The refusal of ‘we’ in SA’s accountability crisis: We cannot repair what we will not stand inside

I have been thinking about the responses to my last article.

On Facebook, the overwhelming majority of comments were not defensive or dismissive. They were reflective. Many South Africans recognised the pattern being described. They named it in their own words. They saw it in their workplaces, in their communities, in their own lives.

That points to something deeper than reaction. Beneath the noise, there is a growing clarity about what is really going on.

But two comments in particular kept returning to me. They came from very different places. They were not making the same argument. But they were making the same move.

One said:

“Don’t say ‘we’ – you should say ANC built. Ubala nathi manje ngo ‘we’.”

The other said:

“The system the black man created – no us.”

Read them slowly.

The first is a Black reader pushing back on my use of the word “we”. He is saying: Do not count me in with the people who did this. The ANC built it. Don’t drag the rest of us in by using a collective pronoun.

The second is a white reader making a different but related claim. The Black man created this corruption. No us – meaning, not us whites who governed before.

Both comments are refusing something.

They are refusing to be included in the “we”.

One from inside the country’s majority, distancing himself from a governing party. The other from outside that majority, distancing himself from the country’s history.

And both, in their own way, are pointing at someone else.

That is the move I want to sit with.

Because South Africa cannot repair what it will not stand inside.

The first refusal

The first commenter has a real point, and I want to honour it before I push back on it.

The word we can launder accountability. When I write we have not lived into the rules, I can sound as though I am holding everyone equally responsible for what specific people in specific offices have done. That is not fair. The commenter is right to flag it. The vast majority of South Africans have not stolen public money. The vast majority of South Africans are the people from whom it has been stolen.

So when I use “we”, I owe a distinction.

There is the “we” of those who held office and made specific choices. That “we” is narrower than the country. It is named. It can be held accountable. The Auditor-General’s reports name it every year – institution by institution, finding by finding. That “we” is not the commenter. It is not me either. It is a smaller group of identifiable people.

And then there is the “we” of those who live in this country, who have watched the deterioration, who have at moments looked away, who have sometimes benefited from the dysfunction in small and silent ways, and who now must decide what to do next. That “we” is wider. It includes the commenter. It includes me. It is not a charge of guilt. It is a description of where we are standing.

Both “wes” are real. The article needs both.

But the commenter is right that the wider “we” cannot be allowed to do the work the narrower “we” should be doing. We the country did not loot Eskom. Specific people in specific offices did. We the country are responsible for what we permit, what we tolerate, what we vote for, what we look away from – and that responsibility is not the same as the responsibility of those who reached into the till.

The commenter is refusing to be flattened into the same category as them.

That refusal is just.

The second refusal

The second commenter is doing something different.

He is not refusing to be flattened into a category. He is asserting a category. The Black man created this. Not us. The corruption South Africa is now describing is being attributed to one race, and the racial group the commenter belongs to is being implicitly cleared of it.

This is not a defence of dignity. It is a claim about who governs well and who does not, sorted by race.

It is also historically wrong.

Apartheid was not a system of accountability. It was a system of control. The law did not function to restrain power. It functioned to enforce it. There was no meaningful accountability for those who designed and enforced injustice. The system was internally coherent – but externally unaccountable.

It was also a system of secrecy. Information was tightly controlled. Access to records was restricted. Disclosure was often criminalised. There was no general right for citizens to demand transparency from the state. Behind that opacity, the state and its networks built forms of covert economic activity – from sanctions-busting operations, to homeland patronage networks – where scrutiny was limited and accountability could be avoided.

When power operates without consequence and without visibility long enough, it forms habits.

And those habits do not disappear when the system changes.

The commenter is not remembering the past. He is mythologising it.

But naming the mythology is not enough. Because if I stop there, I have only said what is wrong with his comment. The deeper question is what was disrupted before him, and what he is unwittingly pointing at.

When the witness disappears

Long before we speak about corruption, we must speak about structure.

Traditional African societies were not, as they are sometimes imagined, ungoverned. They were governed differently. Authority did not run through a single individual exercising private power. It ran through architectures of witness – councils, elders, public ritual, obligations distributed across extended family.

A chief was not above the people. He governed through council, through public hearing, through ritual obligation. His authority was conditional on visible service. He could be challenged. He could lose standing. His power was real, but it was held in front of the community, not above it.

The same was true at the level of the household. A man could not marry without the visible consent of two families negotiating in public. A child was not raised alone – aunts, uncles, grandparents, age-mates were structurally required to participate. Authority was distributed by design.

The point is not that these systems were perfect. They were not. They had their own injustices, their own exclusions, their own failures.

But they shared a structural feature.

Authority was witnessed.

And where authority is witnessed, it is restrained.

Under indirect rule, chieftaincy was preserved in name and gutted in substance. Chiefs were made answerable upward – to the colonial administrator, to the magistrate, eventually to the apartheid state – rather than downward to their people. The witness was removed. What remained was authority that looked traditional but was no longer accountable.

At the household level, the migrant labour system did similar work. Men were pulled away from their families for most of the year. Authority moved from the home into the compound. From the elder into the foreman. From the community into the state.

What remained in many households was not the structure of distributed authority – but fragments of it.

Households without oversight. Children without consistent presence. Authority without witness.

And slowly, what had once been contained became unstable.

This is not a moral argument. It is a structural one.

And then some of us chose

This is where the second commenter is wrong on history but where the first commenter’s distinction matters.

