Prime
For God and Museveni’s country
Author: Alan Tacca. PHOTO/FILE
What you need to know:
- ‘‘Believe it or not, virtually every pastor has been claiming that God spoke to them”
Politicians and religious leaders have something in common. They tell lies. The difference is that politicians live on current lies, while religious leaders thrive on ancient lies.
In a society where politicians get away with extraordinarily big lies, religious leaders are also likely to inflate traditional lies.
Where a politician conjures up the astonishing gospel that he is the only man with a vision in the whole land, you will almost surely find a horde of frauds making outlandish claims that they are prophets getting their instructions directly from God.
The politicians and the religious fellows have very highly practiced facial control. They can refuse to blink.
In a society where propagandists of Tamale Mirundi vintage present themselves as the supreme interpreters and forecasters of the politics of the land, you will find pastors such as Jamada Kikomeko masquerading as divinely authorised interpreters of dreams and biblical text. And they will not blink.
Uganda’s ruling NRM periodically unveils a new mass poverty eradication programme. Wealth for everyone. After several months of uncoordinated implementation circles, with government plunderers creaming off whatever they can, a handful of citizens in a whole district will get their diminished envelopes, with plenty of ceremony to make peanuts look like a cash flood.
A supposedly mass extermination of poverty will have dawdled into a lottery with miserable winnings.
If God was still roaming around like He used to do when He was young, talking with Abraham, Moses and other bigwigs, He would probably avoid making glaring contradictions.
If He woke up from His rest, His earthly dominion and the land of our Civilisation would be much bigger than Canaan.
And if He spoke, why would He choose the rather shady pulpit operators around Kampala and give them such a diverse range of proclamations as his global manifestos for 2024 AD?
But believe it or not, virtually every prominent pastor around Kampala has been claiming that God spoke to them directly with the proclamation for next year. And the proclamations are different, some ridiculous.
What would be so hard about God issuing the same proclamation to all of them?
Anyway, their fight is to lure from rival camps to themselves as many clients as possible, assuring them of miraculous wealth, but bidding them to work hard so that they bring in more tithes and sow bigger ‘seeds’, which would motivate God to reward them with even more money and other blessings.
The Old Testament has many stories about great wealth going to people who made sacrifices and paid their tithes. Our pastors love these stories even more than the story of Jesus’ birth in a cowshed. They pluck these stories from the old book and literally paste them on their 21st Century congregations.
The pastors brasenly equate themselves with the ancient prophets and assure their followers of getting rich like Abraham or Solomon, earning several rounds of clapping.
If anyone has missed out on Abraham’s kind of luck this year, that luck would come next year, which we enter starting midnight this Saturday. Another round of wild clapping! And their midnight fireworks making a cosmological non-event mimic a galactic explosion.
President Museveni is probably rejoicing. As a sisable section of the population buys its success fantasies from the churches, his beloved enemy, Tamale Mirundi, pipes music to his ears that in his ngalabi (Mirundi’s head), President Museveni and the President’s son are the only presidential candidates for 2026.
Such are the ways of obscuring 40 years of under-performance by brandishing the teeth of raw power.
Mr Tacca is a novelist, socio-political commentator.
[email protected]
