The crisis of African governance is not merely political or economic, as people often argue. It is deeply theological. In the contemporary world, we see political forces becoming increasingly theological in form. Not just in Africa: it is happening all over the world.
When I was doing research in Zambia in 2016, I happened to sit next to two young men. They were in an intense discussion about the church’s role in politics. One spoke with confidence; I suspect he was a theological student. But I found what his friend said particularly interesting, and it has stayed with me ever since: “I cannot eat theology.”
He continued, “Theology cannot feed us. But if you buy me food, that is theology.”
That is political theology. The man’s comment captures a fundamental truth: theology divorced from life risks irrelevance. Too often, theology is captured by the state or by the powerful. It becomes a tool of domination rather than liberation. We find this all over the world today.
It is in this context that I quote the words of Walter Benjamin: “The state of emergency in which we live is not the exception but the rule.” Across much of Africa, emergency is not occasional. It is a condition of existence. From one country to the next, we see that the continent has been in perpetual crisis, with conflict after conflict ever since the first country became independent – Ghana in 1957.
In the African context, crisis is not temporary. Instability and unpredictability are carved right into the heart of governance. Statecraft becomes the management of fear, scarcity, and uncertainty rather than the cultivation of life.
What we are seeing is what Achille Mbembe reminds us of in a different context: “Domination consists, for the dominators and for all others, in sharing the same phantasms.” Fantasy and imagination have taken over logic in many places. Power survives not only through force but through imagination, including through political-theological narratives.
When we talk about sovereignty, when we talk about nationhood, when we talk about prosperity, divine blessing – all of it is shaped by fantasy and imagination. Not logic.
Here we have the crisis of state credibility in Africa. Mbembe notes that through bureaucracy and administration, the state constructs a reality of its own. A world without rules. Values are defined by the state itself. The state defines everything for everybody, and everybody has to follow what the state is saying.
Bureaucracy is not neutral at all. It creates reality. Files, borders, classifications. These determine who belongs, who is disposable. To refer to what Mbembe calls “necropolitics”: the state decides who lives and who dies.
Citizens increasingly experience the state as estranged from life and distant from justice.
Theology often becomes the language that blesses what the government cannot justify, sacralising what politicians cannot explain. Even Jesus himself has been conscripted into projects of power. The very idea of Jesus is dangerous today because theology has been transformed into an ideology of power and separation. (This is not new: segregation in South Africa was justified by Christian nationalism.)
Nimi Wariboko argues that the state in Africa is itself trauma. Government has force only in its “absence, nonpresence, suspension.” He argues that governance is “civil war within the body politic,” leading “people into life consecrated to death.” Authority is exercised in the space of abandonment, in the gaps where the state fails to care for people, in structures that perpetuate social and moral injury. These become spaces of governance.
African political theology, as articulated by people like Allan Boesak, Desmond Tutu, Emmanuel Katongole, and Elias Bongmba, emerged from the margins, not from institutions. Not from universities. It emerged from people’s struggles: struggle is the site of political theology.
It was about survival. What are we going to eat tomorrow? What are we going to wear tomorrow? How are we going to walk in the spaces where we are not allowed to walk? It is theology of survival – and hope. Critical hope that amid all these challenges, we can still claim spaces of life.
Initially Pentecostalism also reflected this same marginal energy, including an orientation toward life, dignity, freedom, and renewal. However, I know that in many contexts, prosperity theology, spiritual warfare, or charismatic excess have captured theology itself, aligning it with power rather than liberation. Pentecostalism used to interrupt power, back in the 1980s and 1990s when there was a struggle against authoritarians in Africa. Pentecostals and, more broadly, evangelicals have lost their focus on a political theology of life. They have now become embedded in political theology that legitimizes the state and power, justifies what the state is saying. It no longer interrupts power. It mirrors the powers that be.
Pentecostalism as a political theology has failed. But people continue following it because they believe that some of the resources within Pentecostalism, like the principles of deliverance or being born again can become tools that can transform how people think of themselves.
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If Benjamin is right about permanent emergency, and if Mbembe is right about domination through shared fantasy or imagination, and if Wariboko is right about the state as trauma, then African statecraft cannot be about control alone. It must be, in the formulation of Luke Bretherton, a “work of love,” grounded in moral, ethical, and life-affirming principles.
Do African governments truly understand the meaning of political love? Not political love in a Western context but in an ubuntucontext, do they understand that?
We need to develop a proper political theology of love. Can we say love your country and your fellow citizens as you love yourself? If there was even such a small measure of love, would we be talking about corruption? Would we be talking about plundering resources? It doesn’t have to be Christian. It has to be human.
Even the very idea of African humanism can become a trap. Ubuntu can become a trap. We want these concepts to engage the global world, to engage realities beyond the African context. How can humanism evolve based on African insights? How can love be understood anew?
