Africa’s research and development is prayer, but does it really fix problems?

The last time I knelt down to pray was in December 1983, just a couple of days before Christmas. I was with three people, and we were praying for a five-year-old girl named Grace who was battling measles.

We prayed really heavily (if there is such a thing). Our prayers were completely heartfelt, unselfish and non-materialistic.

We were not praying for luxuries. We wanted to save Grace’s life. I was very young at the time—with hair only on my head. I did not know that we were wasting our time. I did not know that no matter who prays, no matter who you pray to or pray about, you get nothing.

Measles eventually stole Grace’s life. It was stealing lives of children at an alarming rate, especially in villages. There were no vaccines; children could not be immunised.

When President Museveni came to power in 1986, his government embarked on an ambitious immunisation programme that helped rein in measles and diseases such as polio, tetanus, diphtheria and whooping cough. These days only unimmunised (Ugandan) children die from measles, diphtheria and whooping cough.

I remembered this story when I read news about Uganda’s first confirmed case of coronavirus, or Covid-19, which broke only hours after a prayer event that our political leaders had organised ostensibly to help Uganda keep the viciously virulent virus at bay.

Ugandans and Africans in general are big fans of prayer. Africa is arguably the world’s most prayerful continent, although it is, paradoxically, also the world’s poorest, the world’s most underdeveloped and most backward. It has more intractable problems than most continents.
But for every problem in Africa, prayer remains the answer.

Prayer, it seems to me, is to Africans what education, research and development are to Western nations. African politicians and the people they lead want to rely on prayer for solutions to problems ranging from the raging Covid-19 to struggling currencies.

When, in 2015, Zambia’s currency, the Kwacha, dropped sharply against the US dollar, driving up the cost of food and other essentials that had to be imported, president Edgar Lungu organised a prayer event to try to fix the problem. Since 2016, Zambia has had a cabinet minister for National Guidance and Religious Affairs—a 62-year-old reverend named Godfridah Sumaili. (Take a closer look at her first name if you can.)

In Tanzania, president John Pombe Magufuli said last week that Tanzanians should continue to go to places of worship (at a time when nations across the world have banned social gatherings to prevent the spread of the virus) because Covid-19 was a bit like Satan. People, Magufuli said, had to continue praying to defeat the Satan called Covid-19.

Meanwhile, Zimbabwe’s defence minister Oppah Muchinguri said the coronavirus was a punishment from God to nations that imposed sanctions on her country. “God has punished them,” Muchinguri said. “They are now stuck in their homes.

There is nothing else for them to do.”
That kind of talk is very common among African leaders and the people they lead. But it is stupefying nonsense. As everyone who follows international news already knows, Zimbabwe has not only reported confirmed cases of Covid-19, but it has also lost a 30-year-old TV presenter to the pandemic.

The importance the people of Africa attach to prayer and the simplistic ways political leaders try to tackle major problems, often citing divine things that are irrelevant, raises questions as to whether they can ever fix challenges their countries are grappling with.

While leaders of developed nations have continued to rely on the almighty science to craft social media messages guiding people on what they need to do to slow or prevent the spread of the virus, African leaders are insisting that prayer also has a role to play in tackling the coronavirus.

Many religious people have said: “Look, you say prayer does not work, but the world’s richest nation, the United States, is a prayerful country.” That is incontrovertibly true. The United States is a religious country. It has many churches (even mosques), many pastors, many televangelists and its motto, written on its banknotes, says: “In God We Trust.”

Religiosity of the United States is not in doubt. However, the United States is what it is not because of religion but because of science and technology. If being religious and prayerful mattered as much as people want us to believe, Mississippi, the most religious state in the US, would not be the nation’s poorest. It would be the California.

Prayer works in theory. In practice, it does not. This article began with a moving personal experience to try to drive this point home. (By the way, the girl who lost her life to measles was my sister.)

The writer is a journalist and former
Al Jazeera digital editor in charge of the Africa desk
[email protected]
@kazbuk