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On 23 February 2011, sixteen women from several Cape Town townships called at the Office of the Chief Whip of the Majority Party at Parliament to appeal for the intercession and intervention of the ANC in the deepening moral degeneration in the townships of Cape Town. The women came from various Christian denominations.

This meeting took place after President Zuma had visited a drug rehabilitation centre in Mitchell's Plain and announced in his State of the Nation Address that government will convene a national summit against drug abuse. The discussion with these women revealed that the problem is much more serious than the Mitchell's Plain case study reveals. At this meeting we received eyewitness accounts of the depths of moral degeneration in our country.

The moral degeneration in the country revolves around drug and alcohol abuse which manifests themselves in dysfunctional families, women and children abuses, violence in schools, teenage pregnancies and the spread of HIV/AIDS infections. The women we met included senior citizens aged between seventy and eighty-five.

These women graphically illustrated how school children gather at parks to take drugs before going to classes, return to these parks for the same purposes during break, and disappear into shebeens and taverns after schools. Challenging the proliferation of shebeens and taverns rather than recreational facilities in the black townships, the women posed a very disturbing question: does the government want to kill our children and the nation to enrich a few individuals and their families?

The women claimed that after work, many men go to taverns and shebeens and have no time to interact with their families especially children. They come home when children are asleep and leave for work before children are up. They also claim that youth of school-going age hardly sleep or do their school work because of nightlives created by taverns and shebeens. Thus, families have become largely dysfunctional.

The women are crying out for the reform of liquor laws or at least the application of those laws as strictly as they are in historically white suburbs.

In its 2009 Manifesto, the ANC committed itself to build cohesive, caring and sustainable communities. The deepening moral degeneration in black townships negates this commitment. The levels of moral degeneration in our communities require a serious national intervention that goes beyond advocacy of healthy life styles.

The ANC stated categorically in its 2010 January 8 Statement that human development has both spiritual and material aspects. The interdenominational women we met called for an interfaith effort to ensure that our schools do not focus on the intellectual without spiritual development of the children. The common tenet of all faiths is that a human being is both mortal and immortal because his perishable physical body embodies an eternal spiritual element that survives death.

This belief awakens children and the youth to the need for ethical conduct and the respect for the equal rights and freedom of others. Above all, it leads to self-knowledge, self-worth and self-esteem, and a sense of progress and development. These values are essential for the spiritual or moral growth and development of children.

The consensus of the religious sector on interfaith moral education and the birth of a single interfaith organisation, the South African Interfaith Council (SAIC), that brings the National Religious Leaders Forum (NRLF) and the National Interfaith Leaders Council (NILC) together, has created a formidable force for the moral regeneration movement.

The South African Interfaith Council (SAIC) could take the Moral Regeneration Movement to greater heights by going beyond advocacy of healthy lifestyles to practical programmes for early childhood and youth development in partnership with government. In his response to the State of the Nation Address, President Zuma hinted at this when he said that the government would partner with the religious sector for the delivery of skills development and other programmes.

There is an urgent and great need to occupy children and the youth after school and over the weekends. The National Conference on the Values of a Just and Caring Society proposed the establishment of cultural centres in townships and informal centres at or through which school children and out-of-school youth could be engaged for spiritual growth and development by means of practical programmes, for instance by spiritual music, indigenous games, cultural and creative industries.

To this end, it was proposed that the Department of Public Works identify and renovate under utilised and un-utilised government buildings in towns and cities, black townships and rural areas and make them recreational facilities, cultural centres and community development centres. While we create decent jobs and transform the economy, we need to build the character of our children and youth by not only instilling positive values in them, but by also creating conducive conditions for them to live out these values. We must ensure that our children become addicted to activities that lead to spiritual growth and development - not drug and substance abuse.

The creation of decent jobs and improvement of the quality of life of our people should translate into the spiritual and intellectual development of our children and youth, such a youth should place self-development for national service above the pursuit of selfish interests.

In his inaugural speech, President Zuma called on all sectors to partner with government for reconstruction development and progress. The religious sector responded swiftly by working together for greater unity and development and by offering their infrastructure for development of programmes in partnership with government.

The greatest challenge facing the ANC government is to review its moral regeneration programmes in partnership with the South African Interfaith Council (SAIC) and to enter into a partnership with this council for moral and social transformation because, as Former President Nelson Mandela correctly observed, social and economic transformation could not be achieved without spiritual transformation.

We believe, therefore, that the Ubuntu Alive Campaign proposed by the National Conference on the Values of a Just and Caring Society should be supported and used to mobilise our people for spiritual and social transformation as a prerequisite for economic transformation.

The Moral Regeneration Movement should not be an end in itself. It should be an integral part of the presidential nation-building project of creating decent jobs and transforming the economy.