South Africans need to work together to prevent the country from giving in to a culture of greed and corruption, Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan said on Thursday.

"Let me tell you that from where I stand and what I see, this [corruption] is a disease that a hospital or health system cannot solve," he said at the Discovery Invest Leadership Summit in Johannesburg.

The millions of honest people in the country needed to have their voices heard.

Gordhan said the country's leadership and its people had to fight the underlying factors that influenced corruption, such as greed and selfishness.

"If we don't do that we give in to culture that says 'I want everything now. I want to be a millionaire now... I want the best car even if I can't afford it'. We are creating a wrong type of culture."

South African leaders, whether they came from politics and business, needed to be humble, Gordhan said.

"In South Africa we have too many pretenders, who say one thing in public, but do other things in private."

The country needed to be careful about "over-hyping" the ANC's national conference in Mangaung at the end of the year.

"Mangaung will come... We must be careful not to over-hype what are normal political contests in any society around the globe," Gordhan said.

"It will have its own South African character, it will have its own South African noises, but at the end of the day it is a political contest. That's what democracy is about."

South African leaders needed to talk more instead of "shouting at each other in the public space".

Gordhan said the country needed greater economic and political inclusivity.

"Unless the world and South Africa find a solution to economic inclusivity, combined with really serious and deep political inclusivity, we will have serious faultlines.

"Nations will fail if they have non-inclusive economic and political institutions."

He said the lack of development for small companies and businesses was a problem that needed to be rectified.

At the beginning of his address, Gordhan called for a moment of silence for the 34 Lonmin mineworkers shot dead during a clash with police in the North West on August 16.