DURING the launch of the Citizen Manifesto at the Harare Gardens in July, when the Church was identified as a key player and tasked to actively participate in the fresh regime change onslaught, it was a re-incarnation of the 2006 Church’s anti-Zimbabwe project.
The endorsement of the Church at the Harare Gardens also evoked memories of the arrogance of whites, especially the ‘Very Right’ Rev John Da Costa’s attack on what he called ‘deafening silence’ of the world following the attack on the September 3 1978 of the Air Rhodesia Viscount Hunyani on a routine flight from Kariba to Salisbury by ZIPRA operatives using a SAM 7 missile.
On September 8 1978, Da Costa, who used to pray for Rhodesians on missions to attack guerillas, came out guns blazing, accusing the world of ignoring these ‘murders’
This is what he said: “The horror of the crash was bad enough, but that this should have been compounded by murder of the most savage and treacherous sort leaves us stunned with disbelief and brings revulsion in the minds of anyone deserving the name ‘human’.
“The ghastliness of these ill-fated flights from Kariba will be burned upon our memories for years to come.
“For others, far from our borders, it is an intellectual matter, not one which affects them deeply.
“Here is the tragedy!”
Ironically this is the same man of the cloth, who did not utter a word following the Nyadzonia Genocide of August 11 1976.
In 2006, several churches under the banner of ‘The Zimbabwe We Want’ initiative took the unprecedented step of pushing for the ouster of President Robert Mugabe and ZANU PF from power by aiding the West and the opposition’s regime change agenda project.
And they were well-financed by Western governments working with them to pursue the anti-Zimbabwe project.
With elections now on the horizon, the churches have once again revived the project by making a raft of demands that the opposition has been calling for to smoothly sail into power.
They have been placed to strategically cow their followers by preaching a gospel laden with political messages aimed at galvanising congregants against the Government.
The strategy includes, among others, to openly participate in such activities like calling for electoral reforms which the opposition has been claiming are ‘absent’ in their quest for so-called ‘free and fair’ elections.
The messages will then be carefully packaged to incorporate political statements here and there, to devastating effect.
The project also involves inciting strategic groupings such as students unions to embark on violent protests as what happened in June this year when Evan Mawarire incited University of Zimbabwe students to protest against an increase in tuition fees.
The churches’ regime change agenda project is now in motion.
About 10 Christian organisations including the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace (CCJP), Prayer Network of Zimbabwe (PNZ), Zimbabwe Pastors’ Fellowship (ZPF), Christian Leaders Forum (CLM), Ecumenical Church Leaders’ Forum (ECLF), Zimbabwe Christian Alliance (ZCC) and Zimbabwe Devine Destiny (ZDD), among others, have already started participating in a project called ‘The Christian Vote Campaign’, aimed at propping up the embattled opposition which is struggling to tie up the so-called grand coalition project.
The churches met in June 2017 to launch the project.
Zimbabwe Council of Churches secretary-general, Kenneth Mtata said the campaign was meant to ensure there would be no repeat of the previous violent elections.
Said Mtata: “The church needs to reflect on what would be their responsibility, as we get to the elections in 2018.
“Our message is very simple: That we want to make sure that we do not have a repeat of what we have done or what we have seen in the past, where every election is marred by violence, properties destroyed and communities are fragmented.
“We are saying is it possible for us to have a civilised election, where people can air their different views and make their informed choices.”
This is despite the fact that previous elections which they have sought, but failed, to discredit have been endorsed as free and fair by local, regional and international observer missions.
But the churches are undeterred in their push for a new Government for the country.
They are now taking their fight for the same to the public domain.
In May this year, the ZCC invited the World Council of Churches (WCC) for what they claimed was a fact finding mission which then turned out be a visit aimed at attacking the Government on its home turf.
Reverend Dr Olav Fykse Tveit, WCC secretary-general, latched on to the state of the country’s economy but carefully skirted the issues of sanctions which have caused untold suffering to the majority.
“We hear from statistics that the average income of a citizen in Zimbabwe is now at the lowest in Africa and it is an indication that the economy is not working as we hope it to be and the ordinary people are suffering from the daily challenges to get bread.” Treit said.
In specially coded messages, he let the cat out of the bag when he invoked the involvement of the civic society who would go on to endorse the church during the launch of the Citizen Manifesto in July 2017.
“We really hope that if the Government cannot fix the economy, churches and the civic society, together with the Government and other big companies, can work together and improve the economy, and this is also an issue of moral value; it is not only a matter of the economy in a typical sense,” he said.
Since the last elections held on July 31 2013, there has been a lot of canvassing on the ground by the churches.
In May 2016, heads of Christian denominations refined the 2006 communique when they released a fresh document titled ‘The Zimbabwe We Want—Taking the process forward’.
