South African Cardinal prays for the outcome of elections
(Vatican Radio) The people of South Africa go to the polls on Wednesday, 7 May 2014
to vote in the nation’s fifth general elections which also celebrate 20 years since
the end of apartheid.
The African National Congress (ANC), in power since the
end of apartheid in 1994, is expected to win almost 64 percent in the vote. However
serious issues such as soaring unemployment, poverty, the high HIV rate, illegal immigration
and corruption – especially evident within the political classes - as well as the
echoes of apartheid which still resonate in many sectors of public life, shed light
on the downfalls and incapacities of the ruling party to live up to the promise of
a well governed “Rainbow nation”.
The electoral campaign has highlighted much
disillusionment amongst the people and there are fears that many will not even cast
their hard-won votes.
As the Archbishop of Durban, South African Cardinal
Wilfrid Fox Napier points out, there is also the risk of intimidation as people go
to the polls and a widespread loyalty towards to the ruling party which is often
seen as an embodiment of Nelson Mandela’s ideals, and still stands for “liberation”
notwithstanding its questionable performance in the past 20 years.
Speaking
to Vatican Radio’s Linda Bordoni, Cardinal Napier says he hopes that “people will
have matured enough to know that their vote is secret, their vote is precious, and
that it is up to them to decide where they want to place that vote”.
Listen
to the interview…
Cardinal Napier
says voters “should not be intimidated by people who tell them they know what vote
they will or have cast”. Secondly – he says – “people should vote not so much for
traditional reasons – I’ve always voted for this party – but rather for what is going
to serve the common good the most, or the most effectively”.
The Cardinal says
that Freedom Day, the day that celebrates the first democratic election in 1994, was
set aside as a “Day of Prayer” in view of the upcoming election. It was a day designated
for prayers throughout the country in order to “re-energize” what was there 20 years
ago “when we were in crisis and we felt that the only way to find a way out of this
crisis was for us to have recourse to God, and to have Him on our side, to have Him
present among us”.
“I think the day of prayer this year is going
to have the same effects – says Cardinal Napier - because it is going to be the people
on the margins, the women’s sodalities, the small groups that meet regularly; it’s
going to be those same people who are going to be praying and God listens to those
prayers because he knows they come from the heart, from people who say ‘we are praying
because we need God in our lives’ rather than ‘because we want a miracle to be done
for us’”.
Thinking back to the first democratic election in 1994 Cardinal
says: “it was a very special time for us: Africa at its Best was the way the transition
took place in South Africa. The one country where people expected the changeover from
one regime to another would have been nothing but a bloodbath, and here it was – the
smoothest that had ever taken place”.
Cardinal Napier concludes that “It is
with gratitude to God – because I know that many, many simple, ordinary people had
prayed. The women had set aside Thursday as the Day to Pray for Peace in South Africa.
And I attribute the changeover in the way it took place to those prayers”.