Institutional mechanisms don’t work any more; need to convert electorate to honest people: Judge Zak Yacoob

Institutional mechanisms often crumble under the burden of corruption, and what is required is a social revolution where the electorate may be converted to honest people, Zakeria Mohammed Yacoob, retired South African judge, said here on Monday.

“Corruption is the worst part,” Judge ‘Zak’, as he is fondly called, said. “In the end, you can have structure… you can have people appointed, and of course you can have special electoral courts because electoral disputes will have to be determined very, very fast. I have found that all these mechanisms, while they have worked for us in the past, don’t work any more,” Zak added, speaking to a group of students, law practitioners, and disability activists at the office of Arappor Iyakkam, the Chennai-based anti-corruption campaign group.

“I did a lot of thinking. What do you do? How can we improve the structures? How can we make things better than they are? Then I realised that we have got to convert the electorate into being good honest people before we can do it. What we need is a kind of social revolution. We should try and make a majority of people in society honest and generally honourable,” Zak observed. “Make sure that you have structures in place of honest people who try to make honest people of others and this is a very strong revolutionary process.”

Sprucing up the education system to uphold morals and minimise biases was the way forward, he maintained.

Asked about his opinion on people with disabilities starting a political party, he said he would rather want people with disabilities to participate in society and be an integral part of it. All political parties, he said, should work to ensure that people with disabilities were properly catered to.

Responding to a question, he said he was quite thrilled that South Africa had taken Israel to the International Court of Justice for “wholesale exploitation, killing, and extermination of the people of Gaza”.

V. Suresh, advocate and human rights activist, Jayaram Venkatesan, co-founder, Arappor Iyakkam, and Sudha Ramalingam, advocate and rights activist, were present.