Archbishop Makgoba: Zuma’s SA is entering its own ‘Zimbabwe Zombie’ moment.

During Apartheid, religious leaders were at the forefront of fighting racial segregation and helping to bring down the National Party regime. Fast forward more than 25 years and religious leaders again are finding themselves having to take sides as President Jacob Zuma brings one national crisis after another. Last night, Archbishop of Cape Town Thabo Makgoba, in his Easter Sunday Vigil, again called on Zuma to step down and for his crony network to be uprooted. Makgoba labels Zuma as “a president whose soul and integrity have been bought off”. The Archbishop asserts SA desperately needs moral leadership. He also addresses the controversy sparked by Western Cape Premier Helen Zille’s colonialism tweets by saying that colonialism was never acceptable and was intertwined with slavery. But Makgoba warns that a new form of colonialism has emerged in which a set of oppressors, in the pockets of corrupt paymasters, are just as great a risk to society. It’s a hard-hitting speech in which Makgoba also calls for a new economic discourse on how South Africa can start to eradicate poverty. – Gareth van Zyl.

Easter Vigil

St George’s Cathedral, Cape Town

The Most Reverend Thabo Makgoba, Archbishop of Cape Town

16 April 2017

Christ is risen, He is risen indeed! Alleluia! Happy Easter to you all.  

We come to this Easter Sunday, to this open and illuminated tomb, with the dark reality of our country very much at the forefront of our minds.

Over these Lenten days we have come to the lowest point in our political life. Like many, I feel that the dream of South Africa sometimes feels more like a nightmare, a prolonged Passiontide, so to speak. Personal interests, corruption, self-dealing, entitlement, public looting, a vicious contempt for the poor and the common good, a culture of blatant lies and cronyism—and possibly worse—dominate our public landscape.

This past week, the nightmare got worse as the full impact of the President’s recent actions unfolded. They have shattered our hopes for the kind of foreign investment which we desperately need to grow our economy and create new jobs. Their impact on consumer confidence and trust is immeasurable. Tens of thousands of jobs are directly affected by just a 10 percent drop in consumer confidence. If we cannot turn the situation around, at end of the road we are now on, we face the prospect of employees fired; shops shuttering; malls closing; the poor unable to afford bread, paraffin, electricity and the cost of burials; possible hyperinflation—it is as if we are entering the Zimbabwe Zombi moment.

In this hour we grieve because the words of GK Chesterton, used to such effect by Trevor Huddleston as apartheid’s grip intensified in the 1950s, are again apt now:

I tell you naught for your comfort,

Yea, naught for your desire,

Save that the sky grows darker yet

And the sea rises higher.

Many of us over the past days have felt a deep resonance with the gospel observation [in John 13:30] that when Judas left the room in which the disciples shared the Last Supper with Jesus, we are told “it was night.” Every time anyone turns their back on love, betrays the bonds of fellowship and steals from others, it is night! This is true for us in South Africa and indeed in so many, far too many, other parts of the world.

Our nightmare is similar to that under which the ancient Hebrews lived in tonight’s reading. In our case, while we aren’t being disadvantaged by colonial slavery any longer — and no matter what anyone says, colonialism was for most of us a form of slavery — while colonialism and apartheid are over, some of our institutions, part of our economy and some among our leaders have become slaves to a new generation of colonial oppressors.   moral and economic oppression. a president whose integrity, soul and heart have been bought off.

Yet, even as we survey this and the litany of other social pathologies that afflict our country and our world, we have in faith to say that even though it is absolutely true that darkness overwhelms us, the events at the tomb of Jesus on Easter Day signal a greater victory, a more abundant truth. At the heart of the message of the Resurrection of Jesus is the stubborn insistence that nothing is irrevocable.

No betrayal is final.

There is no loss that cannot be redeemed.

It is never too late to start again. As John Shea reminds us: “What the Resurrection teaches us is not how to live but how to live again and again!”

The promise of Easter can be likened to what I call the New Struggle in South Africa. In that struggle, the realisation of the promise of Easter is measured not only by how soon we replace the current administration, but by how well we ready ourselves for what comes next. How do we prepare ourselves for the future after the end of a deeply corrupt regime? After President Zuma has fallen, will those who benefit from his patronage fall too? Because if we change leaders but the patronage system that the current leadership has produced doesn’t change; if state-owned enterprises, the prosecution and law-enforcement agencies remain captured by corrupt interests, we are no better off.

The Resurrection doesn’t only recall the fact that God raised the body of Jesus from the dead. It certainly means that, but it also means that that power raises us from the multiple tombs that hold us in captivity. In one of the last days leading up to the Passion we read that wonderful story, that precursor of Easter Sunday, when Jesus, having wept at the tomb of Lazarus, also called him out of the tomb. He challenged him to leave the places of death and to walk away from its shadows.

