Alan Tacca
The lead story in a local daily recently was about the astonishing wealth of a pastor in Kampala. The pastor reportedly hauls in so much money it upsets the mobile money system, which imposes certain limits.
Incidentally, the story does not suggest any criminality on the part of the pastor, and the Financial Intelligence Authority (FIA) has taken interest probably as routine.
FIA gets curious whenever it detects unexplained huge amounts of money being moved electronically. By pure coincidence, over the same weekend, at the Sunday early morning talk show on Impact FM, ‘Bishop’ Ronald Mukiibi of Ndeeba Victory Church listened to an ‘apostle’ tell his spine-chilling story as a young gun-wielding criminal, whose gang had once laid a plot to rob the (former Uganda Commercial Bank, now Stanbic) bank in Cham Towers.
The apostle related how he was determined to get very rich when he was still a young man, by any means. He told how getting ‘saved’ rescued him from crime. That is a transformation to be thankful for.
Although of course the human will and other agencies are entirely capable of delivering one from criminality without biblical narratives in the frame, my focus here is on the greed that drives many Ugandan pastors into a zone where one of the two supreme commandments issued by Jesus seems to lose meaning. Jesus bid all his followers to love their neighbours as they loved themselves.
Knowing the harm that their enterprises bring upon other people, the gun-wielding gangster and bank robber or murderer, or a street drug pusher, or a thief who siphons away public funds, or who steals votes; these certainly cannot be said to love their neighbours or fellow citizens as they love themselves.
But what about a pastor who, talking like a sewing-machine, spends hours every day, uttering the name Jesus a thousand times, but willfully lies to his (or her) flock and systematically fleeces the same flock until he gets very rich, with the pattern of poverty and wealth in his flock reflecting roughly the same demographic distribution?
He consistently grows richer, ostentatiously displays and often openly brags about his wealth. But his followers generally remain the same.If a few devotees get more prosperous, about the same number get more miserable.
Interestingly, the witchdoctor returns similar percentages. Regarding those who get more miserable, does the pastor love them as he loves himself as Jesus commanded?
The story reports that after night prayers that end after 1am, poor devotees who cannot pay for the journey back home sometimes sleep over on the verandahs at the church and are charged Shs2,000 per person.
Some of the stranded do petty jobs in the neighbourhood to raise their return fares.
The newspaper reported that when one devotee’s child recently died during prayers after supposedly being possessed by demons (a primitive and fraudulent diagnosis of real and pastor-induced ill health that all our pastors dupe their followers with), it was the area community that contributed money to transport the body!We can dismiss these stories and say that it is fools who give their money to the pastors.
Of course, we can. But in Jesus’ commandment, the fools are our ‘neighbours. ’Whether it is in Kampala, Nairobi or Lagos, if greed and cynicism separate our pastors from their most vulnerable followers just as the same vices alienate violent gangsters from their fellow citizens, how can we tell that the pastors listen to Jesus or are even Christians at all?
