes that Locke seems to have regarded an unequal distribution of property as inevitable in an economy based on money, but that he was critical of the English inheritance customs that tended to produce large landed estates. He favoured the division of property among heirs, a practice that, it was thought, would result in a more equitable division of land.
So fundamental are Locke’s religious conceptions to his political and economic ideas, Waldron argues, that “bracketing off the God stuff from the equality stuff” is simply not going to work. This is true to the extent that for Locke the idea of equality is logically derived from God since all human beings are equal because they have been divinely created. But does this mean that we cannot separate the principle of equality from the theological character it has in Locke’s thought? It is significant that even before Locke’s death in 1704 editions of his Two Treatises appeared in France without the First Treatise, which was the most explicitly religious of the two. It was this French version of the work that was eventually translated and published in America. Locke is in this sense very much a transitional figure who stands between the religiously based conceptions of the English Civil War and the increasingly secular arguments for equality that emerge in the American and French revolutions. “Bracketing off the God stuff from the equality stuff “ is exactly what did happen to Locke’s theory in practice.
Waldron’s determination not to separate Locke’s theory of equality from its theological foundations casts an interesting light on the direction of liberal thought at the turn of the twentieth century. John Rawls, the political theorist who died earlier this year, drew on the work of Locke, Rousseau, Kant and Mill to develop a political theory that was highly influential throughout the post-war period. He always argued that it must be possible to defend the principle of equality in terms that all members of society, whether religious or secular, could accept and find compelling because there existed an overlapping consensus of ideas. For Rawls all individuals are equal because they have a sense of justice and a conception of the good and because they have the ability to reason.[2]
Waldron used to accept this argument 20 years ago, he writes, but now finds that he cannot and doubts that a non-religious foundation for the principle of equality is viable.
This shift reflects the fact that 20 years ago it was possible for Rawls or Waldron to take for granted a certain consensus on fundamental political principles. There might be sharp differences in their practical application, but principles such as equality were accepted by the right and left in mainstream political life. This is no longer the case today and it has become impossible to base a liberal political philosophy on the assumption that the principle of equality can be taken for granted.
The theological basis that Locke found for equality is certainly not adequate for the beginning of the twenty-first century, a fact that the traditional liberal theory of equality always recognised and so tried to find a generally acceptable secular theory. To attempt to return to a theological conception of equality at this point would be entirely retrogressive.
Waldron does not examine the foundations of equality in the present day or elaborate a theory of his own that goes beyond a rather tentative critique of Rawls and gives the impression of floundering when he suggests that the justification of the principle of equality must exist at some “deeper level”. It is to his credit that he insists that individuals were inherently worthy of respect in late seventeenth century and they are inherently worthy of respect in the twenty-first century too, but having rejected Rawls’ mid-twentieth century liberalism he seems to have cut himself adrift from any theoretical anchor points for this conviction.
While Waldron’s close focus has some definite advantages because it sets Locke’s thought in an appropriate historical context, it is not sufficient in studying such an influential figure or in exploring such a complex concept as equality, which has a profound resonance over a long historical period. One of the features that Waldron himself emphasises about Locke’s thought is that he wrote in a pre-Linnaean, pre-Darwinian world in which evolutionary or historical arguments had no explanatory force. This is extremely important for understanding Locke because our thought has been so thoroughly infused with historical and evolutionary concepts in the course of the last 300 years that it is often difficult to put ourselves into Locke’s mental world.
We think of species as evolving, societies as evolving and ideas as evolving in a way that Locke did not.
There is, however, no reason why we should artificially confine ourselves to Locke’s mental world and deprive ourselves of a whole range of more modern intellectual equipment in reaching an understanding of his thought. Writing in a world before Vico and Herder, before Hegel and certainly before Darwin and Marx, an historical understanding of the principle of equality was not open to Locke but it is to us. We have to step outside Locke’s essentially a-historical worldview, in which equality existed as a timeless principle based on divine dispensation and an unchanging human nature, and adopt a more historical approach than the one either Locke or Waldron offers us.
The problem is not just that Locke’s theological theory is inadequate today, but that it was philosophically inadequate in the seventeenth century too. God’s opinions are so notoriously varied that they have never made a sound basis for philosophy. In John Locke’s mind God may have created all men equal but many of his contemporaries were just as sincerely convinced that God had ordained inequality since he had given kings a divine right to rule over their subjects. Why then did the theory of equality become so powerful?
Equality could only have become a self-evident idea because it made sense in terms of the experience of a great many people. This may seem anomalous in a world that was dominated by absolute monarchies, in which there were immense socio-economic divisions and when most people’s daily experience was of inequality not equality. Landlord and tenant, master and servant, king and subject—these were the relationships that governed the majority of people’s lives in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Even Locke himself accepted a system in which political rights were proportionate to landholding and slavery was legally recognised when he helped to draft the constitution of colonial Carolina.
Despite this social reality the concept of equality had deep roots and a complex history. It had always led a double life as both part of the official Christian ideology of natural rights theology that was developed by Thomas Aquinas and part of the ideology of plebeian heresy and rebellion.
The Reformation (1516) and the German Peasant War (1524-6) lent it a powerful impetus, as did the French Wars of Religion (1562-98). One of the conclusions drawn from the Thirty Years War (1618-48) was that the only way to maintain social peace was to treat everyone as though they were equal. Under the impact of these political experiences and the economic developments connected with European colonial expansion, the old scholastic theory of natural law and natural rights was dusted off and revived in a modern form that placed greater emphasis on the political implications of equality and the active right of resistance.
