Only one face has consistently been printed on South Africa’s national ballot papers since the first democratic elections in 1994.

This is the face of evangelist, teacher, and politician Reverend Kenneth Meshoe.

Meshoe has been the president of the African Christian Democratic Party (ACDP) since he founded it with his wife, Lydia, in December 1993, only a few months before the first democratic elections took place.

However, he had already made a name for himself as a Christian evangelist by the time he went into politics.

Meshoe was born in Pretoria on 18 January 1954 as the fourth of seven children in a Christian home. After completing his schooling in the South African capital, he went to study teaching at the University of the North, now known as the University of Limpopo. He obtained a secondary teacher’s diploma from the institution in 1975 and went to work as a teacher for the next few years.

In 1976, Meshoe married Lydia Lefokane, and the newlyweds joined Christ for All Nations, an evangelistic organisation created by German-American missionary Reinhard Bonnke in 1969.

After being part of the organisation for several years, Meshoe was eventually appointed as one of Bonnke’s associate evangelists. This resulted in him going to the United States to study further, where he completed a theological diploma at the Shekinah Bible Institute in Kingsport, Tennessee, in 1987.

When he returned home the following year, Meshoe established his own church with Lydia, which he called the Hope of Glory Tabernacle in the township of Vosloorus, roughly 30 kilometres east of Johannesburg.

Hope of Glory Tabernacle eventually grew to serve a congregation of roughly 4 000 people.

With South Africa transitioning away from apartheid and towards a democratic future in the early 1990s, Meshoe believed that a biblical approach should be taken to granting fundamental human rights, and Christian values should govern the new country. So, he and Lydia formed the ACDP and held its first official congress exactly 100 days before the first democratic elections. The party’s founding manifesto stated Christian principles as the basis for personal freedom, national unity, justice, peace, and security.

The ACDP managed to win two parliamentary seats following the elections in 1994, making it the smallest of the seven parties in the National Assembly.

That same year, Meshoe was awarded an honorary doctorate by Bethel Christian College of Riverside, California.

Because of its conservative policies, such as opposition to abortion and backing of the death penalty, it was the only party to vote against the adoption of South Africa’s new Constitution in 1996.

While its support grew over the next several years, increasing its representation in Parliament to seven seats in 2004, this soon began to decline, dropping to three seats in 2009. It increased again a decade later when it won four seats, but dropped back down to three in 2024.

The party currently has one seat each in the Gauteng and Western Cape provincial legislatures, but has previously held provincial legislature seats in the Free State, KwaZulu-Natal, Limpopo, and the Northern Cape.

The party has maintained most of the positions mentioned in its conservative manifesto since its launch in 1994, often voting against progressive Bills in Parliament. This includes opposing the recognition of same-sex marriages, as well as reducing the homosexual age of consent from 19 to 16, to equal the heterosexual age of consent. It also rejected the government’s condom and safe-sex campaigns, recommending abstinence and faithfulness in marriage as the primary response to HIV transmission.

Meshoe said that he would consider stepping down following the 2024 elections should the party fail to increase its parliamentary representation. Despite failing to do so, he has remained the president of the party and has not indicated that he intends to step down now.