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”.