Between Thoughts -Intellectual Musings

Why South Africa Needs More of Them and What Happens If It Doesn’t Get Them

General Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi stood at a National Press Club podium in partnership with the University of South Africa, and said eight words that most politicians in this country are constitutionally incapable of uttering:

“SA does not need heroes. SA needs more principled people.”

I came across it, as I come across most things, through the curated anthropology of WhatsApp statuses. The performative feeds of holidays, hustle, and social justice activism. The endless projection of a country that is fine, of lives that are winning. And then, slipped in between the glowing self-portraits,  a speech that said the exact opposite of everything else on the timeline.

A man who did not want a Marvel title. A man who wanted the clinic shelves stocked and the police to stop extorting people for Coke and KFC money.

I have been thinking about that speech ever since. Thinking about it alongside Kahlil Gibran, who in 1908 wrote a parable about a young monk thrown into a winter storm for the crime of expecting the monastery to live by its own principles. And I have been thinking about what we lose, as a country, as communities, as families,  when we collectively decide that being a principled person is too dangerous a thing to be.

“The true heretic is not the one who wants to burn the system. It is the one whose quiet, stubborn refusal to be corrupted makes the entire rotting structure visible.”


PART ONE
Why South Africa Needs Principled Heretics
The word heretic has always meant the same thing at its core: someone who holds to a belief that the ruling order has declared inconvenient. In Gibran’s parable, Khalil was a heretic not because he hated the church, but because he loved what the church was supposed to be. He expected it to feed the hungry rather than the bishops. That single expectation,  that institutions should do what they claim to do,  was enough to get him thrown into a storm.

South Africa is the monastery. The rot is the same. The storm is the same. And the principled people standing in it are the same breed.

The Corruption Ecosystem Requires Everyone’s Participation
Systemic corruption does not survive on the actions of a few bad actors alone. It survives because it successfully negotiates the silence of the many. The accountant who signs the fraudulent report without reading it. The procurement official who rubber-stamps the tender because the alternative is too complicated. The neighbour who says “that’s just how it is” when the streetlights have been out for eight months. The pastor who preaches accountability on Sunday and votes for the looter on Wednesday.

Every act of silent compliance is a vote for the continuation of the system. Corruption, in South Africa, has become a civic religion with its own theology: “Don’t be naive. Everyone is doing it. You can’t fight city hall. Leave politics to the politicians.” The principled heretic rejects this theology not loudly, but with their actions. They show up. They refuse. They document. They speak. Not because they are heroes,  but because their baseline professional ethics require it.

The Difference Between a Hero and a Heretic
A hero is a performance. We deploy heroes psychologically to manage the anxiety of a broken state. If we believe that salvation will come from one extraordinary person,  one Zondo, one Mkhwanazi, one Madonsela,  then we do not have to grapple with the uncomfortable demand that ordinary citizens also choose principle. The hero narrative is actually a mass abdication dressed as optimism.

The principled heretic makes no such comfort available. They are not extraordinary. They are a civil servant who processes applications in the order they are received. A teacher who shows up to every class because thirty children are waiting. A police officer who does not have a side business involving traffic stops and Chicken Licken. A nurse who reports the missing medication rather than pretending it walked out on its own. The neighbour who is a snitch and reports strangers and stranger things happening in the street.

This ordinariness is the point. It is also the danger. Because if the ordinary person can be principled, then there is no excuse for anyone else. The heretic does not just threaten the corrupt. They indict the compliant.

“Heroes are optional. Principled people are the infrastructure.“


PART TWO
How to Become One When Others Are Shot by Inkabi
This is the question that deserves the most honesty. Because the answer cannot be sanitised. People have been killed in this country for doing the right thing. Not in the abstract. Real people, with names, with children, with mortgage bonds and WhatsApp groups, who were murdered because they refused to look away.

Babita Deokaran. Philemon Mtshaulana. Moses Khanyile. The many whistleblowers. The auditors who refused to sign. The ward councillors who reported the contractor. The journalists who published the documents. They are not statistics. They are the cost of the choice.

So when we speak of becoming a principled person, we cannot pretend that the stakes are low. They are not. And anyone who has not acknowledged that cannot be taken seriously when they encourage others to take the risk. That said, the question is not “is it safe to be principled?” The question is “what kind of country are we building if no one is?” Those are two different questions that require two different kinds of courage.

Principled Does Not Always Mean Loud
The first thing to understand is that principled heresy operates on a spectrum. General Mkhwanazi occupies one end of that spectrum,  visible, institutional, protected by rank, rank being its own armour. Most South Africans do not have rank. Most South Africans have a job they need and a family they are responsible for. Principled heresy, for them, looks different. And it is no less valuable.

