ZIMBABWE Council of Churches (ZCC) secretary-general, Kenneth Mtata has blasted “false prophets’ for misleading people into believing that the country’s political and economic crisis could be resolved spiritually through certain rituals.
By NQOBANI NDLOVU
In a video posted on Facebook last Friday, Mtata said this had “fragmented any possibility of Zimbabweans coming together to find a lasting solution to their woes”.
“The problem with all this is that what it does is that it creates fatalism among Zimbabweans that your future is not in your hands, your future is in the hands of one particular individual, who can solve your problems,” he said.
“I think this is the first problem. It fragments any possibility of Zimbabweans coming together to find a solution. Secondly, the problem with all these kinds of solutions is that they put solutions at the level of superstition, they mystify solutions, they do remove agency from the hands of Zimbabweans and put this agency in the hands of one religious figure who presents himself or herself as having special access to God.”
Zimbabwe has witnessed the mushrooming of several prophets promising heaven on earth, but hardly a month passes without reports of women and girls sexually molested under the pretext of false prophecies and misinterpretation as well as citation of convenient Biblical scriptures by the false prophets.
“They are called by many fancy names and some of these people have actually given a lot of hope to Zimbabweans by promising them that things are going to be okay. But what we have also seen accompanying this hope has been a new form of deception which we think is very destructive in many processes that we may need to find a solution to the many challenges that we are facing as a country. For example, there has been a growing assumption that if we perform certain religious rituals that are presided over by these religious figures who are sometime called man of God.
“For example, we are told that If you have a business and you give something to this man of God, your business is going to thrive…The problem with all these solutions is that first they are individualistic, they make every Zimbabwean to think about him or herself that all the problems that we are facing as a nation are individual problems.”
