On 9 September 2025, Daily Maverick published an Opinionista by Dr Sibongiseni Kumalo on South Africa’s leadership crisis. He called for a deeper conversation on how to grow leaders who can widen the circle of belonging, act with integrity, and rebuild public trust.
While I agree with his assertions as part of the interventions to save South Africa, I must hasten to say that his idea of turning schools and workplaces into “leadership laboratories” is both ambitious and inspiring. As valuable as this vision is, it rests on a key assumption that deserves scrutiny: that ethical leadership can simply be taught and rehearsed into existence.
Research in psychology and behavioural economics suggests otherwise. For instance, people rarely act unethically because they lack knowledge; rather, they are adept at justifying their behaviour to preserve a positive self-image.
This means that lessons and daily rehearsals, while helpful, are not enough on their own to produce consistently ethical leaders.
Moving beyond academic curiosity, the past two decades have produced rich research indicating that dishonesty and moral behaviour is now applied in a wide range of fields to solve real-world problems, design better systems, and understand human nature.
Experiments by a number of behavioural economists such as Dan Ariely have shown that most people do not become flagrantly corrupt villains. Instead, they cheat just enough to benefit themselves while maintaining a self-image of being good.
They are not ignorant of what is right — they are experts at finding ways to justify what they do. Cognitive dissonance is resolved not by changing behaviour, but by adjusting our internal story so we can live with the behaviour.
This matters because Kumalo’s argument leans heavily on education as the solution — as though the main deficit is that people have never been taught to name their biases, connect authentically, or value accountability.
Yet, even in societies with excellent civic education, lapses of ethics still occur, not rarely actually, when incentives align against honesty or when the social environment makes misconduct seem normal.
“Just this once” — as Kumalo notes — becomes a habit not because people were never taught ethics, but because their context allows them to escape consequence while still thinking of themselves as decent.
Make ethical behaviour the path of least resistance
This is why we must broaden the agenda beyond teaching and rehearsing ethics to designing systems that make ethical behaviour the easiest choice.
Role modelling and monitoring are powerful because they reshape the environment, not just the individual. People behave more honestly when they believe their actions are visible and when they see others around them doing the right thing.
South Africa already has experiments that prove this. For instance, the National Treasury’s eTender Portal made it possible for citizens and journalists to scrutinise procurement processes in real time — and in municipalities where the system is used properly, tender rigging becomes harder to hide.
Similarly, the OpenUp Municipal Money project lets residents track local government spending down to line items, turning public finance into something that can be inspected at kitchen tables. These interventions do not “teach” ethics; they engineer visibility that alters behaviour.
We can also learn from smaller behavioural tweaks. The City of Cape Town’s water-saving campaign during the 2017 drought published household-level consumption data, allowing residents to compare themselves with neighbours. This subtle social pressure significantly reduced water use.
The same logic could apply to publishing compliance rates for conflict-of-interest disclosures, audit findings, and service delivery targets — making good behaviour visible and shame a mechanism for improvement.
Culture change requires consequence, not just curriculum
This does not mean Kumalo is wrong about the importance of daily practice — but rehearsal must be paired with real consequences and constant feedback.
In behavioural science, relapsing into unethical conduct is the default, not the exception. We are creatures of habit, and without continuous reinforcement even well-intentioned actors slip back.
Ethics training that is disconnected from live decision-making — “a once-off induction module”, as he puts it — has been shown to have little long-term impact. The better approach is to weave ethical decision points into ordinary workflow and make them observable.
Conflict-of-interest declarations should not be annual tick boxes; they should be triggered at the point of every procurement decision. Performance reviews for managers should include a measure of how they have built trustworthy systems, not only whether they hit targets.
Citizens should be able to see — in simple, public dashboards — whether their municipality’s tenders were competitive and on budget. These are design choices, not lessons.
Kumalo is right that ethics is not a communications strategy, but a culture-shaping exercise. But culture is shaped less by what we preach and more by what we reward, tolerate, and punish. If we can align incentives so that honest action is rewarded and misconduct reliably exposed, we make it easier for the daily rehearsal of ethics to stick.
We also need to acknowledge the role of leaders as choice architects. Research on “nudges” has shown that small changes in how options are presented can dramatically influence behaviour. Leaders can normalise transparency by default, celebrate whistle-blowers rather than ostracise them, and make ethical lapses reputationally costly.
When people see that integrity is rewarded in practice — promotions, partnerships, procurement — they do not merely remember what is right; they start to expect it of themselves and others.
South Africa does need a new generation of leaders, as Kumalo argues — but we also need systems that make it hard for even bad leaders to act badly. Education is a crucial piece, but not the whole puzzle.
Ethics must be co-produced by individuals and institutions, by habits and by guardrails. When we do both, we stand a chance not just of teaching our way to better leadership, but of engineering a society where doing the right thing is not heroic, but ordinary. DM