It looks like the school principal who insists on transparent procurement for the school’s budget, even when the parents’ committee wants a quiet arrangement with a cousin. It looks like the middle manager who documents irregularities even when no one is listening yet. It looks like the professional body that actually revokes a membership rather than processing paperwork indefinitely. It looks like the resident association that names the pothole company in the public meeting rather than thanking the mayor.

Principled heresy is a posture, not a single act. It is the daily decision to treat your particular patch of professional and civic ground with the integrity the whole system requires but cannot impose.

Build Your Tribe Before You Need Them
Khalil in Gibran’s parable was not alone when he faced Sheik Abbas. Rachel and Miriam found him in the storm. The village heard his speech. Isolation is the tool the corrupt use to neutralise the principled. They create the conditions under which speaking up feels like standing alone in a field with a target on your back.

The counter to this is community architecture built in advance. The professional networks where truth-telling is practised before crisis demands it. The mentorship relationships where young people are shown that principled behaviour has a long-term social return. The community organisations that have independent institutional memory that outlasts any individual. You do not build community on the day you need it. You build it so that you already have it.

Know What You Are Willing to Lose
This is perhaps the most important and least romantic counsel: you must know your line before you reach it. Principled heresy extracted under moral pressure, in the heat of the moment, without prior deliberation, is inconsistent and fragile. The person who has not thought about what they are willing to sacrifice will negotiate with themselves at the crucial moment and usually lose.

This is not a counsel of cowardice. It is the opposite. The person who knows their line and has accepted the consequences of standing on it is functionally unbribable. You cannot buy what someone has already given away. The General’s line was drawn long before the speech. That is why the speech was possible.

“You cannot buy what someone has already given away.”


PART THREE
What Happens When We All Choose Not to Be
This is the section no one wants to read. Not because it is not true, but because it removes the comfortable distance between the corrupt and the rest of us. The comfortable story is that South Africa’s problems are caused by a finite number of identifiable bad actors who, once removed, will allow the country to function normally. This story is false. And its falseness is the most important political fact in the country right now.

The Country
When an entire society normalises the abandonment of principle, institutions hollow out from the inside while maintaining their external shape. The municipality still has a website and a budget and a director-general. The hospital still has a board and a mission statement and visiting hours. The university still has rankings and graduation ceremonies and research outputs. But the actual functions,  clean water, unlooted medication, rigorous inquiry,  are evacuated. You are left with the architecture of a working state surrounding a void.

South Africa is, in material terms, a middle-income country with a first-world infrastructure inheritance and a dysfunction rate that is producing third-world outcomes. The infrastructure is being consumed by the void. Every year that passes without enough principled people to staff the systems, the void expands. Rolling blackouts were the most visible symptom. The less visible symptoms are in the disease burden, the maternal mortality rate, the soil erosion statistics, the learner outcomes, and the per capita water availability numbers. These are not acts of God. They are the accumulated cost of non-principled governance.

Your Community
Communities that tolerate the unprincipled become communities that fear the principled. This is the logic of captured townships and villages where everyone knows who the local contractor is, everyone knows the tender is fake, and no one says anything because the contractor also employs people and because the last person who said something lost their contract with the municipality. This is not an abstraction. This is a real social ecosystem in thousands of South African communities right now.

In these environments, principled people are quietly pushed out. They relocate. They go silent. They resign. The community loses its immune system. And once an immune system is gone, it does not restore itself spontaneously. It must be rebuilt deliberately, at significant cost, often by people who were not there when it collapsed.

Your Family
Here is the cost that is rarely spoken about directly. When a parent models compliance with corruption,  when the message transmitted to children, by behaviour rather than words, is that principle is a luxury for people who can afford it, the family loses something that no inheritance can replace.

Children are watching. They are always watching. They see the father who pays the traffic officer. They hear the mother’s calculation about which school governing body position gives access to which contracts. They learn that the bursary application requires the right connection, not the best grades. They internalise a worldview in which institutional systems are obstacles to be gamed rather than public goods to be tended.

This is not a moral lecture. It is a psychological observation about the transmission of social capital. Families that model principled behaviour transmit, without intending to, a relationship with institutions that produces better long-term outcomes. The child who grows up seeing their parent refuse the bribe has a different set of cognitive tools for navigating a professional life. The child who does not has to unlearn a great deal before they can contribute to the restoration of the systems they will inherit.

“The family is the first institution. What gets practised there gets replicated everywhere else.“


PART FOUR
How to Make More General Mkhwanazis
This is the nation-building question underneath all the others. Mkhwanazi is not an accident of character. He is, to a significant degree, an outcome of accumulated inputs. The question of how to produce more of him is therefore a question about which inputs, administered where, at what stage.