Over the past days, as we have recalled how Jesus called Lazarus to leave an environment that offered him no future, hundreds of thousands of South Africans have issued the same challenge to those in public life. Ordinary South Africans, in their places of work, in their places of worship, and tens of thousands of them on the streets, have issued a call to our political leaders. They have called on them to come out from the places that hold them in bondage to the death of greed, in bondage to the lust for and the seduction of power, in bondage to the shadow of moral corruption that has enveloped South Africa.

Ordinary South Africans have called to their leaders, just as Jesus did to Lazarus: Come out! Come out of the tomb! To those who are economically, socially and morally deaf; to those who ignore the crisis of distrust that has cast the longest and darkest shadow our great country has ever seen in the democratic era, ordinary South Africans have said:

Don’t stay in places that will pull us all into a culture that wounds or kills us.

Don’t be overtaken by the culture into which our President and some of our elected officials have descended.

Don’t ignore the pleas, cries and profound sense of pain and suffering that plague our wonderful and beautiful nation.

If Resurrection is about the fact that good will triumph over evil, justice over injustice, hope over despair, then part of that resurrection dynamic means, for us, that we call out the dead and those who deal in death, that we remind them that their destiny is to be in the Upper Room, that place where new life emerges, where the power to restore is released and where joy is glimpsed amidst even the residual sadness..

What does being obedient to Jesus and following in his footsteps entail this Easter? What does it mean for us to imitate his voice in our own Lazarus moment? What are our obligations as citizens, all of us with equal rights and responsibilities under the Constitution? You’ve heard me say this before: our destiny is not a matter of chance. It is a matter of choice. 

Your choice. My choice. Our choice.

South Africa needs real leaders who must be ready to sacrifice all to ensure dignity, equality, opportunity and freedom for all of our people. We cannot and should not ever be afraid to raise our voices for honesty, truth and compassion, and against injustice and lying and greed.

It is time to take sides.

Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Nothing strengthens authority as much as silence. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.

As Archbishop Emeritus Desmond has said, “If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.”We need to rise up, to stand up and speak up for our rights, our children’s rights and our grandchildren’s rights.

We are God’s engineers and everything of meaning and importance that we have accomplished in the past 24 years has been the result of refusing to be stopped by the walls that divide us, and demonstrating our ability to be exceptional bridge builders.

Let the different interest groups and elements of our society which are committed to these ideals — whether rich or poor, whether black, white, coloured or Indian, whether Christian, Communist, Muslim, Hindu or Jew — let us all find one another in a powerful, united coalition which puts first the interests of the poor and thereby the interests of all of us.

 

While the Mandela and Mbeki administrations made mistakes — among them, shutting down dissent from within the ANC’s parliamentary caucus — their record shows that if government pulls together representatives of different interest groups, we can find rational, workable solutions to our most difficult problems. In this New Struggle, let us reject the participation of white racists who don’t believe that black people are capable of running a country or an economy. They are not welcome on marches and protests. Let us also not be distracted by hurtful and anachronistic comments on colonialism. Let us also reject those who want an unequal, tribal, sexist and racialized South Africa, and who exploit the views of a minority of racists to portray their opponents as stooges and to threaten white compatriots for exercising their civic rights.

To all politicians—Mr President, Honourable Members of Parliament, Madam Premier—we appeal to all of you to rise above your petty everyday squabbles and obsessions and to recognise this as a turning point in our history. Let’s move from a ME orientation to a WE orientation.

My father once gave me a very important lesson: You can, he said, if you think you can. It’s just a matter of removing the apostrophe and the “t” from can’t. 

I want to issue a special challenge to our MPs tonight: when you are called upon to decide on whether you have confidence in our President, vote for the country’s future, and not for your own pockets. You should know that:

South Africa will be watching.

The world will be watching.

Vote your conscience.

There is something particularly poignant in Matthew’s account of the Resurrection. The greatest news in all history, the turning point in human affairs, the testimony to the relentless love of God so much stronger than even death, is entrusted to Mary Magdalene and the other Mary. It is entrusted to two women, to people who in the first place had the courage to confront the power of death by going to the tomb and, as it were, taking on that seemingly immutable power. The Good News of the Gospel was announced to those who in the culture of the time were marginalised and often discriminated against, the victims of abuse, poor and unnecessarily burdened.

Resurrection narratives are entrusted to those who do not shrink before the challenges of history and are not cowered by what seems insurmountable, strong and unchanging..

At this moment in our history, where we are faced with hard choices that take us out of our comfort zones, we need to hear Jesus’s resurrection words: “Be not afraid, go and tell.”

In closing, let me share with each of you a very personal message, from my heart to yours: God loves you and so do I.

God bless you, God bless your family, and God bless South Africa. May it be so at this challenging Easter time. Alleluia!