A commitment to high ethical standards is a an absolute requirement for both the public and private sectors.

These are critical institutions that are the cornerstone of a productive and functioning society.

When ethical foundations are eroded, this can have an adverse impact on both the material wellbeing and stability of society.

We have to insist on good ethical conduct by both politicians and corporate leaders.

The image of corrupt politicians from local to national government is all too familiar.

The corporate sector too has not comported itself admirably as various incidents of abuse of power and cartel practices became glaring with tender collusion and inflated costs of infrastructure construction for the 2010 World Cup.

Many people admitted to wrong doing and paid fines to the Competition Commission.

Sadly, we tend to be more lenient when dealing with private sector malfeasance while being dogmatically wild in denouncing government corruption. Both eat away at the social fabric.

More recently, the Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse (Outa) revealed that the South African National Roads Agency Limited (Sanral) might have overpaid for the Gauteng Freeway Improvement project by over R9-billion.

We should be up in arms at this wastage, especially in view of the fact that Sanral has been harassing motorists to pay for e-tolls.

It is not just Sanral that should be in trouble, but also the construction companies that benefited unjustly from this projects. And these are private sector companies.

So, we need to change the narrative on ethics and call for both the government and the private sector to lead by example.

Some of the construction firms implicated in the Sanral scam were also involved in the 2010 cartels' behaviour, which should be appropriately designated as corruption, with much harsher sentences for individuals behind these actions.

The question is: why are we less outraged by corrupt behaviour where the private sector is implicated? There are many other projects that come to mind, where the private sector is on the other side of the corruption table, but the spotlight is one-sided - on government.

Some of the examples include the Home Affairs smart card contract, eNatis, Sassa, the rotten BEE deals that mining companies wilfully undertake to benefit politically connected individuals such as Goldfields's largesse of R25-million shares to Baleka Mbete, a form of a concealed bribe.

In many of the cases where government is involved, especially in large scale tenders, the moral responsibility is apportioned to the department or state entity that awarded the contract. Very little is said about the private company that is implementing the project.

It needs to be said that these companies hardly inject any funds in many of these projects - every cent is taxpayers' money. Obviously this does not include public private partnerships.

There is a narrative that has taken root in this country that suggest that private companies can do no wrong, that they know it all.

This narrative has been allowed to find root without questions in the main. It is a narrative that is unfortunately leading us to a life of not questioning the conducts of many of the private companies that benefit from taxpayers' money directly.

The time has come for us to ask the question who does this narrative benefit? Granted, the public service has been bad in many instances, that on its own should not make us accept everything from the private companies without question.

South African will only succeed if we the people equally hold the government departments/entities and the private companies that are awarded contracts to the same moral and ethical standards.

The moral and ethical standards should extend to companies that do work in communities be they mining, manufacturing or farming companies.

To build a great South Africa, all of us needs to aspire to higher ethical standards. We should never try to short change the taxpayer by overcharging for goods and services.

Gana is DA member in the Gauteng provincial legislature.