Johannesburg- Dear Mogoeng Thomas Reetsang Mogoeng, beloved son, in whom I am well pleased.
Receive this heavenly epistle with an attitude of gratitude.
In former times, I communicated with your ancestors through nightmares, ominous signs and bad omens.
More recently, I increasingly rely on the prophets who roam the spiritual realms of the social and broadcast media platforms. Some among these get so carried away, I am tempted to come and carry them away one by one.
They indulge in rituals that I would
never associate with any of my three holy names – petrol sipping, snake tasting and grazing on the grass.
This is why I am seeking to thuma wena (send you) now my dear Thomas, son of Goo-Mokgatlha, Zeerust.
Unbeknown to your malicious inquisitors who masqueraded as job interview panellists, early in September (2011), I had already anointed and appointed you as chief justice of the country.
High up in my heavenly abode, I chuckled when one Van der Merwe asked you, on that day, if you believed that I, the Lord your God, wanted you to become chief justice. What a redundant question!
With firmness and certitude, you answered Van der Merwe like someone who has been born again and again. Even my very wealthy servant, David Ayedepo, founder of Winners Chapel International of Ogun in Nigeria, to whose spiritual care I have entrusted you, couldn’t have done better.
After an initial period in which your religious exuberance was somewhat subdued, shortly after your appointment as chief justice, you slowly gathered speed and showed them flames.
In the churches of the land, in parliament and in the courts of the country, you elegantly bore witness to my glory.
In 2015, you instructed the prevaricating government to arrest Omar al-Bashir of Sudan as decreed by the International Criminal Court, or else…
Inspired by the Holy Ghost, you led the charge in that unanimous landmark Constitutional Court ruling on Nkandla, which found former president Jacob Zuma to have broken the oath of his office and parliament to have failed in its oversight role. Those who once called you a Zuma lackey ate humble pie.
But on no day have you made your God Almighty prouder than on Tuesday, May 28 2019. Resplendent in the regal green, red and white colours of your high office, you turned that heathen house of parliament – site of many brawls and insults – into a place of worship and prayer.
On this day you taught parliamentarians, who were about to be sworn in, both how to meditate purposefully and how to pray with passion.
While the non-believers, atheists and agnostics among them hung their heads in shameful silence, you fell onto your knees, with your hands up in the air, your powerful voice soaring above all others, you prayed fanatically, in tongues. And I said to myself, what a wonderful son!
As you would expect from your God Almighty, I had advanced knowledge about Covid-19, the lockdowns, the family meetings.
Yes, I had prior knowledge of the vaccines, which seem to scare the hell out of you – if you will pardon my reference to my neighbour’s rather noisy house.
By December 2020, when you prayed to ask me to destroy by fire “any vaccine that is of the devil”, your prayer had been answered long before it was uttered.
My dear Thomas, sometimes you have an imagination more fertile than that of Didymus, the original doubting Thomas. Let not your liver be troubled, seek ye first my kingdom and all these other things shall be added as accessories. Why would I allow the 666 vaccine abomination among my beloved? Over my rather large dead body!
This brings me to a somewhat delicate matter. What is this that I hear about you getting into politics? Huh? Thomas Reetsang Mogoeng, o dirang (what are you doing)?
Why are you playing with fire, son?” Please, do not be seduced into politics by that organisation of itinerant pastors, disgruntled professionals and former politicians called the Independent Citizens Movement.
Already, this organisation distracted you until you had to hide behind your own thumb, towards the end of your term as chief justice.
Fortunately, I have noted that when asked whether you could run for president in 2024, you said: “If God wants me to.”
Now listen carefully. I, the Lord God Almighty, do not want you to run for president in 2024. Understood?
To join South African politics will not only be worse than the way you plunged into Israeli-Palestinian politics, it will be a mistake from which you may never recover.
Signed: The Lord your Guard.
- Professor Maluleke is a senior research fellow at the University of Pretoria’s Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship. Follow him on Twitter @ProfTinyiko
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