Paddy Kearney's legacy: lessons for a divided South Africa

In this memorial lecture, the Honourable John Jeffery examines how the values embodied by interfaith activist Paddy Kearney offer crucial guidance for addressing South Africa’s persistent challenges of racial inequality, corruption, and social division. Drawing parallels between Kearney’s humble dedication to justice and the current state of the nation, Jeffery calls for renewed commitment to non-racialism and ethical leadership.

WE ARE here coming from different backgrounds, different faiths or no faith at all. One of the issues that binds us, I would like to believe, is that we are all idealists in that we aspire to a better South Africa and a better world. We believe that ideas and values can shape reality.

This idealism is not just about overcoming oppression but also about envisioning and building a future society based on the values of equality, justice and equity.

Paddy Kearney was a person of exceptional dedication who, over his 76 years, left an indelible mark on the people of KwaZulu-Natal and South Africa. His influence extended beyond those who knew him personally to those who admired him from afar. What stands out most is his ability to achieve great things while shunning the spotlight.

This quality is notably absent in the materialistic and boastful behaviour that some of our current leaders and influencers exhibit. He was quintessentially a religious person, a Catholic – in his early life he was a vowed Marist Brother; an ecumenicalist and an interfaith proponent. For me, this reflects a move away from a fixation on doctrine to one in which his perception of Catholic and broader Christian values becomes more important.

James 2 vs 18 is very relevant to him: “But someone will say: You have faith, I have deeds. Show me your faith without deeds and I will show you my faith by my deeds.”

I see a message in his life that it is how we live our lives and the care we take of our fellow human beings that is important rather than what we claim to believe in. I am mindful of Mahatma Gandhi’s words when he said – “Let your life be your message.”

I believe Paddy’s life was his message.

The struggle for democracy, equality and social justice

The struggle for democracy, equality and social justice in South Africa has been unique among international anti-colonial struggles in that, for a significant number of the oppressed, non-racialism was an important part of the Struggle.

This focus meant that the struggle not just about overcoming oppression but was also looking at the future society that the activists wanted to build, and the values of that future society. Paddy was an example of a young white person who from an early age, did what he could to understand and address the injustice and inequality in South Africa.

He used his own exploration of his spirituality to engage a central pillar of apartheids existence – their Calvinist justification of apartheid. White Afrikaners, particularly since the Voortrekker period, defined their identity by their perceived relationship with God. They believed that, like the Israelites, they were God’s chosen people. They justified their subjugation of the people already living in the lands they were moving into by claiming that God had given this land to them and that the existing inhabitants were inferior.

Christianity and the church became a key focus of struggle as the apartheid regime attempted to maintain hegemony among the Afrikaner and broader white community. Paddy’s ecumenical work was very important particularly for exposing white Christians to a different interpretation of the Bible and to the reality of the everyday lives of black Christians.

His ground-breaking interfaith work challenged the apartheid State’s notion that religions other than Christianity, were false, and were worshiping false gods. The ANC’s ideological position of non-racialism dominated the aspirations for a post-apartheid South Africa in the multiparty negotiations in the early 1990s and in the drafting of the Constitution by the Constitutional Assembly.

This is encapsulated in the Preamble with its line: “We, the people of South Africa, ... Believe that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, united in our diversity...”

But on this issue of non-racialism, where are we now – over 30 years since the start of our democracy? Former president Thabo Mbeki, in opening the debate in the National Assembly on Reconciliation and Nation Building on May 29, 1998, on the occasion of the adoption of the TRC Report, referred to South Africa as country of two nations.

He said: “We therefore make bold to say that South Africa is a country of two nations. One of these nations is white, relatively prosperous, regardless of gender or geographical dispersal.

“The second and larger nation of South Africa is black and poor with the worst affected being women in rural areas, the black rural population in general and the disabled.

“This reality of two nations, underwritten by the perpetuation of the racial, gender and special disparities born of a very long period of colonial and apartheid white minority domination, constitutes the material base which reinforces the notion that, indeed we are not one nation, but two nations.

“And neither are we becoming one nation. Consequently, also, the objective of national reconciliation is not being realised.”

Not enough has changed

That was 28 years ago. Unfortunately, not enough has changed.

If you are a white person, you are more likely to have a job with 8.2% of white people being unemployed versus 37.1% of African people – that is from the Q2 2025 Stats SA survey released on August 18, 2025. In the private sector whites occupy 65.9% of top management positions with African people occupying 13.8% according to a report in Reuters in September last year.

