Archbishop criticises Zuma: CEN 7.03.09 p 7. July 3, 2009
Posted by geoconger in Anglican Church of Southern Africa, Church of England Newspaper, Politics.trackback
The Archbishop of Cape Town has called for South Africa’s political leaders to move on from the victim mindset of the apartheid-era, and respond to the country’s current needs rather than its past injustices.
“We do not deny our past, but we are not its prisoners. We live in a context where the bondage is over, and God’s comfort has been made real to us,” Archbishop Thabo Makgoba said June 26 at the Annual Naught for your Comfort Award ceremony held at Sophiatown’s Christ the King Church.
“It is our turn to be channels of his comfort,” he said, urging South Africa’s leadership to move beyond their “comfort zone” and address the needs of the present.
Archbishop Makgoba also responded to claims made by President Jacob Zuma last week at an ANC rally in Mpumalanga that the ANC “will rule until the Son of Man comes”.
“He must come back while we are still in power,” President Zuma said.
While President Zuma has the right to hope South African voters will choose an ANC government “until Jesus comes again,”, his prediction that that ANC would rule South Africa forever was “unfortunate, anachronistic, and potentially dangerous,” Archbishop Makgoba said.
The president was within his rights under South Africa’s guarantees of freedom of religion to claim Jesus for the ANC, but “to speak of ruling ‘until the end of time as we know it’ was a political, rather than religious matter,” he said.
One-party rule had brought “enormous poverty and suffering” to Africa, the Archbishop said reflected a “1960s or ‘70’s view of our continent,” that ignored the democratic advances made in the past thirty years expressed in the African Union’s declaration on democracy, political, economic and corporate governance.
“And, finally, the president’s predictions of unending ANC rule are potentially dangerous,” he said. “They might encourage those who have a strong stake in — and economic motives for — prolonging ANC rule indefinitely, and tempt them to take unconstitutional action to preserve it.”
Archbishop Makgoba called for social justice for the new South Africa that went beyond the political slogans of past generations. “Many of us grew up with one big simple question, for the church and for the country, to which there was one big simple answer – the end of apartheid. Now, in both politics and faith, we have to deal with complicated and diverse issues, with no big simple answers – and we are not used to the new mindset this requires. You might even say, it takes us outside our comfort zone.”
“For democratic life is messy,” the archbishop said.
“But, for us who are new to it, it can be confusing, and unsettling, as the tides of politics ebb and flow, and personalities and politicians come and go. And often devout and deep-thinking Christians are divided on all manner of issues from the death penalty through to the best way to tackle poverty. But we should not be discouraged. God can work in this democratic world as easily as in the bad old days – for nowhere is outside God’s comfort zone,” he said.
It’s interesting how the Indian church deals with possible deception so differently from the American church. In the US, when it was discovered that Presiding Bishop Katherine Jefferts Schori’s curriculum vitae on the document introducing them as candidates for the post of Presiding Bishop contained some rather imaginitive material, I don’t believe there was any protest whatsoever from within the church. I guess the Indian church still holds “truth” as a higher value than “respect of church leaders,” which I find healthy.