The spectacle of beer-swilling, uniformed Johannesburg Metro Police strikers brandishing pistols from the top of official vehicles blocking a Gauteng highway seemed this week to mark a new low for our bruised society.

That was until they opened fire on their SA Police Service cousins in a gun battle that put drivers stranded by the unlawful police blockade in mortal danger from the very men and women who were sworn to protect them.

Yet, so inured have we become to our plummeting standards of discipline and service, that this obscene protest passed without obvious civil outrage, and officials continued to negotiate salary and working conditions with these officers who should have been prisoners.

A relentless succession of depressing news reports demonstrates almost daily that the morals of criminality are becoming the dominant standard of our society.

From the urban worker who makes out a false police report to justify a fraudulent insurance claim on a mislaid cellphone, to the civil servant passing government business to a relative, South Africans are excusing themselves from the constraints of the law and natural justice.

As Nelson Mandela says his public goodbye in London’s Hyde Park, we are left apparently leaderless.

In place of moral icons, we have only a brawling mass of petty politicians more interested in their own pockets than the people. No one seems willing to take a stand, to denounce a friend or neighbour or even just to say, “No thanks” to an unlawful opportunity.

Traffic police and speedsters negotiate cheap deals to subvert the law; communities wink at the presence on their streets of chop shops recycling hijacked cars; bewildered parents avert their eyes rather than challenge children who bring weapons, drugs or stolen property into once-decent homes.

It starts at the top, where President Thabo Mbeki and ANC president Jacob Zuma have not matched their rhetoric with personal examples of moral principle.

Mbeki’s defence this week of a new contract for suspended police commissioner Jackie Selebi served to confirm that anything goes, unless and until a judge pronounces a perpetrator guilty beyond the last appeal.

And when a judge seems likely to make an inconvenient decision, there is always the option of public pressure.

ANC Youth League leader Julius Malema retains his post after threatening to kill fellow South Africans to protect Zuma from the due process of law. Labour leader Zwelinzima Vavi has yet to be repudiated by his allies for taking up that call in blatant violation of our law and constitution.

The first signs of fundamental moral decay included the sorry saga of parliament dodging its obligation to find, prosecute and punish MPs who abused their travel privileges. Then we had unions protecting teachers who did not bother to turn up for classes, and security guards willing to kill colleagues who refused to back their violent strike action.

We have ended up with a teacher who has been charged with selling drugs to his own pupils in his classroom, and policemen joining a gang that blows up automatic teller machines for the cash inside them.

And our leaders, apparently mindful of the skeletons in their own closets, prevaricate, excuse and seek to explain the inexplicable, leaving a moral vacuum that sucks in the young, the poor and, mostly, those who are just infinitely greedy.

There can be no substitute for leadership from the top, from the presidency, the cabinet and the courts.

But, with the always morally ambivalent Zuma looking likely to be our next president — and then with a sackful of political debts to settle — there is no prospect of a new national role model in our medium-term future.

Nor can we hope for a late recovery from Mbeki and his tacky team, who continue to lie and obfuscate in order to shore up a crumbling legacy, even at the cost of our own criminal justice system or the rights to life and, quite literally, limb in Zimbabwe.

Adrift as we are — leaderless, rudderless and without credible role models — our salvation lies with us.

We must be our own role models, refusing to share or to accept ill-gotten gains, refusing to condone the crime around us and each adding our own voice to the demand for righteous leadership.

We must reject the reign of the tsotsis.