The political ideas expressed in Locke’s Two Treatises represent a codification of the principles of equality and resistance, which had emerged in a practical and unsystematic way in the course of the struggle against King Charles I. They retained a continuing relevance after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 when it became clear that the king was moving in an absolutist direction as, fortified with subsidies from Louis XIV, Charles II found that he could afford to ignore Parliament and insist on the succession of his brother James II, who was a Roman Catholic. This directly threatened the lives, liberties and properties of Protestant Englishmen who feared that the religious orders would claim back their estates, that they would be excluded from office and that a programme of persecution would be instituted as it had been under Mary Tudor.
Under these circumstances the alliance of wealthy merchants and landlords with more radical urban artisans that had played an important role in the Civil War re-emerged. Locke was very much part of this loose movement that came to be identified as the Whigs.
One of Locke’s practical political actions was organising the legal defence of Stephen College, “the Whig joiner”, when he was on trial for his life in Oxford on charges of sedition. The Two Treatises was part of a whole body of Whig literature that included Algernon Sydney’s Discourse Concerning Government—which also had an impact on the American Revolution. Sydney was convicted of treason and executed for his involvement on the strength of the views he expressed in the Discourses. Locke was more fortunate but he expressed similar ideas in the Two Treatises.
Locke has been thought of as exclusively the spokesman for the wealthy merchants and landlords, but his conception that the poor have the right to take what they need from the surplus of the rich is incompatible with any accepted notions of capitalist economics. Locke certainly is a spokesman of these privileged groups, but at the same time he speaks for their supporters among the labourers and artisans. Waldron is right to identify Locke with the Levellers. Indeed Locke is not so far from the more radical Diggers in advocating that the poor should be allowed to dig up common land and that the rich should not be allowed to engross more land than they can use.
Locke’s political ideas reflect the alliance of classes that jointly opposed the drive to absolutism in mid and late seventeenth century England. We may recognise these classes as having inherently incompatible interests, but Locke did not. He expressed a compromise between class interests, but one that rapidly became untenable.
Within a comparatively short space of time the Whigs became the party of the establishment, maintaining power through a system of corruption, and their revolutionary past was transformed into an assertion of the ancient rights of Englishmen—propertied ones in particular. Locke is often identified with this later Whig tradition, but he never attempts to justify revolution on the grounds that Englishmen could claim certain rights under an ancient constitution. His arguments in The Two Treatises are always universalist in nature and point toward the Enlightenment tradition of natural rights rather than to the constitutional tradition of ancient prerogative and privilege. Locke’s arguments are far more theological in character than later theories of natural rights were to be because he effectively bridges the transition between the religious ideology of the English Civil War and the later American and French Revolutions, where if God appears at all it is in the guise of the “God of Nature”.
God, Locke and Equality is a valuable contribution to the debate about the origins of the modern conception of equality because it recognises the radical aspect of Locke’s thought and his connection with a revolutionary tradition, but it demands to be taken further.
Locke’s conception of God, a conception that was far from satisfactory to the orthodox thinkers of his day, was a philosophical portmanteau—which, if unpacked, we would find contained some highly material historical content. In it we could trace the influence of the history of European wars, religious conflicts and revolutions on his thought and in addition identify the new scientific developments of the age that encouraged him to adopt an anthropological approach to political and religious questions. Professor Waldron has left the bag packed.
Notes:
[1] C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism pp.232.
[2] John Rawls, Political Liberalism, p19
Source: World Socialist Web Site
Monday, June 16, 2003
Wednesday, June 11, 2003
Ngcuka calls for stricter asset forfeiture laws
National Director of Public Prosecutions Bulelani Ngcuka yesterday appealed to MPs to beef up legislation governing asset forfeitures. This followed a high court order won by controversial Businessperson Billy Rautenbach last year for the release of more than R40-million worth of assets seized by the Asset Forfeiture Unit (AFU).
The ruling, by Johannesburg High Court Judge Pierre Rabie, had allowed Rautenbach to take the assets out of the country, to Zimbabwe, despite the government appealing against the decision, Ngcuka told Parliament's justice portfolio committee. "We would like the legislature to give consideration to this. "How can people use the legal system to protect their rights, but then don't want to submit to the jurisdiction of our courts," he said.
The AFU, three years ago, seized Rautenbach's assets, including a luxury home in Sandhurst, Johannesburg, a farm in Paarl, aircrafts, a yacht, as well as various bank accounts. The former Hyundai boss in South Africa had been charged with large-scale fraud, theft, money laundering and evasion of import duties. Ngcuka said he hoped the committee would look into the case and strengthen the law to ensure those accused could not flee with their assets, even though cases were still subject to appeal.
Johnny de Lange, the committee's chairman, said this should not be allowed to happen again. "It is absolutely flabbergasting that a judge can allow that to happen," he said. Ngcuka also said his office was putting in place a system to dramatically cut down on the number of criminal cases withdrawn before the courts. The frequency of suspects being arrested and the cases never coming to court, despite being placed on the court roll, was a source of serious concern. This was particularly the case when arrests were made over a weekend and cases put onto the roll on Monday morning, despite there being no chance of conviction.
