By Dr Tafataona Mahoso

ONE glaring difference between neo-colonial religious leaders and indigenous spiritual leaders over millennia the world over is that the former lack faith and confidence when the people really need it.
All organic faith ministries in history have been known for defending or demanding land for their people.
This is because the most meaningful organic rituals and sacraments are land-based.
But in Zimbabwe the loudest telegenic ‘prophets’ and their organisations have been conspicuous by their absence from leadership of the African land reclamation movement and land revolution.
Some even opposed it.
Yet every year they organise ‘harvest’ programmes to support their ministries.
And since 2009, they have been ignoring the need of the people to create, defend and deploy their own money, preferring instead to ‘harvest’ US dollars, because they do not understand that in every civilisation and every nation the viability of money is based on people’s faith, trust and confidence in themselves and their own means which should be the key-result focus for any home-grown faith ministry and its leadership.
Telegenic prophets are men or women who, under today’s media umbrella, are taking the place of the oracle or the svikiro.
Unlike the oracle or svikiro, telegenic prophets derive their power from the creation of visualised spectacles whereas the oracle or svikiro depended on the prophetic voice and message without insisting on her face or body being magnified as a visual spectacle the way telegenic prophets do.
Telegenic prophets dress-up and appear like movie stars. Celebrity instead of faith has become their key business.
What oracles and masvikiro have in common with telegenic prophets is their being sought after following a crisis, usually a national crisis; a famine, the threat of war, an invasion, prolonged drought or epidemic.
Although modern media tend to exaggerate crises and even to invent and orchestrate them, there is no question that the hysteria which has increased the demand for prophets in Zimbabwe today has been caused by real crises.
First, there is a world-wide crisis which Professor Michel Chossudovsky, in the 1990s, described in Financial Warfare and The Globalisation of Poverty as follows:
“Humanity is undergoing … an economic crisis of unprecedented scale leading to the rapid impoverishment of large sectors of the world population.
The plunge of national currencies in virtually all major regions of the world has contributed to the destabilisation of national economies while precipitating entire countries into abysmal poverty.
The collapse in the standard of living is taking place abruptly and simultaneously in a large number of countries.
This worldwide crisis of the late 20th Century is more devastating than the Great Depression of the 1930s.
It has far-reaching geopolitical implications; economic dislocation has also been accompanied by the outbreak of regional conflicts, the fracturing of national societies and in some cases the destruction of entire countries. This is by far the most serious economic crisis in modern history.”
The global economic crisis hit Zimbabwe in the form of the Economic Structural Adjustment Programme (ESAP) and its effects.
Side-by-side with effects of the global crisis and ESAP, Zimbabwe also suffered the catastrophic effects of the HIV-AIDS pandemic whose impact is on-going.
Then, on top of these crises came the illegal sanctions imposed on Zimbabwe by Britain, the United States, the European Union, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
Former US Ambassador to Zimbabwe, Christopher Dell, described some of the effects of the sanctions in a speech at Africa University in 2005:
The meaning of Dell’s speech at Africa University on November 2 2005 was that from 2000 Zimbabweans were losing about 10 years of development per year, so that at 2016, we can say we have lost 63 years of development and we are at the colonial level of 1953!
It is possible to disagree with the exact magnitude of the loss, but the real experience of sanctions and ‘reform’ cannot be disputed.
Reform and sanctions caused the ‘free flow’ of our pensions, our insurance policies, our savings and even our skilled workers to Britain, Europe, Australia and as far as Eastern Europe.
Reform and sanctions caused the collapse of our currency and led to the adoption of multiple foreign currencies leading to money problems which still affect people to this day.
What Ambassador Dell described is economic terror, our equivalent of September 11 2001, our equivalent of the illegal invasion of Iraq in March 2003, our equivalent of the terror of the so-called war on terror, our equivalent of the pounding and grinding of Gaza from ground, sea and air by the Israeli Defence Forces.
The correct language for it is what Dr Gideon Gono tried to explain in his book Zimbabwe’s Casino Economy: Extraordinary Measures for Extraordinary Challenges where he said that ‘illegal economic sanctions are not different from sanitised terrorism.
As instruments of foreign policy, the objectives of terror and illegal economic sanctions are the same; terror, which is generally described as a state of fear and overwhelming sense of imminent danger’.
But what is even more important for us now is the lightning speed with which the terrorist acts were inflicted on the entire population; the illegal emigration of loved ones, the externalisation of forex, the nullification of all savings, the hourly pegging of new and shocking prices of basic commodities needed for the survival of the person and the family and, finally, the nullification of the currency itself.
