Alan Tacca
December is upon us. From the looks of things, given Ugandans’ characteristic indulgence, few low-income workers will end the year without hustle or stress. In contrast, corporate and government bigwigs have both straight and creative ways of ensuring virtually unlimited expenditure.
As if the rest of us smell like penniless rats, we are inundated with offers of unsolicited loans via our phones; from a few hundred shillings for airtime or data to quite substantial amounts. The lenders are intriguing. Their message is that being indebted will make you happy, even richer!
Then we have the ordinary thugs who raid banks, your farm, your car or your house. They raise their game in December. But the top medals, of course, go to businessmen and the religious industry, exploiting the momentum and excitement Christmas brings.
Business people dealing in all sorts of merchandise and leisure put on their best faces, masquerading as friends. The other medalists, the priesthood, get more church attendance, peaking on Christmas Day, with a mini peak on New Year’s Day.
Offertories, tithes, ‘sowing’, fundraising for endless projects; December is the time to raid from every angle.
The traditional churches had a civilised arrangement where increased attendance was by the local community, supporting the local church, even at a sub-parish level, following clear liturgical guidelines.
After the Pentecostals introduced their idiosyncrasies and themes of the occult from pre-Christian wizardry, claims of magical or miraculous power by competing pastors has degenerated into plain fraud.
Social anthropologists cannot think it a coincidence that the influence of Pentecostal cult leaders has expanded rapidly as our society raced in corruption at almost every level, with the government machine graduating into a vampire state.
In this environment, your typical December pastor is fabricating and advertising all sorts of special empowerment sessions, special Sundays and miracle-packed gatherings, the supposed benefits of which will go to devotees who are cunningly manipulated to pay.
In the battle for souls, the raiding pastor hypocritically encourages you to support your usual church/pastor, but to also ensure you do not miss the raider’s mega-powered programmes. Sniffing around as God’s dog, I recently discovered a truly pathetic and comical innovation in Nsambya.
A church in that area promotes Kawuula as its evil centre figure. Kawuula sometimes takes grip of people’s hands, making them tremble and unable to make or hold money.
However, God can destroy Kawuula, enabling the sufferer to get rich again.
But God comes in a Trinity. If the sufferer paid Shs10,000 for the Father, Shs10,000 for the Son, and Shs10,000 for the Holy Spirit, the pastor(s) at the church would utter the incantations required by the triadic Godhead for forcing Kawuula to loosen his grip on the poor man’s hands.
To prove the authenticity of the scheme, the presence of the Holy Spirit was suddenly unleashed in full apostolic voice… Wa-sa-kata-ya. Yara-ba-ba… Ewe…koto-ceba-ba…. Yoro-ro… Roco-coto cha-ba-ba…Wow! Such is the power of ‘tongues’.
This is much better than the Parish Development Model (PDM), because the thieves in the PDM circus sometimes get ‘disturbed’ by more senior officials of the vampire state. To round off, our Pentecostal friends designed to steal New Year’s Day from other faiths by parking their combat machines, noise and emotions, on the whole of December 31.
On the cosmological scale, of course, the universe is as indifferent to December 31 as to January 1. If God was not in a state of rest, he would wonder what the relentless hype before, and the noise on, December 31 are all about.