Prosecutors were now visiting police stations on Sundays to screen dockets before they were placed on the roll, and only in exceptional instances would a suspect be taken to court before a final decision was taken to prosecute. The new policy would also help ensure against innocent persons being arrested, and detained, he said.
Source: Polity
The ruling, by Johannesburg High Court Judge Pierre Rabie, had allowed Rautenbach to take the assets out of the country, to Zimbabwe, despite the government appealing against the decision, Ngcuka told Parliament's justice portfolio committee. "We would like the legislature to give consideration to this. "How can people use the legal system to protect their rights, but then don't want to submit to the jurisdiction of our courts," he said.
The AFU, three years ago, seized Rautenbach's assets, including a luxury home in Sandhurst, Johannesburg, a farm in Paarl, aircrafts, a yacht, as well as various bank accounts. The former Hyundai boss in South Africa had been charged with large-scale fraud, theft, money laundering and evasion of import duties. Ngcuka said he hoped the committee would look into the case and strengthen the law to ensure those accused could not flee with their assets, even though cases were still subject to appeal.
Johnny de Lange, the committee's chairman, said this should not be allowed to happen again. "It is absolutely flabbergasting that a judge can allow that to happen," he said. Ngcuka also said his office was putting in place a system to dramatically cut down on the number of criminal cases withdrawn before the courts. The frequency of suspects being arrested and the cases never coming to court, despite being placed on the court roll, was a source of serious concern. This was particularly the case when arrests were made over a weekend and cases put onto the roll on Monday morning, despite there being no chance of conviction.
Prosecutors were now visiting police stations on Sundays to screen dockets before they were placed on the roll, and only in exceptional instances would a suspect be taken to court before a final decision was taken to prosecute. The new policy would also help ensure against innocent persons being arrested, and detained, he said.
Source: Polity
Thursday, June 5, 2003
War Crimes Indictment of Liberian President Is Disclosed
President Charles Taylor of Liberia, widely viewed as a wellspring of the violence that has ravaged West Africa, has been indicted on war crimes charges by a special court in Sierra Leone that accused him of ''bearing the greatest responsibility'' for a decade's worth of murders, mutilations and rapes in the neighboring country. He is the second serving national leader to be indicted on war crimes charges in the last decade. The first was Slobodan Milosevic, who was indicted by the tribunal in The Hague while he was president.
The indictment by the court, run jointly by the United Nations and the Sierra Leone government, was originally issued on March 7. It was made public today shortly after Mr. Taylor, bowing to pressure from the leaders of Ghana, Nigeria and South Africa, announced that he would step down by the end of the year. Diplomatic officials and news reports from the region described a surreal diplomatic drama in which Mr.
Taylor was transformed from statesman to fugitive in a matter of minutes. The announcement came at the opening of a peace conference convened in Accra, Ghana, and designed to end Liberia's current civil war. Just after being applauded for his retirement announcement, Mr. Taylor left the peace conference abruptly and caught a plane home rather than risk arrest by his Ghanaian hosts. In the brief time that elapsed between the announcement of the indictment and Mr. Taylor's departure, various Ghanaian officials and West African diplomats said they did not know whether they would attempt an arrest, since Mr. Taylor's status as a head of state grants him automatic immunity from such actions, under various international treaties.
The train of events left deep frustration in at least two quarters, diplomatic officials said today. One senior United States official said today that Presidents Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria and John Kufuor of Ghana felt sandbagged by the release of the indictment on the heels of their successful effort to get Mr. Taylor to resign. But both the Ghanaian government's delays and indecision about arresting Mr. Taylor, and his subsequent return home, left both the war crimes prosecutor's office and some Republican members of the international affairs committee of the United States House of Representatives confused or angry.
In a telephone interview, Luc Copè, the chief of prosecution for the court in Sierra Leone, said: ''We don't have any power of arrest. We depend on a state to execute our orders.'' He added, ''We can serve the warrant of arrest on Liberia. But that would be asking him to arrest himself.''
The indictment itself provided, in stilted legal language, a capsule history of the allegations of crossborder alliances between Mr. Taylor and insurgents in Sierra Leone, and his reported support for a war on civilians that left upwards of 200,000 people dead and hundreds of thousands more maimed or raped or homeless in the late 1990's.
Mr. Taylor originally was a rebel warlord in his own country, and on coming to power, his accusers have charged, he helped rebel groups in neighboring countries, effectively franchising out his own civil war first to Sierra Leone and later to the Ivory Coast. In the case of Sierra Leone, one of the prizes in the conflict was access to Sierra Leone's wealth of diamond mines. ''Victims were routinely shot, hacked to death and burned to death,'' in Sierra Leone, one count of the new indictment said. Another said ''widespread sexual violence committed against civilian women and girls included brutal rapes, often by multiple rapists.''
A third count, involving the mutilations of civilians whose limbs were hacked off, charged that ''these mutilations included cutting off limbs and carving'' the initials of rebel groups on the bodies of the victims. The war crimes court in Sierra Leone, created jointly by the United Nations and Sierra Leone's government 18 months ago, has already indicted several militia leaders from the Revolutionary United Front and the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council, who made common cause with Mr. Taylor's government.
The indictment unsealed today charged that Mr. Taylor had ''to obtain access to the mineral wealth of the Republic of Sierra Leone, in particular the diamond wealth of Sierra Leone, and to destabilize the state'' provided ''financial support, military training, personnel, arms, ammunition'' and other support to the R.U.F., which in turn allied itself with the A.F.R.C.
