TOM EATON | For Muthambi and her ilk, there is but one god and it ain’t in heaven

Faith Muthambi, the patron saint of unemployable cadres who somehow still have highly lucrative jobs, has hope for those who want to blur the distinction between church and state.

On Tuesday evening, religious leaders denounced the new lockdown regulations, telling a governmental portfolio committee that they unfairly target the faithful.

I assume they said this because none of them know any actors or musicians. If they did, they would understand that right now they look like casino owners bathing in asses’ milk, compared to those artists staring at complete ruin as their industries suffer massive and possibly permanent damage.

Still, lobbyists gotta lobby, even holy ones, and on Tuesday evening they did their best, insisting that they should have been consulted in any lockdown decisions.

And this time, their prayers were answered with a voice that came not from a burning bush but rather out of the burning dumpster that is national government.

So what could be the harm in patronising some religious people by hinting that you might allow them to share power? After all, what is God next to the ANC?

According to News24, Muthambi was sympathetic to their pleas, telling them: “It is high time that the religious sector participates in the lawmaking process.”

At first glance, this seems like a very odd thing for a politician in a secular democracy to say.

By definition, religious leaders don’t believe that human laws are the highest authority: to the genuinely faithful, the constitution is simply a seat-warmer, keeping things ticking over until the real laws — God’s laws — get enshrined as the law of the land. So why on Earth would Muthambi want to include people in a process whose outcome they hold in such low regard?

To be clear, I don’t think Muthambi is trying to dismantle the barrier between church and state because she’s religious. In fact, she almost certainly doesn’t believe in God. We know this because when she took a solemn vow to be a good and dutiful communications minister, she said “So help me God”, and then proceeded to put Hlaudi Motsoeneng in charge of the SABC.

I do think, however, that Muthambi is a devout believer in another sort of religion, one which she and her fellow worshippers have been imposing on the South African state for many years now, and which they all clearly believe is the highest power in the universe: the secular church of the ANC.

It is this faith that told her it was righteous to raise Jacob Zuma above the constitution and to destroy the national broadcaster; that forgave her for sharing state secrets with the Guptas, even as they hollowed out our democratic institutions.

No, for Muthambi and her ilk there is but one god, and it lives at Luthuli House. So what could be the harm in patronising some religious people by hinting that you might allow them to share power? After all, what is God next to the ANC?