That there is still confusion about who has financed Zuma’s private home and that the authorities prefer spin to telling the truth is a sign that our political system is gradually degenerating. Complete dysfunction will not announce itself with a knock on the door but we may very well be nearing that point.

In a sense we should not be surprised by the pace at which ethical standards have dropped under Zuma. The outlines of South Africa’s degeneration were clearly drawn in the ignominious events just before Zuma became the president of the country, when he battled corruption charges that were negotiated away politically.

Zuma’s moral and intellectual vulnerability were well known to many senior members of his party. Yet they promoted him. They are complicit in the rot that is deepening in the country because no senior leaders have publicly broken ranks with the party and disassociated themselves from Zuma’s brand of governance. One minister in the economic cluster is said to have celebrated at the news of Zuma’s triumph in Polokwane five years ago and remarked that at least now we have a floating president and will be able to advance the level of debate above him.

Zuma no longer floats. He is sinking his party and damaging South Africa’s reputation.

To be fair, he is not alone. In his book Zuma Exposed, journalist Adriaan Basson provides a dispiriting catalogue of current African National Congress (ANC) leaders who have had brushes with the law. No wonder the ANC is hardly congenial with the law. It has become normal to be corruptible and be an ANC leader at the same time. But this has adverse implications for the vitality of our democratic institutions, especially as we are a young democracy.

Apart from brazen acts of corruption and the abuse of taxpayers’ money to promote the welfare of individual politicians, there is also an emerging trend of politicians being preoccupied with using public office to enhance their comfort, often viewing calls for accountability and transparency as frivolous.

Three years ago, Zuma’s political right-hand man, Blade Nzimande, shamelessly justified buying, for R1.1m, a new vehicle for official duties on the grounds of the Ministerial Handbook, even though he did not have to stretch the public purse that far — a case of his communist conscience conveniently escaping him at a critical moment.

Early this year, Police Minister Nathi Mthethwa dipped into money allocated to the police slush fund to build a security wall around his private home. Public Service and Administration Minister Lindiwe Sisulu is said to have spent nearly R40m on flights when she was defence minister. She comports herself in public office as if notions of accountability are beneath her. Upon assuming her new portfolio, she would not occupy the office of her predecessor as it did not meet her exacting standards.

We have now come to expect this kind of cavalier behaviour from our political leaders and are readjusting to the new normal. This culture promotes the view that politicians are there be served by citizens rather than the other way round. The notion of servant-leadership is alien to them. As Max DePree put it in his classic book Leadership is an Art: "The leader’s first job is to define reality. The last is to say thank you. In between the leader must become a servant and a debtor."

The indebtedness of leaders to the nation should not be extractive in the sense that they live off the sweat of hardworking citizens or disregard democratic virtues of openness and transparency. It must be the kind of indebtedness that makes leaders constantly aware of their privileged position to serve and therefore do everything to enhance the wellbeing of the nation.

If we do not exercise vigilance against imperious leadership we may wake up to vitiated institutions tomorrow. In their magisterial work Why Nations Fail, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson attribute the success or failure of nations to the extent to which the construction of political and economic institutions are inclusive and founded on participatory processes. Accountability and transparency are foundational stones of inclusive political processes and should be nonnegotiable.

We cannot take it for granted that our political institutions will survive over time. To remain vital, they have to be renewed. This requires that we always ask hard questions and take actions that will force politicians to be accountable and transparent.

This article appeared in the Business Day of 23 November 2012