In a statement released in Freetown today, the chief prosecutor of the special court, David M. Crane, said that he had unsealed the indictment when he learned Mr. Taylor would be in Ghana for the peace talks, and thus would be susceptible to arrest. He added, ''To ensure the legitimacy of these negotiations, it is imperative that the attendees know they are dealing with an indicted war criminal.''
A member of Mr. Crane's staff, contacted by telephone in Freeport on Tuesday night, said that the news of the indictment prompted ''cheering in the streets'' of Sierra Leone's capital. In Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, The Associated Press reported that thousands of panicked civilians were running home from work to find their children, apparently fearful of renewed civil strife if Mr. Taylor's government fell.
Mr. Taylor's announcement today that he would resign was made, in the third person, to warm applause, The Associated Press reported. ''It has become apparent that some people believe that Taylor is the problem,'' he said. ''President Taylor wants to say that he intends to remove himself from the process.''
Sourc: New York Times
The indictment by the court, run jointly by the United Nations and the Sierra Leone government, was originally issued on March 7. It was made public today shortly after Mr. Taylor, bowing to pressure from the leaders of Ghana, Nigeria and South Africa, announced that he would step down by the end of the year. Diplomatic officials and news reports from the region described a surreal diplomatic drama in which Mr.
Taylor was transformed from statesman to fugitive in a matter of minutes. The announcement came at the opening of a peace conference convened in Accra, Ghana, and designed to end Liberia's current civil war. Just after being applauded for his retirement announcement, Mr. Taylor left the peace conference abruptly and caught a plane home rather than risk arrest by his Ghanaian hosts. In the brief time that elapsed between the announcement of the indictment and Mr. Taylor's departure, various Ghanaian officials and West African diplomats said they did not know whether they would attempt an arrest, since Mr. Taylor's status as a head of state grants him automatic immunity from such actions, under various international treaties.
The train of events left deep frustration in at least two quarters, diplomatic officials said today. One senior United States official said today that Presidents Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria and John Kufuor of Ghana felt sandbagged by the release of the indictment on the heels of their successful effort to get Mr. Taylor to resign. But both the Ghanaian government's delays and indecision about arresting Mr. Taylor, and his subsequent return home, left both the war crimes prosecutor's office and some Republican members of the international affairs committee of the United States House of Representatives confused or angry.
In a telephone interview, Luc Copè, the chief of prosecution for the court in Sierra Leone, said: ''We don't have any power of arrest. We depend on a state to execute our orders.'' He added, ''We can serve the warrant of arrest on Liberia. But that would be asking him to arrest himself.''
The indictment itself provided, in stilted legal language, a capsule history of the allegations of crossborder alliances between Mr. Taylor and insurgents in Sierra Leone, and his reported support for a war on civilians that left upwards of 200,000 people dead and hundreds of thousands more maimed or raped or homeless in the late 1990's.
Mr. Taylor originally was a rebel warlord in his own country, and on coming to power, his accusers have charged, he helped rebel groups in neighboring countries, effectively franchising out his own civil war first to Sierra Leone and later to the Ivory Coast. In the case of Sierra Leone, one of the prizes in the conflict was access to Sierra Leone's wealth of diamond mines. ''Victims were routinely shot, hacked to death and burned to death,'' in Sierra Leone, one count of the new indictment said. Another said ''widespread sexual violence committed against civilian women and girls included brutal rapes, often by multiple rapists.''
A third count, involving the mutilations of civilians whose limbs were hacked off, charged that ''these mutilations included cutting off limbs and carving'' the initials of rebel groups on the bodies of the victims. The war crimes court in Sierra Leone, created jointly by the United Nations and Sierra Leone's government 18 months ago, has already indicted several militia leaders from the Revolutionary United Front and the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council, who made common cause with Mr. Taylor's government.
The indictment unsealed today charged that Mr. Taylor had ''to obtain access to the mineral wealth of the Republic of Sierra Leone, in particular the diamond wealth of Sierra Leone, and to destabilize the state'' provided ''financial support, military training, personnel, arms, ammunition'' and other support to the R.U.F., which in turn allied itself with the A.F.R.C.
In a statement released in Freetown today, the chief prosecutor of the special court, David M. Crane, said that he had unsealed the indictment when he learned Mr. Taylor would be in Ghana for the peace talks, and thus would be susceptible to arrest. He added, ''To ensure the legitimacy of these negotiations, it is imperative that the attendees know they are dealing with an indicted war criminal.''
A member of Mr. Crane's staff, contacted by telephone in Freeport on Tuesday night, said that the news of the indictment prompted ''cheering in the streets'' of Sierra Leone's capital. In Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, The Associated Press reported that thousands of panicked civilians were running home from work to find their children, apparently fearful of renewed civil strife if Mr. Taylor's government fell.
Mr. Taylor's announcement today that he would resign was made, in the third person, to warm applause, The Associated Press reported. ''It has become apparent that some people believe that Taylor is the problem,'' he said. ''President Taylor wants to say that he intends to remove himself from the process.''
Sourc: New York Times
Our country needs facts, not groundless allegations
A letter from Thabo Mbeki
In the Biblical Gospel according to St Matthew, it is said that Jesus Christ saw Simon Peter and his brother Andrew fishing in the Sea of Galilee. And He said to them: "Follow Me, and I will make you fishers of men."
Perhaps taking a cue from this, some in our country have appointed themselves as "fishers of corrupt men". Our governance system is the sea in which they have chosen to exercise their craft. From everything they say, it is clear that they know it as a matter of fact that they are bound to return from their fishing expeditions with huge catches of corrupt men (and women).
In March 1999, our country's Human Rights Commission (HRC) conducted hearings on the matter of "racism in the media". Not unexpectedly, instead of dealing with this serious matter, some in our country and others abroad, made a big song and dance about it, seeking to ensure that the HRC should not proceed with the hearings.
To frighten the HRC into silence, these made the absurd and self-serving allegation that these hearings constituted a threat to the freedom of the press. Fortunately, the campaign, whose central objective was to cover up racism in our country, failed.
The hearings took place. The HRC made its recommendations. Despite the scare-mongering, the press is no less free now than it was before the hearings. Others will answer the question whether it has done anything to implement at least some of the recommendations of the HRC.
The ANC made its own submission to the hearings. One of the critical issues it raised was the role of the intensely negative, highly offensive and deeply entrenched stereotype of Africans among some in our country, which makes it inevitable that much reporting in our country would be racist. The ANC made the point that this stereotype necessarily dictated that some in our country would proceed from the position that our government was corrupt as alleged, unless it proved itself to be innocent.
Among other things, it cited the instance of an article in a weekly journal, in which the journalist concerned gratuitously accused the writer of this Letter of dictatorial tendencies. The ANC explained the circumstances surrounding the writing and publication of this article, which were relevant to the subject of the hearings.
This matter having been contested and subsequently taken to court by the journal concerned, the judge found in favour of the ANC. Needless to say, the determination made by the courts did not get the public exposure that the resort to these courts by this journal had evoked.
The false allegation of wrong doing by the ANC was what was vigorously implanted in the public mind. To the contrary, the rejection of this allegation by the courts, and therefore the independent judicial assertion of the truth about this matter, was assiduously hidden from the public.
Had this truth been communicated as openly as it should have been, it would have undermined the racist stereotype of Africans, and demonstrated the correctness of the decision of the HRC to hold its hearings. It was therefore not in the interests of some in our country, who believe in the stereotype, that this truth should be widely known.
The same stereotypical conviction about our government being corrupt, unless it proves itself innocent, has re-surfaced with regard to the defence procurement decided by our government in 2000. The fishermen (and women?) have recast their fishing nets, convinced that they will bring in a rich haul of corrupt government luminaries.
So convinced are they of the outcome of their fishing expedition that they regularly describe the defence procurement as "the arms deal scandal" or "debacle". They say "a deepening shadow of allegations is threatening to engulf the highest reaches of government".
Triumphantly, they proclaim that "the publication of details of an earlier (investigative) draft confirmed long-held suspicions by opponents of the arms procurement exercise that changes were made before publication, possibly at the instance of senior members of government".
They say "there was a crucial 'nondisclosure of facts' to a body tasked with evaluating products", and that "draft reports released in court show evidence that passages detailing possible corruption were edited from the report before it was presented to parliament".
The fishers of corrupt men happily construct doom scenarios that serve their purposes. They speculate about the possibility of a senior official being shown to be corrupt, and how this might lead to the conclusion that the whole procurement process was corrupted, resulting in the "the whole edifice of the arms procurement exercise" crumbling. The reality is that the wish is father to the thought.
But it all sounds terribly dramatic and pregnant with the potential to expose horrifying facts about massive corruption by our government, involving billions of rands To prepare the public mind, words such as "scandal" and "debacle" must be, and are used!
To add to the sense of impeding horror, "senior members of government" must be implicated, including "the highest reaches of government", which means the President. Further to whet the appetite for the expected catch that will be brought in by the fishers, the threat is made that a "shadow of allegations might engulf" these "highest reaches".
Quite how shadows rather than substance, and allegations rather than facts might engulf the President, or anybody else for that matter, is somewhat difficult to fathom. The point however is that neither substance nor facts are important to the fishers of corrupt men in terms of their project to substantiate the stereotype of which the ANC spoke, when it made its presentation at the HRC hearings on racism in the media.
What is central is that the stereotype must be sustained and entrenched. For this purpose, precisely because of this entrenched stereotype, shadows and allegations will serve as well as anything else. Carefully chosen words with no factual information to substantiate them, such as "scandal" and "debacle", also come in as useful devices, to give the shadows and allegations the appearance of substance.
In this no-holds-barred campaign, anything and anybody who stands in the way of the fishers, including and especially the truth, must give way. In the current fishing expedition, the Auditor General (AG) has been targeted as one of the possible big fish that the fishers hope to catch.
Accordingly, they accuse the AG of doctoring the report he presented to Parliament, by omitting some details contained in an earlier draft. The AG has taken strong exception to this charge of fraud. In barely disguised language, the fishers have said that they are convinced that the AG is lying. Naturally, they will not bother to supply facts to disprove what the AG said.
As part of this campaign against the AG, they charge him with having "sanitised" and "heavily edited" the final report, "possibly at the instance of senior members of government". They say nothing of the fact that the AG is required by the law to show his draft reports to any institution he may be auditing, for any comments it may wish to make. The AG is free to accept or reject any comments made by those he has audited.
