Among the recommendations of the Zondo Commission is the establishment of an Independent Public Procurement Anti-Corruption Agency (PPACA) consisting of a council, an inspectorate, a litigation unit, a tribunal, and a court. The work of the PPACA would be to “prohibit any practice which facilitates corruption for undue influence in public procurement, and to increase the integrity and transparency of Public Procurement Services … [and] to implement measures to increase the integrity and transparency of public procurement services.” These are worthy values, but unfortunately, they are targeted towards an unworthy system and will likely fail.

The population of South Africa is currently experiencing an ever-widening binary of haves and have-nots at the hands of a black government populated by people who are eager to mimic the crass materialism of Western society. Any government-led initiative to mitigate corruption in the public sector, legal or otherwise, will always fail if government leadership continues to spearhead the scramble for greater wealth accumulation at the expense of the wellbeing of South Africans.

There have been a number of commissions of inquiry that have taken place since 1994, including the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the life Esidimeni Inquest, the Marikana Commission of Enquiry – all with limited or no success in bringing perpetrators to book. The genealogy of this tradition of forming commissions of inquiry that do not lead to any substantive justice arises from colonial times when governmental violence against conquered communities in South Africa was presumed and presented as necessary and justified. No one ever faced anything resembling legal consequences, and now the ANC-led government has picked up the mantle. Who is to say that in the next five to ten years there will be a commission of inquiry into maladministration and corruption in the PPACA?

Having witnessed the proceedings and conclusion of the Zondo Commission, South Africans are justified in our belief that the Commission was the latest in the government’s line of performative morality. When it comes to moral responsibility and accountability, we are not only in the doghouse, re mo ntjeng (we are in the belly of the beast itself). This beast is not corruption, as some would have us believe, but the root of corruption; the obsessive pursuit and mimicry of Western individualist conceptions of the good life, a life founded on perverse wealth accumulation and excessive consumption at the expense of those considered not cunning enough or connected enough to “exploit their situations” for material gain.

These individualist capitalist ethics directly oppose the African ethic of ubuntu. We need a regeneration of ubuntu. Without resorting to saying anything further than that it is an ethic grounded by inter-relational moral personhood for the sake of communal flourishing, I assert that a public service sector that is not guided by this ethic or a derivative of it will continue to disappoint those who it is supposed to serve. Take for instance this Sepedi maxim that proceeds from the logic of ubuntu much spoken about by the philosopher Professor Mogobe Ramose: Feta kgomo o sware Motho, Mofeta kgomo ke moriri o a hloga, an interpretation of which would be that a person should prioritise the wellbeing of human beings over material gain as found in the accumulation of cows and other forms of wealth. We need a regeneration of feta kgomo o tshware motho and there is still time to do this. However, it will not take root on a national level if it is clear that some people are un-prosecutable or cannot be held to account or incarcerated.

But this is not the culture we find in our local, provincial and national government structures because a collective culture of individualist and materialist logic has permeated the ethics of individuals who serve in these capacities. We repeatedly have to outsource a culture of moral responsibility and accountability to the courts or state-sanctioned bodies. An example of this is the creation of the Moral Regeneration Movement (MRM) in 2008 and the relegation of July as Moral Regeneration Month. The MRM is to “raise awareness and arm the communities with strategies to fight moral decay in our country”. It comes with a Charter for Positive Values with nine values which include respect for human rights and equality, sound family and community values, as well as honesty, integrity and loyalty. However, regardless of how many task forces and commission of inquiries and command councils the government creates to try to keep public servants and citizens in check, they are a poor substitute for individual moral responsibility and accountability.

All these were bodies created for “establishing the truth” behind certain national occurrences of mass misconduct without actual substantive accountability. That is what makes commissions of inquiry theatrical and performative in South Africa. Once we’re done inquiring, there’s no guarantee that the established misconduct will lead to any repercussions. We consider the findings of these reports and see them as tragedies instead of the outcomes of a culture based on Nna Pele (I come first) as opposed to the oft-touted Batho Pele (the People come first).

If commissions like the Zondo Commission intend to “understand the weakness within the public sector that makes it vulnerable to state capture, corruption and fraud”, they should be guided by an apprehension that while there can be state-run legal mechanisms to regulate personal behaviour or mitigate certain cultures of public sector corruption, these emanate from social values subtended by the rush for mass material gain by any means necessary, and these values find affirmation from the very top levels of government leadership.

Keolebgile Mbebe is a lecturer in the Department of Philosophy, University of Pretoria.