We cannot address love without addressing relationships. Relationships are the critical place of love formation and the critical place of life formation. They are the critical place for configuring how people think about themselves, about the realities around them, and about the government.
Ubuntu has been critical for Africa understanding itself. Ubuntu means I am therefore we are and we are therefore I am, but it is much deeper than that. It goes to issues of ecology, resource management, and relationships. At the very foundation of ubuntu is relationships. Governance is not just what you do toward people but also how you live as human with those people. As much as we talk about ideas of ubuntu, they have not been used to frame governance.
African governance attempts, rather, to cut and paste from the West. In doing that, it fails to articulate what it means to be an African nation. Because there has not been proper dialogue about this, there has been almost a continuation of colonization, with respect to governance structures.
What we are seeing today is that instead of having political analysis, in many places you find prophets as political analysts. They have taken over roles that should be held by intellectuals. Why? Intellectuals have failed to interrogate African states in a meaningful way.
Political theology needs philosophy like ubuntu, but it needs more than that. It needs feminism. It needs Black theology. It needs ecology. It needs law. It has to be multidisciplinary to make sense to people on the ground. It cannot be just one way of thinking. That is not enough.
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If we agree with Isaac Kekemeke’s argument, they are so backward because they are religious, we need to ask: Why are they holding on to religion? And how do we engage them meaningfully so that their religion – Islam, Christianity, or African traditions – can become life-giving. How can we liberate them? That requires rupture.
We are trapped at the moment. We do not need theologies from the past. Our theology has become a problem, a bondage. The question is, how do we do a theology from the future that shapes our realities today?
There is an urgent need to reclaim theology as a resource for common life rather than for domination. Governance must harmonize political authority with spirituality because spirituality is central in many African contexts. Theology must restore credibility to the state while nurturing life in societies already traumatized by colonization and slavery, histories of violence, exclusion, and abandonment. Centuries and centuries of trauma.
The task is not to refine political theology but to effect a decisive break with theology’s complicity in domination and a recovery of theology as a practice of love and a practice of life, nurturing critical hope and prophetic justice.
We need to start moving to political theology against and after political theology. Political theology needs to become a critique of the fact that political theology has turned into ideology in Africa.
This not a rejection of theology’s political responsibility. I am against political theology as it currently operates in Africa, while I refuse to abandon theology’s political engagement altogether. I am against political theology insofar as the “theology” in political theology has collapsed into a politics of death and become captive to power and domination. I look after political theology to what will emerge once dominant political theological discourse has exhausted itself and collapsed into ideology.
I look to a political theology that will feed the hungry, promote gender justice and equality, struggle for the liberation of creation from human bondage, liberate the oppressed, bring justice to the exploited, and give voice to the marginalized and voiceless.
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Political theology in Africa is not something that starts with policy and governance. Consider the challenges that African nations were facing in the 1980s and 1990s with dictators and with AIDS. People were exhausted. They wanted something new. These conditions gave rise to political theology from the margins. We saw the rise of Pentecostalism. In Senegal, a Muslim country, we also saw the shift. People started resisting the powers that be with religious resources.
However, no one took responsibility for critically reflecting on these emerging theologies. What do they mean? What are their implications for governance? So people moved away from them. When African nations began democratization processes, they didn’t care about what the marginalized were fighting for, so their ideas were left out.
Political theology should not be regulating state policies. The state has left itself too open to religion. Fundamentally, what is needed is to create distance between organic political theology, what the masses are doing, and the state. A redemptive distance. We are never going to have a clear-cut separation between state and religion in Africa because the religious mindset is very widespread. Religion is not just a practice: It is an epistemology and a form of meaning-making.
This is where theologians come in. We need to develop a more pluralistic political theology that can engage with Christianity, Islam, and African traditional religions – all of them are struggling to understand their place in the state. Secularity should not compete with these multiple religious ideas.
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Christianity has been very important for many African countries. If you look at founding leaders, people like Nelson Mandela, Kenneth Kaunda, Julius Nyerere, and Kwame Nkrumah were educated in mission schools. Some were strategically atheistic, others were explicitly Christian. While Christianity did so much for the region, it was also making people docile. It was, to use Karl Marx’s words, an opium of African people. It made them fail to resist. Yet, in what one can see as an unintended consequence, indigenous imagination and political revolutions were fomented by Christianity.
The forms of theology we have at present have lost energy to resist. They have been co-opted by systems of power, and they are dysfunctional. Yet we cannot abandon the responsibility of political theology in Africa. It must be political theology against and after political theology.
African theology needs to be reengaged and given a new orientation as we imagine a better future for Africa.
This is an edited transcript of remarks Dr. Kaunda delivered as part of the Political Theology Network’s January 22, 2026 webinar on “African Political Theology: Statecraft.”
