Does God have special African work to do?

Author: Alan Tacca. PHOTO/FILE

What you need to know:

  • It is the fool nowadays  who thinks that God determines an RCC/RDC’s tour of duty.   

As I have written before, my God protects me from false angels in heaven, and, as His dog, I protect Him from fake prophets on earth. Naturally, post-lockdown 2022 has the masqueraders already in overdrive.
Take the public nuisance of our street preachers. When former Kampala RCC Hussein Hudu confronted them with a ban, they cursed him.

Now, because Uganda’s religious ‘Mafiosi’ want you to believe that God operates like a tin-pot paramount chief who wants to be worshipped round the clock, they claimed that God had answered their prayers when Hudu was transferred to far-flung Yumbe District.

Ugandans are lucky. They now know. If the corruption and repression perpetrated by government officials persist, and the culprits do not fall, it is because the pastors and God approve!

Yes? No. The masqueraders are just opportunistic. Already with a damaged reputation, Hudu’s transfer was planned well before his spat with the preachers. He was making President Museveni and his NRM lose more support in Kampala.

When the God in question had just been invented by the ancestors of the Jewish people, and He was young, energetic and still obsessed with the human project, He could be ‘seen’ or ‘heard’, or visualised intervening in any Jewish human story; from guiding generals making battlefield plans to describing how festival chapattis were to be cooked. But God could not go on forever at that rate with a versatile and cunning primate like man without going mad. To avoid that, He left man in ‘auto’ mode; just like the other things in the universe. 

Pestering Him and endless grovelling annoy God. That kind of attention was based on the Pharaohs and Mobutus of this world.

It is the fool nowadays – and the fake prophet – who thinks that God determines an RCC/RDC’s tour of duty; or chooses Africa’s despots; or protects monsters like Vladimir Putin; or sends droughts and famines; or favours happy Finland. 

Continuing as God’s dog, I turn to Canterbury.

Of course, I must be careful. Archbishop Justin Welby is a heck of a big fish. And he is not one of those chatterboxes who belittle themselves by being all over the place at television talk shows. He speaks sparingly, and is heard.

Listen. According to the archbishop, the arrangement to transfer asylum seekers from the UK to Rwanda is “unethical” and “ungodly”.

Why? Well, because the Africans illegally entering Britain want to be in a really nice place. Like the UK. Rwanda is not so cute, and it has human rights issues. The migrants who choose the UK have not chosen Rwanda. Why send them to Rwanda when the UK has a moral obligation to host them?
Sorry, Most Reverend. Those are good arguments, but one can see the matter differently.

Is Africa condemned to only supply exiles? Or does the continent also provide patches of modest progress, where various Africans can commit their resourcefulness instead of sailing or sneaking into glittering Western ‘ready-mades’?

Africans talk of all kinds of African solutions; why not experiments in pan-African compassion and migration substitution? Instead of striking out Rwanda, add other African candidates. 

To the Anglican bishops, the UK-Rwanda deal may be ungodly, but to God it may not be necessarily evil. Actually, as His dog, I know that to God the Rwanda thing is a matter of indifference. 

With or without the money the UK is giving Rwanda, an Africa taking responsibility for less fortunate Africans may understand more urgently the neglect that stokes the fire of new revolutions. 

Mr Tacca is a novelist, socio-political commentator.
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