The country has therefore undergone mass torture and mass shock and there are things which those who have suffered mass shock should and should not do.
First, they must know that they have been exposed to pure and raw global events moving at lightning speed.
In other words, they have already been opened up, through someone else’s strategy and through the free flow of their wealth to the outside world.
It is therefore not surprising that the ‘prophets’ taking advantage of these crises promise miracle riches, miracle health and instant prosperity; that is the exact opposite of what has happened to most people.
According to Naomi Klein:
“A state of shock, by definition, is a moment when there is a gap between fast-moving events and the information that exists to explain them.”
The events which destroyed the Zimbabwe dollar and led to the adoption of multiple foreign currencies are categorised in disaster theory as ‘excess reality, pure event, raw reality, unprocessed by story, narrative or anything that could bridge the gap between reality and understanding.
Without [a full story of our own leading to a home grown strategy], we are … intensely vulnerable to people who are ready to take advantage of the chaos for their own ends.
As soon as we have a new narrative that offers a perspective from within on the shocking events, we become reoriented and the world begins to make (our) sense again… [For] in moments of crisis, people are willing to hand over a great deal of power to anyone who claims to have a magic cure—whether the crisis is a financial meltdown or … a terrorist attack’.
Naomi Klein again confirms that one effect of programmes such as ESAP is to trigger hyperinflation which has effects on people and society similar to those of war:
“By the mid-eighties, several economists had observed that a true hyperinflation crisis stimulates the effects of a military war—spreading fear and confusion, creating refugees and causing large loss of life.
It was strikingly clear that in Bolivia, hyperinflation had played the same role as had Augusto Pinochet’s war [against the people] in Chile and the Falkland Islands war for Margaret Thatcher. It had created the context for emergency measures, a state of exception during which the rules of democracy could be suspended and economic control be temporarily handed over to the team of experts in Goni’s living room.
For hard-core Chicago School ideologues like John Williamson, that meant that hyperinflation was not a problem to be solved, as Jeffrey Sachs believed, but a golden opportunity to be seized.”
Telegenic ‘prophets’ have also seized crisis as a golden opportunity to plant strange beliefs and to enrich themselves.
Demand for telegenic prophets and the terror of the religious spectacle
The economic and social devastation resulting from effects of the global economic crisis, from the effects of ESAP, from effects of the HIV-AIDS pandemic and from sanctions drives people to seek quick explanations in a state of shock, to seek quick remedies to their immediate needs.
Telegenic prophecy becomes extra-attractive to many because it displays the following public characteristics:
It removes the responsibility for providing answers and meeting dire needs away from the state, away from the society, away from mothers and fathers and places such responsibility upon the shoulders of God whom the charismatic, visualised prophet claims to represent.
Telegenic prophecy, as a visual spectacle, tends to dwarf all other purported answers to tribulation because it is extra-large, extra-loud, extra-bright.
And it makes the victims of crises speechless, gawking with awe at the prophet and the huge crowds as well as the material things that surround him or her.
Telegenic prophecy is deliberately packaged for viewing and its spectacular features overshadow its content and its social, political and economic context.
The spectacle also represents escape from the drudgery of hard work and daily survival, from reflection, reason, nuances, and subtleties.
Instead it highlights impact, drama, hysteria, rescue, rupture, apocalypse, dominance and exclusion of any reality which is not incorporated into the frame of the televised spectacle.
Where telegenic evangelists and prophets came from
The telegenic faith ministry is a North American import and its origins are part and parcel of Anglo-Saxon cold war history, culture and propaganda. Some illustrations of the prototype are in order: According to Joyce Nelson’s book The Perfect Machine: Television in the Nuclear Age, citing Reverend David Mainse:
“When God created the universe, He took into it the laws of communication that are linking people today.
The earth is prepared to receive messages. There are televisions and radios in homes.”
You can see it in the tv cathedrals that rise up into the heavenly air-waves, glorifying the Almighty TV God who has His finger on the cosmic channel selector.
Reverend Rex Hubbard started a church designed as a tv studio, built in 1958.
But Reverend Robert H Schuller and his ‘Hour of Power’ were not to be outdone. By 1980 Reverend Schuller had built his Crystal Cathedral with ninety-foot doors that open to reveal twelve massive fountains (one for each apostle) and a Jumbotron video screen.
The lesson for Zimbabwe is clear. When people are in shock, one can use the power of media and repetition to create beliefs and illusions which make history, the real world and the existing economy temporarily appear disposable, boring, unnecessary and even irrelevant. But reality always returns and strikes back, meaning that the crises are not solved.