SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY SHOULD BE LEGALLY COMPULSORY

Social responsibility refers to a set of obligations a business establishment or an individual owes to the environment in which it operates. This ethical ideology enable entities to build rapport with the communities in which it operates and also offer appreciable compensation for the adverse effect its operation would bring to the community.

Some school of thought would express that higher returns on investment would morally compel entities to channel a chunk of it into their social responsibility. That’s true but on a scale of hundred, I would give twenty (20) to that childish thought. Corporate social responsibility is not about satisfying communities with bread crumbs, it is a matter of having the interest of the community in the first place, respecting the dignity and culture of the inhabitants, and designing ameliorating packages that would tackle relevant and sensitive situations in the community. To effectively realize this, social responsibility should be legally compulsory.

To start with, introducing legal instruments into social responsibility would ensure sanity and effective compliance to environmental standards. This calls for a well-resourced body to monitor the activities of entities, especially entities whose operations pose a greater threat to the society. This brings oil and gas, waste-management, mining, telecommunications, and lumbering businesses into mind. Failure to monitor firms of this kind makes the society susceptible to a lot of severe environmental hazards such as desertification, ozone layer depletion, land destruction, etc.

Also, it must be noted that social responsibility is more than doing something that would be beneficial to the society. If left voluntary, entities would channel resources into areas that would not only be cost effective to them, but also irrelevant to the needs of the people. For instance, imagine a company providing TV sets to a highly illiterate community. That’s why it is prudent for legal mechanisms to be instituted. A testimony of the effectiveness of making social responsibility legally compulsory is the BP oil spill. Not only did the environment agencies ensure that the BP executives clear the mess they created, but also an executive fiat came in to see to it that proper compensation packages are made to the affected communities.

To conclude, the Government of Ghana recognized the essence of this long ago and established the Environmental Protection Agency to protect, co-manage and enhance the environment of Ghana. This is a manifestation of the argument I’ve been making.