Threat to Africa’s search for spiritual redemption
What is wrong with African governments? One would have thought that one of the fundamental pillars of democracy is the separation of religion and state. Even under military rule, soldiers knew that they need divine cover and they hesitated before interfering with the opium of relief – religion and the proliferation of its shrines and […]
What is wrong with African governments? One would have thought that one of the fundamental pillars of democracy is the separation of religion and state. Even under military rule, soldiers knew that they need divine cover and they hesitated before interfering with the opium of relief – religion and the proliferation of its shrines and the gaudy Gods of men. Bloody civilians believe they are closer to heaven after rigging themselves into office than soldiers and so they walk where uniformed angels dare to march.
In the past couple of weeks, a gale wind has been sweeping through the business empires of these Gods of men. The latest clampdown began in Rwanda where born-again Paul Kagame shut down nearly one thousand churches accusing them of violating the rules governing their trade. Now the crackdown train has moved to South Africa.
Looking in from secular Canada where most people spend their Friday nights drinking themselves to stupor and their Sunday mornings walking their dogs, this could be strange. But stranger still are reports that 2, 500 Burundian refugees living in war-ravaged DRC have moved to Rwanda because their religion prohibits them from being fingerprinted. A lot of Africans reject credit cards for similar reasons.
You could run away from African shenanigans, but Africa’s idiocy follows wherever you go. Imagine driving my eleven-year old van to a garage managed by a Haitian brother only to encounter a disciple of Prophet Shepherd Bushiri. For those who think that Adeboye, Oyedepo or Oyakhilome are superstars or that TB Joshua is a spiritual guru, they need to search for Bushiri.
According to professor Google, this super God of man has beaten Naija’s pastorpreneurs to their glamour and glitz to commandeer the largest following both in his home base, South Africa and among the miracle-seeking people of colour in the diaspora. There he was, on a widescreen tv appealing to his congregation to restrain him from prophesying. He does this to hear their cries of ‘continue Papa’ although at 35, he is very unlikely to have sired such a huge number of children.
Bushiri was born a Malawian but has his business base in Pretoria. As the founder of the notorious ECG, which is not to be confused with electro-cardiogram but Enlightened Christian Gathering Church he calls his business a prophetic ministry. Fortune seeking Africans never wait for accumulated wealth, they want it by the quickest means and so fall prey to phoney prophecy and miracle peddlers. Bushiri’s services pack an estimated 200,000 followers excluding my mechanic and others in the diaspora under his spell.
My mechanic’s overall is soiled in car rust and engine oil but Bushiri dresses like the wanton billionaire, status he’s made from the gullibility of those too lazy to read the scriptures to understand the true meaning of wealth. Like TB, Bushiri claims to cure any disease from cancer to HIV and also to walk on air, which apparently makes him closer to God than Jesus Christ.
As it stands, not even this proximity to the omnipotent has separated him from the terrestrial rules of politicians whom he calls detractors. He is sad that governments are fighting his wealth instead of taunting it as an example of homegrown prosperity and an inspiration to the youths. His spiritual business taunts miracles practical and virtual – cures, jobs, pregnancies and things the poor desire that their kleptocratic ruiners promise but fail to deliver.
In 2017, the pagan regime of Jacob Zuma who finds it difficult to read the first two words of the Christian Bible, as any Youtube follower knows, investigated Bushiri’s finances. Bushiri considers the sacrilege a form of ‘racism’ comparing his emblazoned T-shirts, anointing oil, CD and DVDs comparable to Catholic rosaries, and phylacteries of the Pharisees.
Bushiri is not the only God-of-man suffering persecution, those who overcook their vegetables until it has lost all its nutrients were believed to have instigated Zuma’s government to go after another South African pastor who ordered his followers to mow down the church lawn with their mouths. Next, he delivered snacks of non-poisonous live snakes without drawing the ire of either the RSPCA or PETA. Another South Africa based miracle-working pastor turned petrol into pineapple juice, but when his miracle-drunk congregation tasted it they were filled with the spirit of delirium.
Somehow the African ruiners or Nicodemians, who patronize these charlatans at night and persecute them in the day are unconvinced about these miracles. Having embezzled all the allocations for fixing hospitals, they’re perhaps angry that these 419 miracle workers have not emptied the hospitals by making the lame to walk and the blind to see. Not raising the dead is not bad, after all, the continent is overpopulated and culling is sometimes imperative.
Blind followers attribute massive poverty, wanton disease and the non-development of the continent to these crackdowns. They are worried that the continent might slip deeper into the age of darkness if things continue. In future, spiritual miracles would be peddled online. Naija babalawos are ahead of the pack. They are now on Twitter, peddling everything from political fortunes to football match predictions, sudden wealth and miracle marriages.