PRESUMABLY reluctant to take power next year as captain of the Titanic, Deputy President Thabo Mbeki recently took the podium in Parliament to call for a national "Moral Summit," this to be convened by spiritual leaders, the focus: SA’s collapsed moral standards. If this is, as it appears to be, tacit ANC recognition that things have gone catastrophically, cataclysmicaly wrong in SA, then Mr Mbeki deserves our support.

Few today would question that SA’s decline and degeneration has now reached the point where it can only presage a very grim future for all this nation’s people: is indeed so advanced that it now profoundly threatens our survival.

Unfortunately, Mbeki’s move may well be faulted as closing the barn door after the horse’s departure. Realism suggests that diminishing the towering mountain of porn, drugs, violent crime, perversion, rape, child abuse, sodomy, sleazy sex shops, our filthy hospitals and cities, the pollution, the ugliness, makes cleansing the Augean stables look like a light day’s work.

"Transformation" is a big word with the comrades. SA has indeed been transformed since "The People" took control in 1994. But not for the better. Indeed, so shockingly inept is ANC "rule" that it makes P W Botha look better all the time. For all its flaws, White-ruled SA, circumscribed, Calvinist and conservative as it might have been, nevertheless provided a viable, disciplined and generally well-run, law-abiding society. But Calvinist SA is now dead and gone: and some very nasty pages in our history have been written since.

Examine much of the legislation the ANC has enacted: and you can only conclude that those now ruling us have very little notion of what morality, law and order and justice are all about. And that, yes, we do most urgently need to have an honest national conversation about how to restore social order in this now desperately unhappy country.

The last decade has seen a huge turnaround in our fortunes. Per capita, we are now at or very near the top in rates of murder, armed robbery, child abuse and violent crime. Against that, in economic development, job creation and productivity, education and health services, we are at or near the bottom in achievement.

Thinking it over, perhaps the solution is not for the ANC regime to do something. Perhaps the solution is for the ANC to stop undermining institutions, customs, traditions and taboos. Let me outline some of the empirical evidence on that:

Shaming as it is to admit it, we in this new socialist paradise now live in a society which seems almost dedicated to the corruption of the young. We all know, or should know, that pornography plays a key role in paedophile activity. Many paedophiles use both child and adult porn in their seduction of children. Yet, discounting warnings that its Pornography Act could (1) prove far too friendly to international crime and porn syndicates and (2) that it would put children at increased risk of sexual abuse, the ANC rammed the bill through Parliament with a huge majority.

Today we are seeing the grim underbelly of that enactment. Child abuse has escalated at pandemic proportions, with child rape surging from 7 559 reported cases in 1994 to 21 404 cases last year. In 1996 the police child protection unit alone dealt with 35 838 cases of crimes against children. Child welfare societies deal with an average of 9 398 cases a month, 23% of which involve physical and sexual abuse.

Since many such crimes, especially those within the family unit, are not reported, these figures represent the tip of the iceberg. Such crimes include rape, sodomy, indecent assault, sexual offences, attempted murder, aggravated assault, abduction, kidnapping and public indecency.

A spokesman for the SA National Council for Child Welfare states: "Our children are in a crisis situation - and it is a shame that we, as mature adults - allow them to be treated this way." He added: "Despite all efforts by the police and specialised child welfare workers, our children are still having to endure horrific acts of abuse - abuse that is way out of control and severely affecting a very vulnerable generation."

Those are not good things for any society to accept. To cap that, the AIDS epidemic has drastically contributed to the exploitation of children, as demand for under-age partners has rocketed in the belief they are less likely to be infected. Sick, sick, sick.