The regime change communique calls for ‘leadership renewal across the board and for increased political accountability’.
It says: “Deficiency in leadership, governance and leadership succession issues have resulted in lack of direction, policy inconsistencies, stagnation and absence of political will to tackle current challenges.”
The churches that authored the communique are the Evangelical Fellowship of Zimbabwe (FZ), the Zimbabwe Council of Churches (ZCC), Zimbabwe Catholic Bishops Conference (ZCBC) and Union for Development of Apostolic Churches in Zimbabwe (UDACIZA).
This is why it is important to unravel the 2006 project.
US Embassy funding of Church institutions and figures included funding of the Christian Alliance headed by Bishop Kadenge and Archbishop Pius Ncube’s South African-based Solidarity Peace Trust.
Both were part of riots in Zimbabwe, with the Christian Alliance providing Christian cover to The Save Zimbabwe Campaign around which confrontation with Government was organised.
The US also bankrolled Archbishop Ncube’s repeated travels around the world which had no
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financial benefits to the local Catholic Church or the Vatican.
In the meantime, the former US Ambassador to Zimbabwe, Christopher Dell, was meeting with both factions of the MDC and their NGO affiliates to encourage them to close ranks and confront the Government.
He promised new money for such a project.
Therein lay the origins of ‘the broad political Church’ concept within which all oppositional forces would concert action against the Government towards the regime change goals.
As it turned out, this broad political Church housed itself in a real British and American-sponsored Church movement called the Christian Alliance, led by one Bishop Kadenge, with Archbishop Pius Ncube hard behind.
Formed parallel to the MDC’s mobilisation campaign, this pseudo- Christian body and its openly political and confrontational agenda, had alarmed other religious figures into breaking ranks with it, to start a rival platform founded on an intercessional role and seeking settlement blueprint under the banner of ‘The Zimbabwe We Want’.
It was led by Bishop Trevor Manhanga who would soon be ousted from the Evangelical Fellowship Church as punishment for his non-compliance with the radical agenda of the Christian Alliance.
While this rival movement had the numbers and an ear of the state, it soon discovered that ‘donor dollars’ would dry up quite fast over its decision to work with the Government.
The Christian Alliance, on the other hand, would be well-heeled, moreso now that it sponsored what appeared to be a programme of ‘prayer meetings’ under the political rubric of The Save Zimbabwe Campaign.
In reality, ‘prayer meetings’ hosted by the Anglo-American-backed Christian Alliance under the banner of ‘The Save Zimbabwe Campaign’, was an attempt to dress the MDC in a bishop’s cloak and robes.
The Christian Alliance hosted both factions of the MDC, the NCA, ZCTU, Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition, Women/Men of Zimbabwe Arise (WOZA/MOZA), Zimbabwe National Students Union (ZINASU), Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights, Zimbabwe Doctors for Human Rights, Media Alliance and a whole battery of political NGOs.
The common elements across this vast welter of institutions were their shared parentage and funding.
Posters announcing the so-called ‘prayer meeting’ on March 11 2007 had clear MDC logos and read: “Save Zimbabwe Rally, MDC Defiance Campaign.
MDC joins other democratic forces under the auspices of The Save Zimbabwe Campaign to a rally to be held on March 11 at Zimbabwe Grounds, Highfield, starting at 10 am.”
What followed from January 2007 up to March 11 2007 were series of opposition activities quite bellicose in tone and often complemented by physical attacks on structures and figures of law enforcement, especially the police.
In 2013, The Patriot published an expose of the activities of Kadenge in the run-up to the July 31 2013 harmonised elections.
Below is part of our story.
“The Southern Africa Crisis Management Agency (SACMA) and Christian Action Trust Zimbabwe (CAT-Zim) have come together to launch a grassroots-anchored peace initiative ahead of Zimbabwe’s watershed elections this year.
To lay the groundwork, the organisations are training church pastors and spiritual leaders in electoral processes and monitoring of political violence across the country.
They will also be responsible for escalating the incidences with relevant authorities, making follow-ups on incidents reported.
A total of 200 church leaders comprising pastors, reverends, apostles and bishops have so far been trained.
On completion, the programme is expected to reach 5 000 church leaders across Zimbabwe.
‘We are part of a broader group of organisations affiliated to the Zimbabwe Council of Churches, who have embarked on various strategies to minimise violence and torture as part of our normal pastoral work in Zimbabwe’, said Reverend Kadenge, chairman of CAT-Zimbabwe.
‘This programme seeks to compliment the efforts already underway by three Zimbabwe main Church organisations, The Catholic Bishops Conference, Evangelical Fellowship of Zimbabwe and the Zimbabwe Council of Churches to address Zimbabwe’s perennial legacy of violence before, during and after elections.
