#Godisinit! Nelson Chamisa’s theology to address the sociopolitical crisis in Zimbabwe

Abstract

The Bible presents God journeying with the weak and the poor. God’s involvement in the affairs of the less privileged was because of God’s nature of being just, compassionate, eternal, omnipresent and unchangeable. These attributes gave the weak hope as God intervened in their circumstances. Although in perpetual suffering, one would expect God’s nature to remain unchanging, unfortunately, the oppressed people grapple with the Doctrine of God in the context of different sociopolitical and economic traumas. For example, Zimbabwe suffered a sociopolitical ordeal for more than two decades resulting in the weak and the oppressed questioning God’s divine justice, the just and the omnipotence of God. To invite God to be on the side of the oppressed, the leader of the opposition party, Nelson Chamisa coined a mantra titled #Godisinit to involve Godself in the Zimbabwean sociopolitical crisis. The hashtag became a slogan and a campaigning strategy inviting God to arbitrate on the side of the weak. Moreover, the hashtag represents the decoloniality of theology where the elite apply it to empower the weak of the society suffering different forms of socioeconomic challenges. In addition, the hashtag remained the hope of the people as they believed that God would intervene in the Zimbabwean sociopolitical and economic crisis. This literature research used secondary sources and the Internet to explore how Nelson Chamisa used #Godisinit to invoke the Doctrine of God in the Zimbabwean sociopolitical environment.

Contribution: The contribution of this study lies in its clarification of the role of hashtags, its analysis of how Nelson Chamisa utilised #Godisinit to engage the Doctrine of God within Zimbabwe’s sociopolitical sphere, and its demonstration of how the infinite nature of God is intertwined with the struggles of the weak and oppressed.