From: Ouko joachim omolo
The News Dispatch with Omolo Beste
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 7, 2013
Pope Francis is among the top world leaders who have paid tribute to Nelson Mandela on Friday. Indeed Mandela was one of the world’s most ardent fighters for equality. Pope Francis in his telegram sent to South African President Jacob Zuma that said:
“It was with sadness that I learned of the death of former President Nelson Mandela, and I send prayerful condolences to all the Mandela family, to the members of the Government and to all the people of South Africa”.
Pope Francis and Mandela have not only shared a strong belief in the injustice of poverty, they have the will to protection of a fundamental human right. Protection of a fundamental human right is Jesus’ call, even if you are a public sinner you are still a human being and your rights just like any other human beings must be protected.
Like Pope Francis, Mandela strongly believed that overcoming poverty is not a gesture of charity. It is an act of justice. It is the protection of a fundamental human right, the right to dignity and a decent life. While poverty persists, there is no true freedom.
When Mandela welcomed Pope John Paul II to South Africa in 1995, he still expressed similar view of their mutual concern for the poor, commitment to equality, and undying fight for liberation from oppression.
Mandela’s faith in God was very great, a faith probably he acquired from his mother. When Mandela was 7 years old his mother enrolled him at the Clarkebury Missionary School in South Africa’s Eastern Cape Province. His mother was a devout Christian and taught him respect for God and good morals.
Although Mandela was a protestant, his love for humanity led him to think beyond religion. In 1993, he attended Mass celebrated by Archbishop Lawrence Henry and parish Capuchin priest Fr. Wildrid Aherne at St. Mary of the Angels in Cape Town.
He learnt that people cannot co-exist without mutual understanding, reconciliation and healing. Reconciliation he believed requires that we join hands to eradicate the poverty spawned by a system that thrived on the deprivation of the majority.
Reconciliation requires that we end malnutrition, homelessness and ignorance, that we put shoulders to the wheel to end crime and corruption. Reconciliation and forgiveness were to be the cornerstone of Mandela’s five-year term as president, with the focus always on nation-building.
Mandela never did anything before prayer. He was a stickler for praying before meals, after, going to bed, in the morning when he woke up and before doing his duties. He believed that things will never succeed without God’s intervention.
He was so humble to the extent that when people referred to him as a living saint he always insisted that he wasn’t a saint. He just did his duty justly because he believed that is what God wants.
When South Africa’s apartheid government had been brutally repressive for nearly five decades, and the country’s black majority was justifiably full of anger, Mandela never was.
Instead, he negotiated a transition that acknowledged the right of white South Africans to be citizens but no longer lords and masters. Even after 27 years in prison he was never angry.
That explains why when Mandela took office as president in 1994 he governed with the same generosity. Few could have imagined that South Africa could move peacefully to black majority rule.
Without Mandela’s leadership, without his example, stature and wisdom, the story might have been radically different. That is why he became an icon of integral leader. No wonder why the world remembers the great leader who acted without bitterness.
Fr Joachim Omolo Ouko, AJ
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Real change must come from ordinary people who refuse to be taken hostage by the weapons of politicians in the face of inequality, racism and oppression, but march together towards a clear and unambiguous goal.
-Anne Montgomery, RSCJ
UN Disarmament
Conference, 2002