This happens regularly, is required by law, and carries no imputation whatsoever of corrupt behaviour on the part of the AG. Precisely because he had absolutely nothing to hide by following this procedure, the AG attached an official letter to the draft report he gave the Cabinet sub-committee that approved the primary contracts, citing the provisions in the law requiring him to abide by this procedure.
The fishers have focused especially on the Thomson (Thales) element of the prime contract entered into by the government with the suppliers of the corvettes, the German Frigate Consortium (GFC). The government has explained this very clearly before, that it entered into a contract with the GFC to supply the required number of corvettes, meeting all the stipulated specifications.
The government has no contracts with the companies retained by the GFC to supply the various component parts of the corvettes. Similarly, it never had occasion or need to determine who the partners of the GFC should or should not be, including Thomson (Thales).
The proposition that the government influenced the choice of Thomson by the GFC as one of its sub-contractors is both a blatant falsity concocted by the fishers, and a logical absurdity. In its statement of 15 September 2000, the government announced those with whom it had entered into contracts. These are British Aerospace/SAAB, the German Frigate Consortium and Augusta. It had no primary contract with Thomson (Thales), as the supplier of the electronic combat suite of the corvettes, which matter, of the supplier of this suite, remained in the exclusive domain of the GFC.
In the Background Notes issued on 12 January, 2001, the government said: "It should be pointed out that the Procurement does not deal with subcontractors. This has to be the contractual obligation of the prime contractor as it is they who must deliver reliable equipment and undertake the performance and delivery obligations. This is standard practice in major contracts. To insist that the Government must be held to account for minor subcontracts is to misunderstand procurement. The prime contractors are major international corporations and we are confident that they would ensure the quality of the subcontractors and this is their responsibility."
But of course this does not matter to the fishers, who are intent to prove or otherwise entrench the stereotype of a corrupt African government. This is why their fond scenario visualises a determination that an official acted corruptly, leading, according to them, to the collapse of the "arms procurement exercise", even as they exclude the fact that the final recommendations to the deciding authority, the Cabinet, had to be, and were made by a Cabinet sub-committee, and not officials.
An aggrieved potential and unsuccessful sub-contractor has taken his grievance to our courts. For this reason, we will not comment on the matters he raises, which the fishers nevertheless use triumphantly and wilfully to justify their campaign. But this gentleman decided to raise, in the media, the matter of an earlier process to acquire corvettes for our Navy.
The gentleman concerned makes the false allegation that during the life of the Government of National Unity, formed in 1994, a contract for four corvettes to be built by Bazan of Spain "was cancelled after being awarded". This is not true. The preceding apartheid Cabinet had not approved this contract. The GNU Cabinet decided not to enter into this contract.
Bazan entered the later competition to supply the four corvettes, and lost to the GFC. This issue is of relevance and interest only because of the controversy that some have brought into the current defence procurement. It is an interesting coincidence that this controversy has focused so intensely on the corvettes.
In time the details of the truth will come out about how the controversy concerning the 2000 defence procurement emerged and persisted. The gentleman litigant, who has raised the matter of Bazan of Spain, may be proved to have been justified in raising this issue, even if he made false claims about a Bazan contract that never was.
This detailed truthful account would tell our country interesting things about such matters as defence procurement during the apartheid years, and the promotion of political careers and fortunes in contemporary South Africa. It would tell a story about the political uses of the racist stereotypes that are part of our daily menu of information and perception, and the formation of popular consciousness.
It would inform us about the impact or otherwise of the domestic and international apartheid networks on our democratic order, and the moral integrity of those who correctly claim that they fought for the victory of this order, and therefore seek to position themselves as its true representatives.
The sooner this fascinating story is told the better, so that we can improve our performance with regard to the achievement of the critical objective of building a truly people-centred society.
As an important part of the struggle to realise this objective, we should not, and will not abandon the offensive to defeat the insulting campaigns further to entrench a stereotype that has, for centuries, sought to portray Africans as a people that is corrupt, given to telling lies, prone to theft and self-enrichment by immoral means, a people that is otherwise contemptible in the eyes of the "civilised". We must expect that, as usual, our opponents will accuse us of "playing the race card", to stop us confronting the challenge of racism.
The fishers of corrupt men are determined to prove everything in the anti-African stereotype. They rely on their capacity to produce long shadows and innumerable allegations around the effort of our government to supply the South African National Defence Force with the means to discharge its constitutional and continental obligations. They are confident that these long shadows and allegations without number will engulf and suffocate the forces that fought for and lead our process of democratisation, reconstruction and development.
However, what our country needs is substance and not shadows, facts instead of allegations, and the eradication of racism. The struggle continues.
Source: ANC Today
In the Biblical Gospel according to St Matthew, it is said that Jesus Christ saw Simon Peter and his brother Andrew fishing in the Sea of Galilee. And He said to them: "Follow Me, and I will make you fishers of men."
Perhaps taking a cue from this, some in our country have appointed themselves as "fishers of corrupt men". Our governance system is the sea in which they have chosen to exercise their craft. From everything they say, it is clear that they know it as a matter of fact that they are bound to return from their fishing expeditions with huge catches of corrupt men (and women).
In March 1999, our country's Human Rights Commission (HRC) conducted hearings on the matter of "racism in the media". Not unexpectedly, instead of dealing with this serious matter, some in our country and others abroad, made a big song and dance about it, seeking to ensure that the HRC should not proceed with the hearings.
