09146
February 26, 2009

Prominent clerics nominated to head breakaway South African party

by Hans Pienaar
Ecumenical News International

JOHANNESBURG ― The former general secretary of the All Africa Conference of Churches, the Rev. Mvume Dandala, 57, has been nominated as the presidential candidate of a breakaway faction of South Africa’s ruling African National Congress in the country’s April 22 elections.

Also, Professor Russel Botman, the rector of Stellenbosch University and the former president of the South African Council of Churches, is the nominee of the Congress of the People (COPE) for the premiership of the Western Cape, a province that the ANC could lose control of in the April elections.

The COPE party was formed in December after Thabo Mbeki was made to step down as president in September 2008.

Dandala, who is also a former head of the Methodist Church in Southern Africa, is seen as a compromise candidate between COPE’s founders, former defense minister Mosiua Lekota and former Gauteng provincial premier Mbhazima Shilowa.

Dandala is also seen as a trump card as COPE beats an anti-corruption drum in the wake of a fraud scandal involving former ANC spokesperson Carl Niehaus, who says he is an ordained minister.
 
Largely unknown on the South African political scene, Dandala returned to South Africa barely two months ago after a five-year stint in Nairobi at the AACC. He first made his name as a peacemaker in the 1990s township wars between Zulu nationalist migrants and ANC-aligned units in the East Rand gold mining area near Johannesburg.
   
As presiding bishop of the Methodist church, he became a voice against the Robert Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe, and the South African government’s refusal to acknowledge scientific facts on the HIV and AIDS pandemic. A staunch believer in unifying Africans, he also promoted the use of African customs, including ancestor worship and new liturgies, in the Methodist Church in Southern Africa.

COPE’s general secretary Charlotte Lobe said on Feb. 19: “COPE stands for clean governance that efficiently delivers service to the people.” She said Dandala represented honesty, hard work and family values.

In the Cape provincial election Botman could face the Cape Town mayor, Helen Zille, a long-standing anti-apartheid activist in the Black Sash woman’s movement. She is leader of the Democratic Alliance, a party whose leadership has been labeled as “too white” by its opponents.

Zille on Feb. 19 called for the withdrawal of the ANC’s nominee for president, Jacob Zuma, who faces multiple corruption charges, saying his presidency of the country could be unconstitutional.

There had been some speculation in media reports in that Dandala was being thought of as a possible successor to the Rev. Samuel Kobia, a Kenyan Methodist who is general secretary of the Geneva-based World Council of Churches. Kobia’s successor is to be named at the end of August.