When Floyd Shivambu travelled to Malawi to spend Good Friday with the charlatan Shepherd Bushiri at his place of business — a sort of farm where humans are milked for money and yet which the press still inexplicably describes as a “church” — it was clearly a meeting of kindred souls.
Not everyone, however, is happy about this mash-up of the sacred and the profane, or at least of the profane and the much more profane.
As the uMkhonto We Sizwe party scrambled to distance itself from the event, justice and constitutional development minister Mmamoloko Kubayi denounced the meeting as a “blatant act of disrespect towards South Africa’s legal system”, and as the woman tasked with making Phala Phala go away forever, she clearly knows a blatant act of disrespect towards the legal system when she sees one.
With all due respect to these critics, however, I wonder if they’ve considered the possibility that they are mired in old-fashioned thinking and that Shivambu is 10 steps ahead, courting the most valuable demographic in the coming decades: religious disciples of earthly corruption.
Of course, politicians have always been drawn to the fertile soil of religion, not least because religious people tend to do a lot of the work for them, whether by organising themselves into large groups or training their children from infancy to listen to men claiming to be telling them objective truths. Cynics might also argue that the religious are low-hanging fruit for politicians because, by definition, they prize belief without evidence and generally expect to be rewarded only after they die.
To the likes of Shivambu, these people — who have trained themselves not only to deny their own moral upbringing and reality as a whole but to believe that reality’s advocates are minions of Beelzebub — are priceless.
These, of course, are uncharitable generalisations: we all know believers who expect godly codes of conduct from their leaders, and who are appalled by how few of them seem to have read the bits about rich men and camels and eyes of needles.
Still, it is also a fact that within these huge movements there are many who have joined not to get closer to their god but to sidle up to the hot, dirty fire of worldly power, or who, because they are desperately poor, are willing to ignore the vast moral failures of their god-kings on the off chance they might be blessed with magical cash.
It is these hollowed-out congregations that create so many of spectacles of hypocrisy or self-abasement that haunt history, whether white South African Christians quoting the bible to justify apartheid, American Evangelicals demonstrating that sexual abuse isn’t a crime if you’re owning the libs, or Bushiri’s followers watching him grow vastly wealthy off their meagre pennies and yet giving him even more.
To the likes of Shivambu, these people — who have trained themselves not only to deny their own moral upbringing and reality as a whole but to believe that reality’s advocates are minions of Beelzebub — are priceless.
But it’s not just the guarantee of forever-voters and an endless supply of cash. There’s an even bigger reward, and one that will become more evident, I believe, in the coming years.
It is, simply, that if you win the amoral religious vote, you win an electorate that doesn’t believe in the authority of earthly powers.
The investigators and prosecutors who expose your messiah; the judges who sentence him; the prison that holds him: none are legitimate. And when he inevitably has a revelation that you need to storm the prison and whisk him to his jet, well, is he asking you commit a crime or is he offering you a chance to serve God?
A blatant act of disrespect, maybe. But Shivambu clearly doesn’t plan to wait for the afterlife to know paradise.
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