To frighten the HRC into silence, these made the absurd and self-serving allegation that these hearings constituted a threat to the freedom of the press. Fortunately, the campaign, whose central objective was to cover up racism in our country, failed.
The hearings took place. The HRC made its recommendations. Despite the scare-mongering, the press is no less free now than it was before the hearings. Others will answer the question whether it has done anything to implement at least some of the recommendations of the HRC.
The ANC made its own submission to the hearings. One of the critical issues it raised was the role of the intensely negative, highly offensive and deeply entrenched stereotype of Africans among some in our country, which makes it inevitable that much reporting in our country would be racist. The ANC made the point that this stereotype necessarily dictated that some in our country would proceed from the position that our government was corrupt as alleged, unless it proved itself to be innocent.
Among other things, it cited the instance of an article in a weekly journal, in which the journalist concerned gratuitously accused the writer of this Letter of dictatorial tendencies. The ANC explained the circumstances surrounding the writing and publication of this article, which were relevant to the subject of the hearings.
This matter having been contested and subsequently taken to court by the journal concerned, the judge found in favour of the ANC. Needless to say, the determination made by the courts did not get the public exposure that the resort to these courts by this journal had evoked.
The false allegation of wrong doing by the ANC was what was vigorously implanted in the public mind. To the contrary, the rejection of this allegation by the courts, and therefore the independent judicial assertion of the truth about this matter, was assiduously hidden from the public.
Had this truth been communicated as openly as it should have been, it would have undermined the racist stereotype of Africans, and demonstrated the correctness of the decision of the HRC to hold its hearings. It was therefore not in the interests of some in our country, who believe in the stereotype, that this truth should be widely known.
The same stereotypical conviction about our government being corrupt, unless it proves itself innocent, has re-surfaced with regard to the defence procurement decided by our government in 2000. The fishermen (and women?) have recast their fishing nets, convinced that they will bring in a rich haul of corrupt government luminaries.
So convinced are they of the outcome of their fishing expedition that they regularly describe the defence procurement as "the arms deal scandal" or "debacle". They say "a deepening shadow of allegations is threatening to engulf the highest reaches of government".
Triumphantly, they proclaim that "the publication of details of an earlier (investigative) draft confirmed long-held suspicions by opponents of the arms procurement exercise that changes were made before publication, possibly at the instance of senior members of government".
They say "there was a crucial 'nondisclosure of facts' to a body tasked with evaluating products", and that "draft reports released in court show evidence that passages detailing possible corruption were edited from the report before it was presented to parliament".
The fishers of corrupt men happily construct doom scenarios that serve their purposes. They speculate about the possibility of a senior official being shown to be corrupt, and how this might lead to the conclusion that the whole procurement process was corrupted, resulting in the "the whole edifice of the arms procurement exercise" crumbling. The reality is that the wish is father to the thought.
But it all sounds terribly dramatic and pregnant with the potential to expose horrifying facts about massive corruption by our government, involving billions of rands To prepare the public mind, words such as "scandal" and "debacle" must be, and are used!
To add to the sense of impeding horror, "senior members of government" must be implicated, including "the highest reaches of government", which means the President. Further to whet the appetite for the expected catch that will be brought in by the fishers, the threat is made that a "shadow of allegations might engulf" these "highest reaches".
Quite how shadows rather than substance, and allegations rather than facts might engulf the President, or anybody else for that matter, is somewhat difficult to fathom. The point however is that neither substance nor facts are important to the fishers of corrupt men in terms of their project to substantiate the stereotype of which the ANC spoke, when it made its presentation at the HRC hearings on racism in the media.
What is central is that the stereotype must be sustained and entrenched. For this purpose, precisely because of this entrenched stereotype, shadows and allegations will serve as well as anything else. Carefully chosen words with no factual information to substantiate them, such as "scandal" and "debacle", also come in as useful devices, to give the shadows and allegations the appearance of substance.
In this no-holds-barred campaign, anything and anybody who stands in the way of the fishers, including and especially the truth, must give way. In the current fishing expedition, the Auditor General (AG) has been targeted as one of the possible big fish that the fishers hope to catch.
Accordingly, they accuse the AG of doctoring the report he presented to Parliament, by omitting some details contained in an earlier draft. The AG has taken strong exception to this charge of fraud. In barely disguised language, the fishers have said that they are convinced that the AG is lying. Naturally, they will not bother to supply facts to disprove what the AG said.
As part of this campaign against the AG, they charge him with having "sanitised" and "heavily edited" the final report, "possibly at the instance of senior members of government". They say nothing of the fact that the AG is required by the law to show his draft reports to any institution he may be auditing, for any comments it may wish to make. The AG is free to accept or reject any comments made by those he has audited.
This happens regularly, is required by law, and carries no imputation whatsoever of corrupt behaviour on the part of the AG. Precisely because he had absolutely nothing to hide by following this procedure, the AG attached an official letter to the draft report he gave the Cabinet sub-committee that approved the primary contracts, citing the provisions in the law requiring him to abide by this procedure.
The fishers have focused especially on the Thomson (Thales) element of the prime contract entered into by the government with the suppliers of the corvettes, the German Frigate Consortium (GFC). The government has explained this very clearly before, that it entered into a contract with the GFC to supply the required number of corvettes, meeting all the stipulated specifications.
The government has no contracts with the companies retained by the GFC to supply the various component parts of the corvettes. Similarly, it never had occasion or need to determine who the partners of the GFC should or should not be, including Thomson (Thales).
