Online Reporter
Communion with Bishop Lazarus
Howdy folks.
Bishop Lazi is back.
He hopes you had restful, blessed and fulfilling holidays that were full of merriment, camaraderie, measured indulgence and everything that made your heart content.
Oftentimes, a deserved year-end therapeutic break is needed to restore our balance and sanity, particularly in today’s world that can be gratingly enervating to the mind, body and soul through the inherent workaday struggles of both living and surviving.
For special beings such as Bishop Lazarus who are deeply spiritual, holidays are immeasurably important insofar as they regenerate the spirit and inspire the ability to presciently look into the future. No doubt, the new year is going to be interesting — politically, that is — what with developments locally, regionally and internationally.
You see, no matter how much we might be unenthused by politics, it is inextricably linked to our daily lives.
In fact, in all its iterations and forms, it is like the sun around which our lives revolve — the be-all and end-all of life of earth.
Dousing the flames in Mozambique
Tomorrow — when Donald Trump takes an oath of office as the 47th President of the United States, and arguably the most powerful and influential person on earth — is perhaps the biggest day in world politics.
Through the sheer power that it wields, the US can make war and peace, and influence the global political and economic weather and climate, which have a bearing and impact on all our lives, including ordinary wananchi in this part of the world.
Trump’s inauguration will be the second such political pageantry that we will be witnessing in a space of six days, especially after Cde Daniel Chapo of Mozambique assumed office on Wednesday, January 15, last week.
Interestingly, like Chapo, who was sworn in almost 100 days after the October 9, 2024 election, Trump will also be moving into the Oval Office 76 days after the November 5, 2024 vote.
The peculiarities of the US electoral system, unlike parliamentary democracies where members of cabinet are drawn from parliament, mean the incoming administration has to recruit talent scattered across the constellation of 50 states, making it a long-drawn-out process.
Initially, the transitional period between the incoming and outgoing administration in the US covered the November-March period to give ample time to move people and resources around the vast country at a time when such processes were slow.
This was, however, reviewed through the 20th Amendment to the American constitution in 1933, which set the new inauguration date on January 20 (or January 21, when the date falls on a Sunday).
Remember, this was around the time of the Great Depression, which forced policymakers to resolve to swear in newly elected leaders more quickly to deal with the urgent business of the day.
The “lame duck” period, where no one is in effective control of the instruments of power, is a delicate period characterised by a power vacuum that can be exploited by opportunists — typically those who would have lost elections — to foment trouble.
We saw this on January 6, 2021 in the US when a mob that was displeased by Joe Biden’s electoral victory over then-incumbent Trump besieged Capitol Building to prevent certification of the results.
It resulted in death of six people, including a 35-year-old woman, Ashli Babbitt, who was fatally shot by a security agent while trying to climb through a broken window leading to the Speaker’s Lobby inside the Capitol.
By their very nature, elections, which more often than not, are characterised by brutal and bristling contestations, usually leave in their wake dejected and sore losers who, with sufficient prompting and incitement, can be willing instruments of violence.
You should have seen the meltdown of Democratic Party supporters after Trump’s historic and unexpected electoral win in November, as they struggled to process the fact that more than 77,3 million Americans had voted for a candidate they believed was as abominable as he was unelectable.
Closer to home, we also saw what happened in neighbouring Mozambique, where the main opposition candidate, Venâncio Mondlane, knowing full well he was not going to win the elections, pre-emptively disputed the outcome even before a single vote had been cast.
In a period after the October 9 elections, he whipped up emotions among his supporters and incited them to protest, resulting in egregious violence that claimed lives and destroyed properties and livelihoods.
Unfortunately, Mozambique found itself in an awkward political situation and interregnum characterised by a lame duck outgoing president (Filipe Nyusi), who was running on empty in terms of political capital, and an incoming president who did not yet fully control the levers of power.
All told, close to 300 Mozambicans needlessly lost their lives through the senseless post-election violence that was instigated, orchestrated and egged on by the shameless losing candidate, Mondlane.
In neighbouring Botswana, Duma Boko did not take any chances, as he took his oath of office just hours after being declared the winner of the October 30 elections. Kikikiki.
So, as 47-year-old Chapo, who is a lawyer by training, begins his reign as the fifth President of the Republic of Mozambique after Samora Machel, Joaquim Chissano, Armando Guebuza and Nyusi — and one with the happy distinction of being that country’s first President to be born after independence from Portugal on June 25, 1975 — he might find it worthwhile to relook at such constitutional provisions that make the State vulnerable.
Encouragingly, on January 9 this year, his predecessor, Nyusi, and leaders of the other four political parties (Renamo, Podemos, New Democracy and MDM) had already created technical working teams to discuss state reforms, including mulled changes to the electoral law and the constitution.
As President ED counselled last year: “The constitution doesn’t make the country. It’s the country which makes the constitution. As long as your constitution is serving you well, keep it.
If it’s not serving you well, you sit down and amend the provisions that no longer serve the interests of the country.”
And this is what the US did in 1933.
The constitution was made for man; man was not made for the constitution.
Mark 2:23-27 was instructive.
“One Sabbath Jesus was going through the grainfields, and as his disciples walked along, they began to pick some heads of grain. The Pharisees said to him, ‘Look, why are they doing what is unlawful on the Sabbath?’
“He answered, ‘Have you never read what David did when he and his companions were hungry and in need? In the days of Abiathar the high priest, he entered the house of God and ate the consecrated bread, which is lawful only for priests to eat. And he also gave some to his companions.’
“Then he said to them, ‘The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. So, the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.’”
The bane on Western liberal democracy
From what has happened in America, the United Kingdom and the Sahel region in recent history and of late, where elections seem to split people asunder rather than unite them, often exploding in bouts of violence, it might be pertinent to examine the efficacy of this animal called Western liberal democracy that was foisted on us.
Even some of its crusaders now seem disillusioned.
In a speech on October 30 last year, former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo was emphatic that Western liberal democracy was not working in and for Africa.
“I have always been talking about Western liberal democracy; it is not working for us; it is not even working for those who gave it to us. The British were complaining. We must rethink democracy,” he said during a valedictory service in Ogun State.
“We must bring our own culture into democracy. African culture does not talk about opposition; it talks about communalism; you come together, reason together, iron it out, and then you work together.”
This is quite rich, especially coming as it does from a former Head of State, and one who has been doing the bidding of the Brenthurst Foundation, a creation of the neo-liberal Oppenheimer family, the founders of Anglo American Plc.
Ghanaian philosopher and scholar Kwasi Wiredu did a lot of work to show the incompatibility of democracy — particularly majoritarian democracy — as a means of decision-making and governance with the nature of traditional African life.
For him, a better alternative for decision-making in traditional African life and governance was consensus (or consensual democracy).
Wiredu argues that despite the complexities of contemporary African life, consensual non-party precedents of traditional African politics are still usable and indispensable. In one of his essays, “Democracy and Consensus in African Traditional Politics: A Plea for a Non-Party Polity”, he cites the Ashanti empire of Ghana as a society that practised such a system.
“Ashanti system was a consensual democracy,” he wrote.
“It was a democracy because government was by the consent, and subject to the control of the people as expressed through the representatives. It was consensual because, at least, as a rule, that consent was negotiated on the principle of consensus.”
So, we need to decolonise our thoughts and political systems, and adapt them to models that best deliver our goals and aspirations.
How we organise our society and systems will ultimately determine our success or failure.
Democracy is what we say it is.
Bishop out!
