Just over 20 years ago, I was offered a job on the FM. I asked a friend what he thought. "Greedy capitalists. Before long you will have no heart, no conscience, no values," he muttered under his breath, referring to the fact that this was a magazine unashamedly for business consumption. I took the job.
Every so often I think about him. I think about him because whereas I said that the people who read this magazine are entrepreneurs who pay taxes and create jobs and make a success of our country and are major drivers of initiatives such as the Solidarity Fund, he argued that business had no moral compass or ethical core. He threw a famous Karl Marx quote at me, saying that in much of the business universe "money is the universal, self-constituted value of all things".
"It has therefore robbed the whole world, human as well as natural, of its own values," Marx concluded back in the 1800s.
I thought about my friend last year as the hate-filled rhetoric of former US president Donald Trump reached its zenith. Trump was not a mistake. His rise to power was largely due to a failure on the part of business to act ethically when it had the chance. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google failed to act when numerous civil society voices pointed out that their algorithms were amplifying the messages of racists, conspiracy theorists, anti-Semites and other dangerous groupings who saw Trump as their leader.
Did these companies act? No. They took the cash and sat quietly while the very outrages they claim to stand against in their slick company profiles spread like wildfire. As the actor Sacha Baron Cohen put it: "If you pay them, Facebook will run any political ad you want ... And they’ll even help you micro-target those lies to their users for maximum effect. Under this twisted logic, if Facebook were around in the 1930s it would have allowed Hitler to post 30-second ads on his ‘solution to the Jewish problem’."
It was only after the violent siege of the US Capitol on January 6 (in which five people died) that big tech found its misplaced moral and ethical backbone. Twitter and Facebook froze Trump’s social media accounts. YouTube removed his video telling the rioters: "We love you, you’re very special ... go home in peace."
Trump was not a mistake. His rise to power was largely due to a failure by business to act ethically when it had the chance
The horse had already bolted.
The next big moral and ethical failure for business and governments across the globe is what is already being called "vaccine apartheid". Many of us have watched with dismay as some of the world’s rich countries (Canada, Germany) have ordered as many as eight times more vaccine doses than they have people.
While this is happening, business across the world is quiet on the fact that many of these vaccines were developed with the express help of the governments and the co-operation of ordinary people in places like SA and Brazil, which participated in clinical trials. Activists have been speaking up for months about the iniquity of it all. SA business should be doing the same. It is in the interests of all to get everyone vaccinated, not just the rich in the West. There is no recovery for the entire world if there isn’t a solution for the whole of humanity.
Worse still is the thinking that an inoculated US or UK is "fine" while an inoculated Ghana will always be a pipe dream. The September variant of the virus was first spotted in the UK, not in SA. It’s all over the world now.
SA business ought to join other civil society voices in calling out and naming and shaming vaccine manufacturers signing lucrative deals with nations that are essentially hoarding extra supplies. As World Health Organisation director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said recently, there were 44 such sneaky deals last year and 12 signed so far in January. We know what this is. In the face of a pandemic, people have thrown their values aside and are just taking, taking and taking. They are not just jumping the queue. They are corrupt.
Greed is not good. It is not sustainable. Pharmaceutical companies and all of us can do better than this for humanity.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.