Dehydrated and exhausted, I’m writing from my hospital bed, because I felt I needed to when all this came to mind, and share it with my family, friends and all the people of the Western Cape. These past few months have been hard, but not as hard as these past few days. But my Father is in Control…
I hope this letter finds you well, in troubled times, in our province and our country, but I return to the Western Cape from Limpopo filled with hope and optimism for the future of our country. The Economic Freedom Fighters continues to grow, and that augurs well for our constitutional democracy, especially for the poor, the landless and the alienated. I write this to you to ask for your reinforcement of the mandate that we will receive from people all over this country on voting day.
This elections period has seen both the ANC and the DA deploy the language of religious and political iconography to distract you from the truth or emotionally blackmail your votes out of you. By pointing to the sky, they have kept your eyes off the material conditions around you – the lack of sanitation, services and proper housing, the poverty, the alienation, the crime, gangs and drugs – material conditions that directly and indirectly affect the majority of us, but mainly the poorest of us.
Jacob Zuma says that the ANC will rule until Jesus comes again, while the DA has chosen to advertise that Nelson Mandela will smile on you from Heaven if you vote for them. In both cases these parties use deities, both religious and political, as a fig leaf to cover up their individual and systemic failures in governance and opposition. Jacob Zuma is no prophet, and Mmusi is no messiah.
If Jacob Zuma is right, then it may well be that the Economic Freedom Fighters would be the harbinger of Jesus’ arrival. Faced with possible Kingmaker status in municipalities in Gauteng, the Son of Man may well land in Tshwane, stop-over in Johannesburg, before embarking on a nationwide tour of the various councils and wards where the ruling party would be relegated to the opposition.
Of course, JZ’s reckless pronouncements of divine mandate say much more about his own God complex as Number One and should not be taken literally, because it implies that absent, corrupt or dysfunctional public representatives working in a system that is ethically biased against the poor has some sort of celestial endorsement.