The Home: First Formation
The principled person begins in a home where a specific kind of conversation is normal. Not a perfect home,  Mkhwanazi himself came from complex circumstances, as most South Africans who achieve anything significant do. But a home where certain things were non-negotiable. Where there was a visible relationship between behaviour and consequence. Where some adult in the orbit of the child demonstrated, repeatedly and without fanfare, that there are things you simply do not do.

This is what Ubuntu, at its most operational, actually looks like. Not the conference poster. The grandmother who sends the child back to return the shopkeeper’s change. The uncle who refuses the tender and is poorer for it but sleeps without medication. The parent who explains, rather than exploits, the system.

The School: Building the Muscle
Principled behaviour is a muscle. It atrophies without use and strengthens with repetition. Schools are the first institution, outside the home, where this muscle can be deliberately exercised. Not through civic education classes,  though those have their place,  but through the institutional culture that the school itself models.

A school where the principal is transparent, where the tuck-shop tender is awarded fairly, where student representatives are actual representatives rather than the principal’s preferred candidates, where the teacher who comes late is held to the same standard as the learner who comes late,  this school is producing principled people without teaching a single lesson about ethics. It is doing it through institutional culture, which is the only way it actually works.

Conversely, a school where the opposite is true in all these things is producing a different kind of citizen. The lesson being taught in that school is that institutional processes are performances for external audiences, not real governance. That lesson is also learned thoroughly.

Civil Society: The Development Infrastructure
South Africa has a civil society infrastructure that has, at its best, produced a remarkable number of Mkhwanazis. The civic organisations, faith communities, scouting movements, union structures, and community organisations that took ordinary young people and gave them their first experience of governance with accountability. Many of the country’s most principled public figures trace their formation to some version of these structures.

The problem is that these structures are underfunded, undervalued, and ageing. The Scouting movement. The civics. The community advice offices. The church youth organisations that used to be schools of leadership rather than performance platforms. These are not nostalgic sentimentalities. They are infrastructure. The question is whether the country is willing to invest in them with the same seriousness it invests in anything else it claims to value.

Institutions: The Proving Ground
The principled person needs an institutional home that does not immediately punish their principles. This is not about protection from all hardship,  Khalil was thrown into a storm and survived it, and the survival was itself formative. It is about the difference between a crucible and a slaughterhouse.

Institutions that produce Mkhwanazis are institutions that have a culture of accountability that predates and outlasts any individual. Where the record of principled action exists, is visible, is rewarded even imperfectly, and is honoured in institutional memory. Where a junior person can see that it is possible to do the right thing and remain professionally alive.

The deliberate construction and defence of these institutional cultures is itself a form of principled heresy. Because institutional culture does not happen by itself. Someone has to fight to maintain it. Someone has to refuse the informal negotiation that would compromise it. Someone has to be, in the moment, Khalil.

Who Develops Them?
The short answer is: they are developed by other principled people. This is circular, but it is also true. The Mkhwanazis of the next generation are being shaped right now, by the adults in their current orbit. By the teachers who stayed in the profession because they believed in it. By the mentors in their professional networks who demonstrate daily what institutional integrity looks like from the inside. By the parents who chose principle over convenience in the small decisions their children witnessed.

The development of principled people is, in the end, a distributed network project. No single institution owns it. No single programme can systematise it. It requires enough nodes in the network,  enough principled people across enough contexts, that the next generation encounters at least one of them during their formation, is moved by them, and chooses to continue the transmission.

“The Mkhwanazis of the next generation are being shaped right now. By someone who has already chosen principle.”


Epilogue: The Storm and the Morning After
Kahlil Gibran ends his parable not with Khalil’s punishment but with the village’s awakening. The storm threw the heretic out. The storm also showed the village who they were and what they had been tolerating. And when Khalil spoke to them, wet and cold and unbowed, they heard him, because the storm had stripped away the comfortable fictions.

South Africa is in the storm. The fictions are being stripped away. Load shedding is not a glitch. Water contamination is not an administrative oversight. A child dying in a pit latrine is not an isolated incident. These are the outputs of a system in which not enough principled people have been present at enough decisive moments.

But the General was right. What the country needs is not a single extraordinary hero to lift us out of the storm. What it needs is the quiet, stubborn, daily practice of principled people,  in classrooms and court rooms, in procurement committees and parent meetings, in WhatsApp groups and in the small decisions that nobody is filming.

The principled heretic will not be celebrated in real time. They will be inconvenient. They will be isolated. They may be harmed. And they will also, in ways they may never fully see, keep the lights on for someone who needed them  and transmit, to one child watching them, the knowledge that another way of being is possible.

That transmission is the country.

That transmission is the work.

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Dr. Mzamo Masito.
Between Thoughts – Intellectual Musings..
Where the uncomfortable questions get a seat at the table.