I wrote in my last instalment last week about the dangers of deitising leaders — making them believe they are infallible little gods – turning otherwise good leaders into incorrigible dictators.
Opinion By Tangai Chipangura
One fateful October morning, 31 years ago, Egypt’s third President Anwar Sadat who had been made to believe by a clique of bootlicking hangers-on that he was super-human — larger than life — was gunned down by one of his own soldiers.
The angry young soldier broke from the military parade that Sadat was inspecting, shouting obscenities and pumping bullets into the President’s heart. But, even as the bullets ripped him to pieces, Sadat still believed he had the authority to “warn” the young soldier: “Don’t do anything silly my son!”
His supporters and bootlicking hangers-on had stupefied him into believing he was the last Pharaoh and therefore did not have to fear death.
He collapsed, dead — grisly evidence of the consequences of arrogant impunity — horrid proof of what happens to leaders that blindly fall victim of hyperbolic praises and sycophantic flattery.
Such grim realisation of the folly of taking people for granted does not occur only to political leaders, but to all forms of society where human justice must have the last word.
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Defrocked Anglican bishop Nolbert Kunonga’s on-going humiliating saga is a case in point. The man, apparently riding on what he believed was unassailable political backing, trampled on lives and religious rights of many thousands of believers with sickening impunity.
For five years he made life unliveable for Anglican Christians – he kicked out children from orphanages and rendered thousands workers jobless. He then went on to make money out of properties of the Church.
According to the court declared rightful owners of the Church properties, activities at several churches under Kunonga’s stewardship included desecrating the temples of the Lord — defiling the houses of God with everything imaginable, including fornication!
The Church, led by Harare Diocese Bishop Chad Gandiya, has started reclaiming Church properties and started last Sunday the process of cleansing the churches which Gandiya’s officials say had been used as homes where “procreation” was taking place while others had been turned into brothels.
Tables turned with the ruling by the country’s highest court, the Supreme Court, that Kunonga had been excommunicated and left the Anglican Church of the Province of Central Africa (CPCA).
He had formed his own church which he called the Anglican Church of the Province of Zimbabwe and therefore could not lay claim to any of the CPCA properties.
The disrobed bishop now cries foul. He seeks to have the Supreme Court ruling reversed on grounds that if he were dispossessed of the church properties, at least 150 of his priests would be rendered destitute among other concerns.
What I fail to comprehend from the former bishop’s appeal (if appeals to Supreme Court rulings can be entertained at law) is the reasoning behind Kunonga’s actions when he ejected, often violently, priests, parishioners and children from church properties over the past five years.
What has happened to Kunonga could be yet more evidence of the dangers of impunity and arrogance — driven by this culture of deitising mere mortals.
Kunonga was showered with praises as a religious hero of indigenisation and he swallowed the flattery hook, line and sinker. Now politicians, having assessed and concluded he was a political liability, who would lose them votes, have dumped him —leaving him in the cold.
Kunonga cut a sad, solemn figure in the photographs taken of him sitting in some non-descript chair outside the Cathedral as the Deputy Sheriff chucked him out last week. He was no longer that popular bishop who graced national events, whose seat was up there on the top table among powerful national leaders.
The former flamboyant and maverick Kunonga, who not so long back condescendingly called Bishop Chad Gandiya “little man” must have realised, albeit too late, like Egypt’s Sadat, that behaving like a god was a costly adventure.
When he kicked hundreds of workers out of work upon forcibly taking over Anglican properties, Kunonga believed he was untouchable and the lives of thousands of people meant nothing to him. Hundreds of people including children and those in care homes cried out for mercy, but none was given.
Politicians that nurtured Kunonga’s arrogance did so in the hope that the renegade bishop would attract massive following, but then Christians abandoned him and his numbers dwindled, sending alarm among politicians who thrive on numbers, especially towards elections.
Kunonga must have learnt his lesson and the best for him now is to repent and go back to church. Gandiya says he is prepared to take him back albeit as an ordinary member.