The median annual household income in 2023 was R472 788 for a white household head as opposed to R81 290 for an African household head.We surely cannot expect racial equality in South Africa under these conditions. The Constitution of South Africa in the Equality clause, in 3(2) states that “Equality includes the full and equal enjoyment of all rights and freedoms. To promote the achievement of equality, legislative and other measures designed to protect or advance persons, or categories of persons, disadvantaged by unfair discrimination may be taken”.

There are similar more focused provisions in the property clause. And the ANC government attempted this with laws relating to land redistribution, and broad-based black economic empowerment among others. The picture of the progress in economic redistribution is however not all negative.

For example, Wandile Sihlobo and Johan Kirsten from the Bureau of Economic Research and the Department of Agricultural Economics at Stellenbosch University take issue with the commonly cited argument that land reform has been a failure and that only 8% to 10% of farmland has been returned to black South Africans since 1994.

In an article published on December 9, 2024, titled “South Africa is making progress with its land reform”, they provide substance to President Cyril Ramaphosa’s assertion in his State of the Nation Address of February 2024 that “Through redistribution, around 25% of farmland in our country is now owned by black South Africans, bringing us closer to achieving our target of 30% by 2030”.

They do the math by adding up the land that is now owned by black people through restitution, land redistribution, the Proactive Land Acquisition Strategy programme, government acquisition and importantly also private transactions to get to the figure of 24.9% of all freehold farmland. However, although there has been some advancement, generally poverty in SA still has a black face.

Affirmative action policies

Affirmative action policies and programs have worked, particularly when it comes to the advancement of women. For those old enough, remember the outcry from the establishment when then president Nelson Mandela announced his first Cabinet in 1994 with two women ministers as well as three women deputy ministers.

There had only been one woman minister before that and no deputies. There were complaints that the women did not qualify for such important positions and that the appointments were just tokenism. In the last Cabinet before the GNU, we had a Cabinet of 50% women, and everyone accepted it as something not particularly contentious.

The representation of women in other sectors has also proceeded well due to attention being given to it. From only one woman judge before democracy, 122 out of 248 judges of the Superior Courts are women. That is just over 49%.I do not believe this would have happened without affirmative action for women.

We have also made significant advances in building a religiously tolerant South Africa that is more accepting of its diversity. Multi-faith prayers are led at the start of official events. Even Parliament no longer opens with a prayer but has a moment of silent prayer or meditation. From two official languages both of which have their origins in Europe, we have 11 official languages, all equal, with SA sign language being added last year as the 12th.

Racism is a major problem

But racism is still a major problem in our country. In their report titled July’s People released on January 29, 2024, the SA Human Rights Commission stated that “the violence in Phoenix during the July 2021 Unrest exposed deep divisions within the community and highlighted underlying tensions between different racial and ethnic groups. These divisions continue to have far-reaching implications for social cohesion and intergroup relations in the aftermath of the unrest.”

In their analysis of evidence, the commission stated that: “The stories of the events of racialised violence that occurred during the July Unrest are not merely about the indiscriminate racism of a small deviant group within a larger Indian community.

“Neither is it about a community rising to protect itself during a moment of national crisis... The texture of the testimonies presented ... Suggest that the events raise much bigger questions about transformation and democracy.”

The spatial geography of apartheid still prevails in South Africa. African, Indian and coloured working-class people still largely live on the periphery of the urban areas, wholly separate from the middle and upper classes. Mbeki, in his two nations speech 28 years ago, acknowledged that the abolition of the apartheid legacy would require considerable effort over a considerable period of time.

He spoke about the extensive funds transferred from West Germany to East Germany as part of the reunification of Germany and asked if the rich in South Africa were prepared to underwrite the poor as happened in Germany. He also spoke about the complaints from the rich about the solidarity tax that was only imposed for a year during South Africa’s transition. So basically, he was arguing for greater financial transfers from the rich to the poor.

Personally, I feel that white people who kept the National Party in power for so long and who benefitted from the three centuries of economic development that deprived black people of not just the land but of the economic opportunities available to white people, did not do enough to atone for the benefits they historically enjoyed.

When 1994 arrived, they were very content to accept that there was now legal equality but felt that life could continue as before and that they had no responsibility to give back to South Africa in terms of addressing racial inequality. We need to do more to transfer resources and skills to less privileged black people. If we are going to build the non-racial South Africa aspired to in the Freedom Charter, each one of us needs to do a lot more to achieve this.