The proposition that the government influenced the choice of Thomson by the GFC as one of its sub-contractors is both a blatant falsity concocted by the fishers, and a logical absurdity. In its statement of 15 September 2000, the government announced those with whom it had entered into contracts. These are British Aerospace/SAAB, the German Frigate Consortium and Augusta. It had no primary contract with Thomson (Thales), as the supplier of the electronic combat suite of the corvettes, which matter, of the supplier of this suite, remained in the exclusive domain of the GFC.
In the Background Notes issued on 12 January, 2001, the government said: "It should be pointed out that the Procurement does not deal with subcontractors. This has to be the contractual obligation of the prime contractor as it is they who must deliver reliable equipment and undertake the performance and delivery obligations. This is standard practice in major contracts. To insist that the Government must be held to account for minor subcontracts is to misunderstand procurement. The prime contractors are major international corporations and we are confident that they would ensure the quality of the subcontractors and this is their responsibility."
But of course this does not matter to the fishers, who are intent to prove or otherwise entrench the stereotype of a corrupt African government. This is why their fond scenario visualises a determination that an official acted corruptly, leading, according to them, to the collapse of the "arms procurement exercise", even as they exclude the fact that the final recommendations to the deciding authority, the Cabinet, had to be, and were made by a Cabinet sub-committee, and not officials.
An aggrieved potential and unsuccessful sub-contractor has taken his grievance to our courts. For this reason, we will not comment on the matters he raises, which the fishers nevertheless use triumphantly and wilfully to justify their campaign. But this gentleman decided to raise, in the media, the matter of an earlier process to acquire corvettes for our Navy.
The gentleman concerned makes the false allegation that during the life of the Government of National Unity, formed in 1994, a contract for four corvettes to be built by Bazan of Spain "was cancelled after being awarded". This is not true. The preceding apartheid Cabinet had not approved this contract. The GNU Cabinet decided not to enter into this contract.
Bazan entered the later competition to supply the four corvettes, and lost to the GFC. This issue is of relevance and interest only because of the controversy that some have brought into the current defence procurement. It is an interesting coincidence that this controversy has focused so intensely on the corvettes.
In time the details of the truth will come out about how the controversy concerning the 2000 defence procurement emerged and persisted. The gentleman litigant, who has raised the matter of Bazan of Spain, may be proved to have been justified in raising this issue, even if he made false claims about a Bazan contract that never was.
This detailed truthful account would tell our country interesting things about such matters as defence procurement during the apartheid years, and the promotion of political careers and fortunes in contemporary South Africa. It would tell a story about the political uses of the racist stereotypes that are part of our daily menu of information and perception, and the formation of popular consciousness.
It would inform us about the impact or otherwise of the domestic and international apartheid networks on our democratic order, and the moral integrity of those who correctly claim that they fought for the victory of this order, and therefore seek to position themselves as its true representatives.
The sooner this fascinating story is told the better, so that we can improve our performance with regard to the achievement of the critical objective of building a truly people-centred society.
As an important part of the struggle to realise this objective, we should not, and will not abandon the offensive to defeat the insulting campaigns further to entrench a stereotype that has, for centuries, sought to portray Africans as a people that is corrupt, given to telling lies, prone to theft and self-enrichment by immoral means, a people that is otherwise contemptible in the eyes of the "civilised". We must expect that, as usual, our opponents will accuse us of "playing the race card", to stop us confronting the challenge of racism.
The fishers of corrupt men are determined to prove everything in the anti-African stereotype. They rely on their capacity to produce long shadows and innumerable allegations around the effort of our government to supply the South African National Defence Force with the means to discharge its constitutional and continental obligations. They are confident that these long shadows and allegations without number will engulf and suffocate the forces that fought for and lead our process of democratisation, reconstruction and development.
However, what our country needs is substance and not shadows, facts instead of allegations, and the eradication of racism. The struggle continues.
Source: ANC Today
Tuesday, June 3, 2003
G8 Update on HIV in Africa
Global health crises call for close international co-operation on policies and methods. We reaffirm our commitment to achieving the development goals set out in the Millennium Summit and at the World Summit on Sustainable Development.
We will work in partnership with developing countries, the private sector, multilateral organisations and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to help achieve these health goals. Multilateral and bilateral Official Development Aid as well as private efforts from companies and NGOs should match and complement existing efforts to improve health outcomes.
We express our continued concern at the increase in the global HIV/AIDS pandemic. We welcome the increased bilateral commitments for HIV/AIDS, whilst recognising that significant additional funds are required. We commit, with recipient countries, to fulfil our shared obligations as contained in the Declaration of Commitment on HIV/AIDS for the 2001 United Nations General Assembly Special Session.
Source: G8 Summit, Evian, 3 June 2003
We will work in partnership with developing countries, the private sector, multilateral organisations and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to help achieve these health goals. Multilateral and bilateral Official Development Aid as well as private efforts from companies and NGOs should match and complement existing efforts to improve health outcomes.
We express our continued concern at the increase in the global HIV/AIDS pandemic. We welcome the increased bilateral commitments for HIV/AIDS, whilst recognising that significant additional funds are required. We commit, with recipient countries, to fulfil our shared obligations as contained in the Declaration of Commitment on HIV/AIDS for the 2001 United Nations General Assembly Special Session.
Source: G8 Summit, Evian, 3 June 2003
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