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Moral decline has huge social and economic costs for Africa

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While human rights are a strong focus in the education systems of many African countries, little attention has been paid to ethics—an oversight that has had massive social and economic consequences. By contrast, countries, organisations and individuals that make “moral capital investments” in education stand to gain significant competitive and comparative advantage.

This is according to bioethics expert Professor Joseph-Mathews Mfutso-Bengo, one of the keynote speakers at this week’s 6th International Conference on Ethics Education in Stellenbosch, Western Cape. Conference partners and sponsors include Unisa, the Tshwane University of Technology, the Research Ethics Committee Association of Southern Africa (REASA) and Globethics.net.

In a message ahead of the conference, which opens on Wednesday, 3 October, and runs until 5 October, Mfutso-Bengo said one of the findings of his research on factors affecting professional integrity in Africa is that values-based education was “ignored” in most African countries during political democratisation.

“The education model has been mainly based on knowledge-generation and skills-development and not on knowledge-attitude-skills. The consequence has been the decline in professional ethics and integrity,” said Mfutso-Bengo, who is chair of the Global Summit of Global Ethics National Advisory Boards, World Health Organisation Afro-Region. He is also Head of Health Systems and Policy Department and Director of the Centre of Bioethics for Eastern and Southern Africa (CEBESA) at the College of Medicine in Malawi.

Counting the costs of integrity loss

The decline in professional ethics and integrity in many African countries has had enormous social and economic costs in the form of increased integrity loss containment cost, the cost of doing business, corruption, juvenile delinquency, violence, poor leadership and state-sponsored selective justice.

“Unlike in the West, where loss of moral capital (inner-controls) have been compensated by strong external-controls (rule-of-law), some African countries have lost both,” said Mfutso-Bengo.

The antidote to declining professional ethics and integrity is to invest in holistic ethics education that is informative, formative and transformative. “Investment in knowledge and skills without right-attitude or professional integrity is costly and often destructive…No country can sustain development, democracy, professional integrity and competitiveness without moral capital investments in ethics education. Moral capital is a key to acquire all other capitals.”

Mfutso-Bengo will further elaborate on his research and findings in his keynote speech during the conference, which will explore ethics education in the medical and health sciences, as well as the arts, humanities and social sciences, and showcase comparative studies and other research projects related to ethics education across Africa, Latin America and elsewhere.

Other keynote speakers are Professor Bert Gordijn, Director of the Institute of Ethics at Dublin University;l Professor Keymanthree Moodley, Director of the Centre for Medical Ethics and Law at Stellenbosch University; and Dr Obiora Ike, Professor of Ethics and Intercultural Studies at Nigeria’s Godfrey Okoye University.

*By Clairwyn van der Merwe

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Publish date: 2018-10-03 00:00:00.0

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