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

Published by the Institute for Security Studies (ISS), a non-profit regional research institute operating across sub-Saharan Africa, this 32-page report charts the development and effectiveness of a national crime prevention campaign initiated by former President Nelson Mandela in 1997 through an engagement with religious leaders of various faiths in South Africa.

Officially launched in April 2002 in a high-profile ceremony including over a thousand people from government, parliament, provincial legislatures, political parties, religious organisations, traditional structures, and non-governmental organisations (NGOs), the Moral Regeneration Movement (MRM) originated through the establishment of an NGO which was funded by the government. As detailed here, the MRM has, since that time, evolved in various ways - with various degrees of effectiveness. The purpose of this document is to trace the evolution of MRM's messages - which have taken on political, religious and secular, ethical, and nation-building aspects - and to explore the campaign's impact on rebuilding the social fabric in post-apartheid South Africa.

The hallmark of this campaign is its rooting in messages that make explicit appeals to morals, values or ethics as part of a strategy to address a particular conflict-related development issue: crime. This approach reflects one of the 4 "pillars" articulated by the 1996 National Crime Prevention Strategy (NCPS) - one that 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 approach taken was that moral regeneration could be accomplished through an ideological/political "campaign" designed to stimulate a mass mobilisation through which a large number of people and organisations would unite against a common enemy: moral malaise and criminality.

Despite its valiant intentions, the MRM initiative has suffered from a lack of clarity about both its mission and its strategy - according to this evaluation. To begin, the speakers at the launch did not provide any guidance on exactly how "the people" could get actively involved in moral regeneration; approximately a year was spent on setting up the organisation and generating a vision of its role. Further, "a definition of what kinds of moral issues to focus on, and the drawing of any clear lines about what constitutes 'immoral behaviour' has not even been possible" within the MRM, the evaluation finds. The author also notes that, while over time campaign materials became less explicitly religious in phrasing, MRM is still associated with a religious initiative, and perhaps for that reason still viewed with some skepticism by those who are uncomfortable with the language and practice of organised religion.

As explained here, the movement also suffered from failed attempts to collaborate with existing crime
prevention initiatives (e.g., the 1996 NCPS) and - while MRM has engaged occasionally with
other government anti-crime campaigns - efforts to build meaningful civil society participation in the campaign have fallen short. "The campaign’s failures to engage with non-state initiatives are significant lost opportunities. They may, once again, be a result of the organisation's limited capacity and consequent failures to build effective networks, or may be related to the campaign's own uncertainty and ambiguity about the role of NGOs and civil society."

Efforts undertaken in mid-2004 to re-vision the campaign to avoid perpetuating these difficulties involved grassroots mobilisation and facilitation work such as awareness-raising workshops held all over the country, but this advocacy work "was hard to quantify and its impact hard to demonstrate. Little had been achieved in the critical arena of public communication...." In response, the new board of the MRM, in its presentation at the 2004 First Annual Conference, recommended that the MRM office become more focused on advocacy work, an effort which is detailed here. In short, this new direction was underpinned by an implicit acknowledgement that there is a need to advocate around moral regeneration issues, rather than assuming (as had been the case in earlier incarnations of the campaign) that there was organic public support for these issues.

According to the author, one key challenge facing MRM in moving forward is whether this campaign can be sustained as a civil society initiative in the absence of a popular, organic support base. The movement also faces the problem of defining and identifying activities as morally regenerative; it will be extremely difficult, the author predicts, to empirically demonstrate that its activities actually enhance morality. Along these lines - and more broadly - the report also considers whether a largely ideological campaign of this type can deliver meaningful results in terms of strengthening social fabric and reducing crime.