SPEECH AT THE NATIONAL ANTI-CORRUPTION SUMMIT Cape Town, 14 April 1999 Chairperson Distinguished delegates Sometime during the 1960's, an English judge sat in his court to decide the complex question whether it was possible to corrupt a corrupt person. The hearing was occasioned by the fact, uncontested in the case, that a vendor of pornographic material had sold such literature to a young man who had not yet reached the legally defined age of maturity. The law having defined pornographic material as corrupt, it further prescribed that it was illegal to sell this material to minors because this would result in corrupting the young. The shop-keeper argued that it was clear to him that by the time the young man visited his shop, he was already familiar with pornography and was therefore, and in the meaning of the law, already corrupt. Hence the question - can you corrupt a corrupt person! The judge found the vendor guilty. Nevertheless because of the complexity of the question, he ruled that his own finding should be reviewed by a superior court. He had found that the law had been broken, but was uncertain as to whether the social morality of the English generations of the 1960's had been violated. If we follow the English judge, as I believe we should, we too should make the determiantion that the issue of corruption about which we have convened, is about two distinct matters, one being the matter of the law and the other being a matter of social morality. Between these two, clearly what must come first is the matter of social morality. This would suggest that we who are gathered here are faced with the challenge to draw up a moral schedule of rights and wrongs. This done, we could then proceed to agree on what we need to do to prevent and punish what is morally wrong and to encourage and reward all that is morally right. Obviously none of us would agree to proceed in this manner as though we were a judicial court of ethics. Nevertheless we are still called upon to make a judgement about what is right and wrong about our behaviour as a society. We will still need to make an attempt to understand what it is that happened during the course of the evolution of our society which created the conditions for such behaviour as we might consider morally unacceptable. Having taken these two steps, clearly, we will have to make an attempt to answer the question -what is to be done! If the religious leaders present among us will pardon me, I would like to cite a number of verses from the King James Version of the Biblical Book of Ecclesiastes in the effort to answer the question - what went wrong? "I sought in mine heart to give myself unto wine, yet acquainted mine heart with wisdom; "I made me great works; I builded me houses; I planted me vineyards; "I made me gardens and orchards, and I planted trees in them of all kind of fruits; "I got me servants and maidens, and had servants born in my house; also I had great possessions of great and small cattle above all that were in Jerusalem before me; "I gathered me also silver and gold, and the peculiar treasure of kings and of the provinces; I gat me men singers and women singers, and the delights of the sons of men, as musical instruments, and that of all sorts. "So I was great, and increased more than all that were before me in Jerusalem: also my wisdom remained with me. "And whatsoever mine eyes desired I kept not from them, I withheld not my heart from any joy; for my heart rejoiced in all my labour." Obviously, this text gives a vivid description of a very successful resident of Jerusalem who, through his labour, has all the material things that anyone of us would like to have - from wine to silver and gold, from an army of servants to in-house musicians, from an abundance of food to what is described as "the delights of the sons of men". And yet the text goes on: "Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and on the labour that I had laboured to do: and, behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun." It seems to me that this text correctly raises what is perhaps at the heart of the problem of corruption which we have to confront, the relationship within each human being and each society between the material and the spiritual. All philosophy recognises the fact that what distinguishes us, human beings, from other forms of animal existence is that we have both material and spiritual needs. Thus the normal human beings we would like to see and to be are people who succeed to maintain the necessary balance between these needs, between what is materially necessary and what is morally good. This is to say that the exclusive pursuit of one of these, ignoring the other, is to invite disaster. And yet it would seem to me that many in our society are inspired by a system of values which begins and ends with the pursuit of what is materially beneficial to themselves, with no sense of what is morally correct. In many instances, our society itself describes as successful and people to be emulated those who are like the resident of Jerusalem described in Ecclesiastes, who have accumulated more wealth than any other who ever lived in that city. ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe/subscribe or view archives of postings, go to the Gambia-L Web interface at: http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/gambia-l.html ----------------------------------------------------------------------------