Corruption is not a racial trait. There is no gene for theft. White corporate executives have looted companies and collapsed pensions. Black public officials have siphoned state resources meant for the poor. Across the world – from Europe to Asia to the Americas – corruption follows opportunity, incentives, and pressure.

The looting of the post-1994 state was not done by the Black man. It was done by specific people in specific offices, most of whom were politically connected and professionally protected. A racial frame conceals more than it reveals. It also hides the white auditors, white consultants, white bankers and white-owned firms that enabled the same looting and were paid handsomely for it.

Thieves are thieves.

But systems matter.

Because systems shape what people believe they can do – and what they believe they can get away with.

The inheritance we don’t name

So, when democracy came, it did not arrive on neutral ground.

It arrived on a foundation where authority had long operated without meaningful restraint. Where family structures had been disrupted across generations. Where economic pressure was immense. And where the idea of power had been shaped more by control than by accountability.

It is also worth being clear about something we often overlook. In aspiration and policy, South Africa’s post-apartheid legal and institutional framework is among the most sophisticated in the world. The Public Finance Management Act and the Municipal Finance Management Act created a level of structure, transparency and accountability that did not exist in any coherent form before.

Under apartheid, financial oversight was fragmented and uneven. Many administrations – particularly in Black local authorities and homeland governments – operated with weak reporting, inconsistent auditing and limited consequence management.

What we – and here I mean the country, all of us – inherited was not a system of accountability.

What we built, at least on paper, was one.

The problem is not that we lack rules.

It is that we have not lived into them.

The pattern in my own house

I am not writing about this from the outside.

In my own family, what disrupted the structure was polygamy – not in its traditional, witnessed form, but in the form it took once the witness had already been removed. My father was moved out of place by it before I was born. My mother was moved by the poverty that followed. By the time I arrived, what should have been overhead was already gone.

In other families, the disrupting force was the migrant labour system. In others, it was the homelands. In others, it was the slow erosion of extended family obligation under economic pressure that left aunts and uncles unable to be the witnesses they had once been required to be.

The specific mechanism varied.

The pattern did not.

A father, an elder, a chief – someone who was meant to be a covering – moved out of place. The walls held. The lights stayed on. And underneath, a generation grew up inside a structure with no one watching.

That pattern did not remain in the household.

It scaled.

Into business. Into politics. Into the state.

Power expanded. Oversight weakened. And the structure held – just long enough to look stable.

The cost of standing outside it

A third response, from a different commenter, said simply: Your article has exposed the farce we call democracy.

I understand that response. I do not share it.

The democratic framework South Africa built is not a farce. It is a serious framework, sophisticated by international standards, and it has been hollowed by people who understood exactly what they were doing. That is a different problem from a fraudulent system. A fraud requires no covering at all. What we are looking at is a covering that has been moved out of place by people who were trusted to hold it.

But I also understand the pull of the word farce. When citizens look at the gap between the framework and the lived experience for long enough, the gap itself begins to feel like the lie. That is the moment when the wider “we” begins to dissolve. When citizens stop saying “we” about the country and start saying “they” about the people running it, the structure has lost more than its covering.

It has lost its inhabitants.

You can see it already: the withdrawal into private security, the resignation in voter turnout, the language of this country is finished in dinner-table conversation. These are not failures of patriotism. They are accurate readings of the present moment.

But they are also the second-order failure the structure cannot survive. A country whose citizens have stepped outside it cannot be repaired by them. And the people who broke it are not coming back to fix it on their own.

What must change

If we reduce corruption to race, we lose truth. If we remove race from the conversation entirely, we lose history.

And without both, we cannot see the full picture.

South Africa’s challenge is not that one group created corruption. It is that we inherited a system where accountability was thin – and then those who governed allowed it to remain that way, while the rest of us watched it deepen.

The work runs at two levels:

Structural accountability. Systems that close opportunity and enforce consequence. Names and faces, not collective pronouns. The narrower “we”.

Personal formation. Leaders who understand that power must be carried, not consumed. And citizens who understand that distance from the structure does not protect them from its collapse.

Because in the end, corruption is not sustained by race.

It is sustained by opportunity, incentives, pressure – and the absence of covering.

Final thought

Two refusals.

Don’t say we – say ANC built.

The black man created this – not us.

One from inside the majority. One from outside it. Different stakes. Different histories. Same move.

Both are pointing somewhere else.

Both are partly justified, in different ways, by what was done to them or before them.

But neither, on its own, can rebuild what is broken.

The first commenter is right that accountability must be specific. The narrower “we” is real, and it is named, and it must be held to account. Without that, “we” becomes a way of pretending no one in particular did this.

But the second refusal – and the third, the one that calls the whole thing a farce – point to something else. They point to a country slowly emptying out of its own structure. A country where citizens have looked at what has been done in their name, and decided to stand outside it.

We did not create the ground we inherited.

But we are responsible for what we build on it.

And we cannot build it from the outside.

Race, unlike sex, is not a biological constant. It is a construct – but in South Africa, it is a construct that was enforced with law, violence and memory. Apartheid did not just divide land. It seared categories into our imagination. The task before us is not to pretend it never existed. It is to refuse to let it define what we build next.

South Africa cannot heal by rehearsing race. It must outgrow it.

What matters now is not what we are called – but what we stand for.

And until we hold both – history and responsibility – together, we will keep arguing about who is to blame.

While the structure continues to weaken beneath all of us. DM