FIKILE MBALULA

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There is a particular weight to a pope’s first encyclical. It is the document that sets out what he sees and what he intends to do. When Leo XIII published Rerum Novarum in 1891, he set the Catholic Church’s compass for the industrial century; 135 years later, to the day, on May 15, Pope Leo XIV signed his own first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence. It is a document the ANC has read carefully, and it is a document every South African should read.

What follows is a political reflection by a movement that takes ideas seriously on a document that names, with unusual clarity, the crisis of our time.

The encyclical opens with a stark image. Humanity stands at a fork. We can construct a new Tower of Babel — a civilisation in which our technologies multiply our power without ordering our purposes — or we can build a city, the pope says, in which God and humanity dwell together.

Technology, he insists, is not the enemy. But technology is never neutral. It carries the intentions, the incentives and the values of those who design it, fund it, regulate it and use it. That is the starting point. From there, Pope Leo walks his readers through five chapters on dignity, on AI, on truth and work and freedom, and on what he calls the civilisation of love. I will pick four threads that speak to where we are as a country.

South Africa, in 2026, is having an angry conversation about migration. Some of that anger is real. People who have lost work, who wait in clinic queues, who walk past full schools and overcrowded settlements, are not imagining their difficulties. The movement does not pretend otherwise. We have, openly, named the burden on receiving states and the long failure of the continental architecture to share that burden.

But Pope Leo calls migration a litmus test for social justice — and the test, he says, is whether a society’s sense of justice is driven by fear or by fraternity.

These are not abstract concerns. They feed back into the migration anger I have just named, into the discourse on race, and into the readings the world has of South Africa

The ultimatum issued by the March and March movement — that all undocumented foreigners must leave the country by the end of this month or the country will be shut down — is not justice driven by fraternity. It is fear, packaged as politics, sold as patriotism. South Africans have very recent memories of what mobilisation packaged this way produces.

The July 2021 unrest cost 354 lives and R50bn in damage. We do not need a sequel. The movement supports the application of the law against the threat-makers.

I have said before that we can march and agitate, but we are also not a cruel people; we can demand law and order on immigration in an orderly way. We cannot purport to be fighting unlawful behaviour by committing unlawful behaviour ourselves in a constitutional democracy. We are a people of ubuntu.

The encyclical’s longest single argument concerns AI. Pope Leo calls for AI to be disarmed — freed, he says, from a mentality of military, economic and cognitive competition. He is asking that technical power should not automatically confer a right to govern and that no algorithm can make a war morally acceptable.

These are not abstract concerns. They feed back into the migration anger I have just named, into the discourse on race, and into the readings the world has of South Africa.

The movement is not afraid of free speech. We are not asking for any platform to be closed. We are asking — with Pope Leo — that:

the platforms shaping our public conversation be subject to public oversight;
hate-speech advertising not be approved at upload;
algorithmic amplification be transparent; and
we, as African states, develop a continental conversation on platform regulation rather than each carrying the question alone.

Pope Leo urges us to move beyond GDP as the measure of development and to centre instead the dignity of work, shared prosperity, reduced inequality and the protection of the environment.

Read that against the South African reality. We are a country that has built much in three decades — longer life expectancy, electricity access, water access, the social-grant architecture, the National Health Insurance Act of 2024 now in rollout — but our citizens, when surveyed, tell us the country is going in the wrong direction. The Afrobarometer Round 10 results released on May 22 this year are sobering.

Pope Leo writes that the rule of law has given way to the law of the strongest and that conflicts must be confronted by what he calls a civilisation of love. He offers five paths:

disarming words by speaking the truth;
building peace founded on justice;
adopting the perspective of victims;
cultivating a healthy realism; and
relaunching dialogue from the culture of power to the culture of negotiation.

South Africa knows this language. It is the language of Oliver Tambo on the African position in the world. It is the language of the Harare Declaration. It is the language of the negotiations that delivered our 1994 transition.

The pope writes for all of humanity, not for Catholics alone. Reflect on his five paths of responsibility. Apply them to the South African questions that crowd our lives: the cost of living, the unemployment, the crime, the corruption, the migration anger and the local government that has, in places, failed our communities.

The movement of which I am the administrative head will, in July, table its manifesto for the local government elections of November 4 this year. We will name the country we are working to build. The pope names the country every nation should aspire to be, one in which: