Crime Prevention and Morality: The Campaign for Moral Regeneration in South Africa

Politicians, religious leaders, and social commentators have all spoken about a breakdown in morality in South Africa, with crime as the most commonly cited evidence. The moral regeneration initiative is one response to this crises, emerging in parallel to countless other initiatives aimed at reducing crime, some of which have themselves contained explicit appeals to morals, values or ethics. In its strategy to tackle crime, the 1996 National Crime Prevention Strategy (NCPS) consisted of four 'pillar' - each one 'a particular arena of attack against the factors which create or facilitate criminal activity'. One of these 'pillars' focused on public values and education, with the intention of tackling "the prevailing moral climate within communities, the attitudes towards crime, and the tolerance towards crime". The origins of the moral regeneration initiative date back to a meeting between then-President Nelson Mandela and key South African religious leaders in June 1997. At that meeting, Mandela described the 'spiritual malaise' underpinning the crime problem as "a lack of good spirit, as pessimism, or lack of hope and faith. And from it emerge the problems of greed and cruelty, of laziness and egotism, of personal and family failure. It both helps fuel the problems of crime and corruption and hinders our efforts to deal with them". Mandela then called on the religious leaders to get actively involved in a campaign, subsequently to become the moral regeneration initiative. One of the key sources of the moral regeneration initiative within the ANC was its Commission for Religious Affairs; the other was the concept of the African Renaissance, which was strongly promoted by, and associated with, Mandela's successor, Thabo Mbeki. Subsequent to the 1999 election, with Mbeki as president and Jacob Zuma as deputy president, the moral regeneration initiative began to enjoy more formal attention from the Presidency. Zuma was allocated responsibility for this initiative, with his role being that of political patron and 'front man'.