By Kevin Forster
President Zuma’s recent comments suggesting Jesus’s preference for the ANC should not be seen as an analogy taken out of context. It is an attempt to abuse the religious belief of the South African public. If the analogy ended after “when you vote for the ANC, you are also choosing to go to heaven. When you don’t vote for the ANC you should know that you are choosing that man who carries a fork … who cooks people” it might be claimed that he was likening a future under the ANC government to heaven and likening the opposition to the devil. Such an analogy would have been objectionable but explained away. However the quote doesn’t end there. The president went on to say “when you get up there, there are different cards used but when you have an ANC card, you will be let through to go to heaven”. This is where the problem really lies. If meant to be taken literally this amounts to a horrific manipulation of the Christianity of most of South Africa’s population, especially the poorest and least educated. If meant as an extension of the analogy it implies preferential treatment of ANC members under a future ANC government, and therefore condones corruption.
These statements, therefore, undermine both democracy and the Constitution. Our Constitution seeks to guarantee freedom of religion in South Africa through the separation of politics from religion. In fact, the guarantee of a secular state is the most important element to ensuring individual liberty. The French get this wrong by allowing secularism to interfere with liberty and the US seems to have forgotten about this, its founding tenant. Our democracy is young enough to remember this and we should fight for it fiercely. Our opposition has failed to do so.
The DA (unsurprisingly) condemned the statements as, among other things, offensive, and the ACDP condemned them as blasphemous. The DA (unsurprisingly) misses the point by doing this. Offense is a subjective thing, and people who hold unsubstantiated and largely refuted beliefs should be expect to be offended from time to time. And thankfully our Constitution protects our right to be blasphemous if we so choose, we can’t be expected to constrain our own behaviour to prevent the offence being caused to those who believe the irrational. Christ on a bike!
Premier Zille did no better in her response on the campaign trail. She is as guilty as the president, making the claim that there is only one God “and He loves us all”. This seemingly suggests that different religions are more like different denominations. Here she falls foul of another trap that the president falls into. They give irrational preference to one or several belief systems over others. President Zuma gives obvious preference to Christian beliefs and Premier Zille to monotheists. What of Hindus, atheists, agnostics and a host of other belief systems protected by our Constitution. Both have clearly undermined the Constitution to garner popular political support.
In this the Zuma administration proves that it is a real threat to democracy and to our freedom which, the ANC and others fought so hard to achieve. And Premier Zille proves how the DA is willing to compromise its liberal values to win local government elections. Regardless of our beliefs we must fight for secularism in politics to protect our right to freely choose and enjoy those beliefs.
Kevin is a public policy masters student at UCT, teaching assistant in the UCT department of political studies and a Southern and East African political analyst.
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