Because it is his bag, Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu has revealed that he intends to pray for Jacob Zuma. I don't think that it will help all that much, what with God's infinite impotence, but you can't fault the Arch for trying.
To his credit, Tutu did not announce his intentions to save Msholozi to the world at large, but had merely mentioned it as an aside to the National Planning Minister, Trevor Manuel, shortly after a small, intimate ceremony at Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden last week to honour the late Kader Asmal.
It's unclear whether he was aware of it, but Tutu's exchange with Manuel was filmed, and the video clip posted on the internet. In it, Tutu reveals that he told Manuel, "You don't belong in this government." The cleric then becomes more animated as he speaks about the state of the nation. "I've never been so close to tears. I can't believe that this is true. That we are where we are. I mean, things are revealed and it's as if someone said, ‘And so what?' We go on like nothing has happened. What the heck?
"What has happened to us? I mean, what has happened to us that we can just go on going on? Who in their right minds could have approved the expenditure of more than R200-million [for the upgrade at Zuma's Nkandla home]? And to do it in that area, where you have this nice place standing up and, just around there, the squalor and poverty. What is the matter with us?"
Manuel wasn't giving any answers. Perhaps he was embarrassed. He just grinned in that way that naughty boys do when they're being scolded by a batty aunt. And that's when Tutu told him to tell his boss that he was going to pray for Zuma the way that he had once prayed for the Nationalists. I don't know if Manuel passed on the message. He probably had other things on his mind.
Elsewhere, there was little sign that Tutu's threat was being taken seriously. Stuffy Jeremy Cronin, the SACP's deputy secretary general, has claimed that the press were more of a headache than an elderly cleric. Writing in Umsebenzi Online, he fulminated on about "neo-liberal media commissars" who were dumbing down policy documents and setting up "false oppositions" in a bid to divide the ANC ahead of tomorrow's Mangaung conference. Such original thinking. Little wonder the great jargonaut is the stupid communist's idea of a clever communist.
But back to praying. It was the legendary science fiction writer Robert A Heinlein who noted, "Men rarely (if ever) manage to dream up a god superior to themselves. Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child." This is certainly true of the sort of gods Zuma has chosen to follow, if one considers the conservative church leaders he has batting for him.
They include the pastorpreneur Ray McCauley, who helped found the National Religious Leaders' Forum shortly after Zuma took office in 2009 and then immediately began lobbying for the abolition of laws that offended their religious sensibilities, like the legalisation of abortion and same-sex marriages.
Then there were those clerics who, like business leaders, were greatly concerned that the president may have played a significant part in the loss of the country's moral compass. In a letter to Zuma, they warned that South Africans "yearn for a change from an increasingly corrupt political, business and societal culture to one that is accountable to the people."
Luckily, the president has Gwede Mantashe, the ANC's secretary general, to deal with upstarts like this, and the little terrier has wasted no time in dismissing such concerns as coming from those who would want to "manipulate" the outcome of events at Mangaung. "We see this [letter] as a mischievous warning," Mantashe said. "Sectors of society want a particular outcome . . . I don't think we should accept that." And naturally, they won't.
There is however very little Mantashe -- or anyone else, for that matter -- can do or say to change the fact that, under Zuma's stewardship, the ruling party's centenary year has been an epic disaster. What should have been a year of celebration has instead been a series of awful calamities: the country has suffered rising public protests, credit rating downgrades, massive education failures, embarrassing attempts to stifle media and artistic freedom and, to top it all, the massacre of 34 striking miners in the bloodiest police crackdown since the end of apartheid.
Prayer is not going to help anytime soon. Perhaps if they could dust off Manuel's National Development Plan, and devote some urgency to the implementation thereof, we may save Tutu a lot of trouble.
This article first appeared in The Weekend Argus.
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