No Divine Mandate

by Editor · January 22, 2017

This week’s editorial examines the claims by President Jacob Zuma that his party has been given a ‘divine right to rule’

Recently President Jacob Zuma clumsily admonished churches not to get involved in his business of politics, but he seems to regard himself as qualified to meddle in theirs.

Addressing a 105th birthday celebration event of the African National Congress in Soweto this month, Mr Zuma delivered a peculiar analogy between his party and the incarnation of the Saviour.

“We believers never forget that, just like the Son of Man who came to wash away all of our sins, the birth of the ANC happened to free the people who were oppressed. We will never forget that, just like we don’t forget Christmas,” Mr Zuma said

The president has a history of invoking the Christian faith to make a political point. In 2008 he predicted that “we [the ANC] will rule until Jesus comes back”, an assertion he repeated in July last year.

The absolute monarchs of old (and a few still today) justified their autocratic rule by claiming that the feudal caste system was willed by God, constituting a natural order.As we now know, there was no Second Coming after the ANC lost the metros of Johannesburg, Tshwane and Nelson Mandela Bay in the municipal elections in August.

His statements suggest that Mr Zuma believes that his party is ruling by some kind of divine right. One needs to be neither a theologian nor a political scientist to spot the flaws in this curious notion.

The absolute monarchs of old (and a few still today) justified their autocratic rule by claiming that the feudal caste system was willed by God, constituting a natural order. Those who opposed the principle of the aristocratic order’s divine right to rule were therefore seen as defying God.

When Mr Zuma invokes his party’s divine right to rule, he is proposing that voting against the ANC represents an act of defiance against God. That is an affront to South Africa’s believers and to our democracy.

If Mr Zuma really believes that the ANC is ruling by God’s mandate, then the party must subject itself to accountability before God. The ANC would have some difficulty explaining to God how its abortion law, for example, is reflecting his will, or how the looting of public funds—as even its own secretary-general describes it — by ANC appointees complies with the Seventh Commandment.

Mr Zuma’s idea of the ANC ruling by divine mandate is an alarming echo of the theological justifications for apartheid which were used by the National Party to propagate its evil system.

Unlike the Nats of old, Mr Zuma will not find a credible church willing to support his proposition that the ANC is specifically blessed by God. Indeed, many a scrupulous theologian may consider his claims blasphemous.

We doubt that Mr Zuma actually subscribes to his absurd claims of a divine mandate. It seems more likely that he engages in manipulative and hyperbolic oratory when he invokes God.

It is good to receive clerical blessings, but they grant no absolution from transgressions.In doing so, Mr Zuma loses sight of a striking paradox: during apartheid, the National Party’s propaganda machine portrayed the ANC as an entity in conflict with God and support for it as an act of impiety; today the leader of the ANC is employing the very same tactic against its opposition.

The irony goes further. When Mr Zuma claims a divine mandate on basis of the ANC having been blessed by pastors when it was founded, and by more pastors since then, he forgets that the founding father of apartheid was a man of the cloth, Dominee DF Malan.

It is good to receive clerical blessings, but they grant no absolution from transgressions.

There are many good reasons to cast one’s vote for and against any political party in South Africa, including the ANC. The Catholic Church does not endorse one party over another, though it may claim the prerogative to comment on specific policies which violate the Gospel or the Church’s teachings.

The Church, whose claims to discern God’s will are more credible than those of Mr Zuma, commends and encourages our democracy, and wants it to be strengthened further.

Mr Zuma’s near-blasphemous proclamations undermine our democracy in a bid to satisfy a hunger for power, and in doing so assails basic principles embraced by virtually all religions in South Africa.

The president would do well to adopt a bearing of humility before God, and offer the electorate good reasons why they should vote for his party — out of their free will.