FIKILE-NTSIKELELO MOYA | Don't trust Mogoeng Mogoeng with SA's secular future

News that former chief justice Mogoeng Mogoeng intends to run for the presidency of the country should be concerning to all who value freedoms that come with being a secular society. 

First, let us dispense with what should be obvious. Everyone is entitled to run for public office, including Mogoeng. We all have the right to believe or not believe. 

Everyone is entitled to practise their faith without needing to explain themselves to anyone, except where the exercise of that right objectively impacts negatively on others. We also have to congregate around shared opinions and agitate for their place in society.

It is also worth noting that Mogoeng has not as yet publicly accepted All African Alliance Movement nomination and is said to be still praying about it.

With that out of the way, we have to take a hearty look at the self-serving delusions among many on the Christian right that the problems we have in SA are as a result of the post-1994 state choosing to be a secular rather than the Christian state the racist Nationalist Party imagined itself to be.

It is trite that SA has many challenges that suggest that ours is a state with questionable morals and values.

Thieves, some of them in party political regalia and sitting in law-making houses,  murderers and rapists seem to be enjoying themselves. Simple rules such as stopping at a traffic light or paying for services you consume seem an option one is free to take or reject.

I can sympathise with the view that some of these frustrations can be overcome by normalising a culture of higher moral values that most faith organisations – particularly those that have a version of the Golden Rule: Do unto others what you would like them do to you – embrace.

That, however, does not mean that we must have a religious leader as head of state, especially not one that is as multicultural as SA is.

The desire for a person like Mogoeng to lead the state comes from the nostalgic, but ultimately faulty, belief that SA was a more virtuous place when it was a so-called Christian country.

By every indication, it was not. The very state was the chief agent of mass murders. It divided people on random lines such as skin colour or hair texture and dispensed privileges and rights according to these.

While it is possibly true that law enforcement was more effective during apartheid rule than it is now, it is untrue that schoolchildren and the youth were a lot more respectful of their teachers and older people than is the case today.

Let us not even start with the pretence that the concept of teenage pregnancy is an aberration that has come about with the post-1994 dispensation.

It will be dangerous to have as public policy, the right to beat up children because your religious text says not doing so would cause them to grow to be antisocial.

Imagine entrusting the nation’s future to men and women who understand that descriptions of their deity as a “rock” or a “shepherd” are metaphoric but insist that a line that says “spare the rod and spoil the child” could only be interpreted literally instead of it encouraging parents to instil discipline in their children.

Religious organisations play an important role in the life of any society.

But that does not mean they have a right to impose their values on anyone.

In fact, the very notion of loving your neighbour demands that you respect their rights and choices of how to live so long as such choices do not adversely affect others.

Mogoeng is a particularly  problematic person to be head of state. He has shown rank anti-intellectualism and an abhorrent grasp of theology and geopolitics as shown by his reducing the deadly Covid virus to a religious conspiracy revealed in the sacred texts of his faith and his conflating the biblical state of Israel with the current political entity.

We just cannot have a head of state who appeals to private revelation or appeals to the dictates of his faith when formulating public policy.

It can only end badly either for those who elected him and expected him to play that role or for the rest of society.

Mogoeng must be allowed to stand for high office but the electorate must send a strong message to him and everyone else on a religious sectarian ticket that our collective values transcend our religious affiliations.