The Pastor, the Politician, and the Pursuit of Moral Leadership
Last week, COPE Parliamentary leader Rev. Mvume Dandala led a no-confidence vote against President Jacob Zuma. Topping Dandala's list of allegations of failed leadership was Zuma's "repeated risky sexual behaviour, thus weakening the crucial fight against HIV/Aids and setting a poor example."
Dandala's grievances remind me, as an American citizen, of the Republican-led impeachment in 1998 of the Democratic U.S. President Bill Clinton for his affair with Monica Lewinsky, a twenty-something White House intern. Suspicious of the Republicans' motives, I was, at the time, skeptical of his opponents' criticism: that Clinton's private failings irreparably crippled his effectiveness as a public leader. Two subsequent, and intertwined, experiences, however, have served to modify my previous thinking on the question of the relationship between private and public integrity in the moral realm.
I watched the ascent of Barack Obama to the presidency of the United States through the lens of my experience in South Africa. In Obama I saw, for the first time, a prominent political leader seemingly in touch with my most cherished moral values: a husband genuinely in love with his beautiful wife and children; a critic of the evils of empire, as seen through his autobiography Dreams from My Father; a churchman who, in spite of the politically-necessary maneuvering away from his controversial but brilliant spiritual mentor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Jr., must have shared something of the latter's passion for Jesus as God's agent of good news to the poor. In fact, it was Wright who, in video footage played during his interview with journalist Bill Moyers in April 2008, described the social reality against which Obama's eventual position at the seat of national power acquires its moral significance. In the footage Wright describes the plight of African American youth.
"You can't be whatcha ain't seen. And so many of our young boys haven't seen nothing but the gangs and the pimps and the brothers on the corner. They've never sat and talked to lawyers, they've never sat and talked to a man, a black man, with 2, 3 degrees! They've never had a chance, they've never had an option in terms of thinking I could do this? I can be this? They see a doctor when they're sick. They don't get to sit and talk--me go to med school? They don't talk to somebody who writes programs and analyzes systems and computers. A black guy? I can do this? I can--never have their horizons lifted."
In the context of the scarcity of responsible male leadership before the eyes of African American youth, the visibility of Obama's success--in the family, in the workplace--carries an incalculable social effect. Likewise, wherever South African men are taught to express their manhood through the objectification of women, Zuma, through the visibility afforded him by his high position, has real power to begin the reversal of destructive trends in South African society--if only he embodied an alternative manhood. Dandala has recognized precisely that.
Nevertheless, one also wonders if--or perhaps is it why?--the reverend is looking to the state president to begin that great reversal. Zuma's great visibility is effectual only in the absence of attractive alternatives. The president's visibility is still viewed from afar; it pales in the light of the love shared between man and woman, parent and child, within the home. More than politicians, pastors, rooted in the midst of the people, are equipped to begin construction of a new society--if they too "lead a life worthy of the calling to which [they] have been called" (Eph. 4:1).
