From Tony Sturges, Johannesburg
Stewardship. What a profound word! What does it mean? Where does it apply and to whom? In our current selfish society, I doubt this word would ever enter the arena of debate, particularly in Southern Africa; and yet it is here where the defining origins of the word might be found.
Ubuntu is an extraordinary African social philosophy that South Africa had but which appears to have been lost.
This is a humanistic worldview which describes the individual as the sum of those around them, of the community within which they reside, indeed the society within which all individuals live!
Stewardship can be as small as caring for the individual gifts given you through the grace of God or as large as humankind’s responsibility to the finite resources provided by the Earth.
But big or small, the responsibility is the same.
A topical subject is the recent US election which forced candidates to lay their policies bare for public scrutiny, and so it should.
It also forced the individual US citizen to exercise stewardship over their country.
A government’s stewardship is wide and varied and is intended to cover all citizenry and the land which is their heritage.
In particular the government is responsible to those who are most vulnerable in society—the poor, the elderly, the young, the homeless.
The government is, in the ethos of ubuntu, the sum of those around them, the result of the exercising of stewardship by all eligible citizens.
How well are we exercising our stewardship?
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