Corruption

“I believed that that democratic SA would not be corrupt.”

One of the biggest threats to South Africa is corruption. Corruption is not just perpetrated by a few greedy people wanting that which they are not ordinarily entitled to. It is now something that has seeped into the values and culture of our society at all levels.I remember that when democracy was achieved, I believed that that democratic SA would not be corrupt.

Unfortunately, I was naïve. In the beginning projects were still finished but often at substandard levels as money from buying concrete had to be used to pay for the bribes. Now in some cases contracts are awarded and the work is not even done or completed. If you want to be paid for work done as a service provider, you often need to pay a bribe to the person making the payments.

If you want to get your approvals, you may have to pay a bribe to get it done; if you want to be able to move higher up in the queues, you must pay the security guard a bribe and so on. It is not just the political office bearers, the public servants and the people looking for tenders. It is society as a whole that has become accepting of this way of life. Corruption has seriously affected service delivery at a municipal level, the level at which people live.

Those who are honest are at risk of being murdered for that. Honest auditors who uncover corruption, have become targets. The murder of Babita Deokaran, four years ago, shocked our nation. Three auditors involved with the Ekurhuleni Munici­pality have been murdered recently.

Councillors such as Jimmy Mohlale from Mbombela, Moss Phakoe, from Rustenberg as well as councillors from eThekwini, have been murdered for blowing the whistle on corruption. This cancer will destroy us all if we do not unite as a country to fight it. There are some success stories though – a national commissioner of police found guilty and imprisoned for corruption.

That is something not to be sneezed at, particularly when it cost the then National Director of Public Prosecutions his job. Last week a former MP, a portfolio committee chair in the National Assembly and a former chair of the NYDA, lost their appeal in the Supreme Court of Appeal and are now going to have to service a 20-year sentence for corruption.

Many of the hitmen are convicted such as in the murder cases of Deokaran and former Richmond municipal manager Sbu Sithole, but those who sent them still remain free. While things are not where they should be with criminal investigations and prosecutions, on the civil side, things are going a lot better.

The Special Investigation Unit (SIU) is showing increasing success in recovering stolen state money. In the 2024/25 financial year, they recovered a cash value of more than R833 million, assets to the value of R1.3 billion, set aside irregular contracts worth R5.6 billion, and prevented potential loss to the state to the tune ofR2.7 billion.

It is a central tenet of our law that a person is innocent until proven guilty. Unfortunately, in South Africa when someone is caught committing what clearly appears to be an offence, they often loudly protest their innocence and claim a conspiracy against them. While this can happen, individuals accused of corruption need to step back from their political or governmental positions until the allegations against them have been investigated. They cannot continue as if nothing has happened. Perceptions of corruption must be taken seriously otherwise people will lose faith in the system.

Systematic changes

Given the amount of time criminal investigations and prosecutions take, we also need to look at other ways of dealing with corruption. What systemic changes can we make to our procurement processes to make it more difficult for money to be made from corruption?

Lifestyle audits to identify people living beyond their known incomes are gaining more traction but progress in implementation has been too slow. If a crime is alleged to have been committed, it must be investigated and there must be consequences. To ignore bribery and corruption however small sends a message that it is not a serious crime.

I do not think we can talk about values without some mention of the situation in Palestine. There are similarities between the ethic and religious nationalistic state of Israel and the ethnic and religious nationalist apartheid state. Both attempting to justify their existence on the basis of their belief that God gave them the land. We must stand up for the people of Gaza and Palestine as a whole. The era of conquest should have long ended and has no place in our modern life.

Let us reflect on Paddy’s life, his beliefs and his values and what he has left behind. Let us pick up his spear and carry on the good fight. This is our country and our world and that of our children and children’s children, and if we are not active in the fight for a better South Africa and a better world, then how can we expect it to happen?

As Maya Angelou said: “A great soul serves everyone all of the time. A great soul never dies. It brings us together again and again.”

This an edited version of the Paddy Kearney Memorial Lecture that was delivered recently by John Jeffery. He is the Deputy Minister of Justice and Constitutional Development in South Africa.

An ecumenical service of music and readings will be held at St James Church on Venice Road, Windermere, on September 14 at 5pm. The service will commemorate the 40th anniversary of Paddy Kearney’s detention and offer psalms and prayers for all who face suffering. The service includes the world premiere of new work specially written by pianist Melvin Peters.

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