A poem about hope after the darkness

unRun and unHide

The day darkens

At midday

So close your eyes

Shrink out the light

It will be gone

Till you awake

Life flashes by

In blurs of unengagement

Disenchantment

Unreal, surreal, not real

Sleep induced denial

Plays havoc with dreams

Dedream a life

Unseam the fabric

Of who you are

The world awaits

Your wakening

You have much to give

Believe me

Unrun

Unhide

Look straight in the light

And live

Unbridled

Unabridged

And free

I would be telling a Lie if I were talking about Ethics

“Liar, Liar, pants on fire”! I bet you haven’t heard that line for a very long time. It takes you back to the playground when adults were tall and stories were even taller.

“My dad is a skydiver!”

“Well mine is a submarine commander!”

“No he’s not, he sells cars!”

“Over the weekends he works in a submarine!!!!”

According to Peter Stratheim, there is no such thing as business ethics. I want to agree with him based on experience provided by the School of Hard Knocks. Something inside me, however, desperately wants to fight back.

At this moment in history in South Africa, we stand solidly behind our rugby Springboks, our cricket Proteas and our soccer Bafanas. We proudly wear our national colours (as well we should) on special days and we dissect the action with great fervor both pre and post the great sporting events. Yet we seem to accept that dishonesty is an accepted way of life in Southern Africa and indeed the whole continent.

John L Huntsman has written an inspirational book entitled “Winners never Cheat”. If you need an uplifting book to read, get it now. Perhaps it could become a set work for all those people wishing to or already engaged in business or politics. He managed to run a Multibillion Dollar petro-chemical business globally without once participating in bribery and corruption. His faith had some large part to do with his honesty, and he has a cause in which to believe.

The citizens of South Africa (according to the great majority of critical observers) seem somehow to have lost the cause, lost our faith, and lost the basic spirit which drove us from oppression into democracy – we have lost our sense of “Ubuntu” –togetherness.

Shaka, the oft maligned leader of the Zulus, had a cause – to unite the Nguni people into one unit. You see, the Zulus were a relatively peace loving people, but persistent power struggles and bitter rivalry divided all the people of what is now KwaZulu Natal. He started with a volunteer group of 50 warriors and he was a strong leader with new ideas. A mere 5 years later he had an army of 80 000 warriors fighting for him. He also almost eliminated the people’s long suffering fear of the Sangomas (a powerful force over which they had little control). Say what you may about him, he did many things right, and it is for this reason that both he and Nelson Mandela have been named the two greatest leaders of all time in Africa.

The fear our people have now is loss of control and an seemingly insurmountable inability to protect ourselves from crime, poverty, homelessness, joblessness and HIV/Aids. A once fiercely racially and politically divided country who fought tirelessly for decades against the “enemy” has lost its direction. We have come a long way since democracy but we have lost our way within the freedom it has given to us.

Freedom has given rise to a new breed of rich people from all racial groups, and they just seem to get more obscenely rich whilst the poor become more evidently poorer. The great divide between our people has not become racial, it has become financial. Greed and corruption was clearly present in the Apartheid Regime (the only problem being that the press was not free to report it). Greed and corruption is starkly evident (and distinctly reported in our free media) in our current business and political fraternities. Anybody can manage but few can lead, and real leaders are hard to find in the corrupt quagmire we see and hear today. We have solid role models in the western world, however, and the words “I never had sexual relations with that woman” seem to ring resoundingly in our ears. Even after the whole Bill Clinton saga came to an end, he continued to stay leader of the great United States of America. I suppose if he could do it and get away with it, the logic of many other people will be influenced and they will follow suite.

And, my goodness, they have. They have taken a leaf from Clinton’s book and sexual lechers, fraudulent members of parliament, and mass-adored figureheads ride roughshod and bareback through the quiet towns of our lives like drunken cowboys, guns blazing, after a day of drinking in the sun and laugh in the face of our sheriff conscience. They are exposed time after time, yet the sentence (if any) doesn’t seem to fit the crime. Politically connected fraudsters are prematurely released from prison accompanied by adoration and ululation and their stature grows day by day. How many honest people in this land will never be free from the prison of hunger and joblessness, and be free from the fear of walking down a road without being killed for their cell phones?

Perhaps we, as a people, could consider putting our energy into fighting crime, corruption, poverty, homelessness, joblessness and HIV/Aids. If we see these as our “causes” we could transform this beautiful nation.

I digress, I was talking about ethics - back to the playground.

“Well my dad is an honest politician”

“Ja right, and my dad is an astronaut”

“For real?”

“For real, it’s more possible than an honest politician!”