‘SACMA in partnership with CAT-Zim is training pastors in electoral processes and monitoring of political violence, equipping them with various skills like terrain scanning, event diarising, incident recording as well as peace building.
‘The initiative aims to finally set up a Zimbabwean own version of Ushahidi, where incidences of violence are fed into an online database in real time with church leaders as community focal persons in scanning, detecting, verifying and feeding our call centre’.
The above snippet of what these two organisations are planning on doing was taken from the Kubatana website. SACMA and CAT-Zim are busy advertising and looking for more churches to work with.”
In order to have credence, the project already has in its fold people like Shingi Munyeza, Evan Mawarire and Philip Mugadza, to mention but a few.
Below are some of the brief profiles of these men in question.
Bishop Sebastian Bakare
Former Anglican cleric bishop Sebastian Bakare is another well-known rabid advocate of the regime change agenda.
On the eve of President Robert Mugabe’s Youth Interface Rally in Mutare, the retired Bishop urged youths to take the ZANU PF Government ‘head-on’ through demonstrations.
He said, without demonstrations by the youth there would be no miracle like the removal of President Mugabe from power.
“For miracles to happen, they should start to do something. God does not work in a vacuum. Do the little and God will do the rest,” said the retired Bishop with a clerical collar firmly fixed around his neck.
(No wonder Pastor Obediah Musindo said Bakare was a replica of former Bishop Pius Ncube) who was always eager to publicly show his hatred of the country’s leadership.
The retired cleric’s penchant for protests, and everything they bring, can be seen by his close association with the MDC a violent party.
He recently led a team of Anglicans in endorsing Morgan Tsvangirai for presidency at the party’s rally, where he equated the MDC leader to some Biblical character.
In an interview in the US last year, the retired Bishop supported the MDC protests in August last year which ended in violence and massive destruction of property.
The retired Bishop does not seem to appreciate genuine black governments that promote the African cause.
He is also a chairman of United Mutare Residents and Ratepayers Trust and we have already shown how fired up these so-called residents’ associations are in their drive to effect regime change.
He is married to a German wife.
Perhaps that’s why his ideas seem to be moulded around imperialists’ thinking when they decided to partition Africa.
The conference was held in Berlin.
Shingi Munyeza
According to part of his profile on his website: “Munyeza is a Zimbabwean businessman who was born in 1966 who in 2008 became the chief executive officer of Africa Sun Limited (ASL), a hospitality company in sub-Saharan Africa and Africa in general.
Munyeza is also a devout Christian and a senior pastor at Faith Ministries in Harare.
Munyeza came to Salisbury (present day Harare) in 1970 in search of a safe haven as a result of the Second Chimurenga.
Curiously Munyeza runs gambling houses and has facilities to sell alcohol and since last year, took to social media where he has been posting political statements attacking the Government.
Pr Munyeza said in June 2016: “A little while ago I warned of severe turbulence.
We have now entered into severe turbulence.
Further warning — the severe turbulence will last longer than expected.
Zimbabwe is going through change which involves everyone so it becomes the country that God always wanted it to be.”
A report on July 3 2016 by The Sunday Mail said: “Some of the controversial statements are titled ‘10-Point Plan to Run Zimbabwe Limited’ and ‘What I would have done with the US$200 million facility’.”
Under his 10-point plan, Pr Munyeza calls for massive civil servants retrenchments and privatisation of State-owned enterprises.
He also advocates reversal of the indigenisation policy from the 51 percent threshold for locals to 10 percent, and he criticises historic land reforms that have seen around 300 000 black families benefitting from farms previously held by just 6 000 whites.
Pr Munyeza also speaks strongly against Bond notes which are set to be introduced by Government to arrest capital flight through externalisation.
He wrote: “Definitely stay away from the printing press by ensuring the necessary foreign currency controls are in place to arrest externalisation.
No to Bond notes.
Conclude a balance of payment support through current process with IMF — this will ensure my working capital requirement. No to Bond notes.”
Pr Munyeza went on: “Government immediately cuts its expenditure and begins to live within its means — privatise or commercialise State-owned enterprises.
Major retrenchment is overdue.”
He, however, called for the removal of Western economic sanctions on Zimbabwe saying: “No need for market restrictions in a free world.”
Philip Mugadza
Remnant Pentecostal Church leader Pastor Philip Mugadza rose to fame after he led a one-man demonstration against President Mugabe during ZANU PF’s Annual National People’s Conference in Victoria Falls in 2015.
Since then, he has been in prison more than he has been at pulpit.
Mugadza was arrested on Friday, November 18 2016 by ZRP officers for wearing the national flag without first seeking permission from the authorities.
Prosecutors said Mugadza contravened Section 6 of the Flag Act by unlawfully and intentionally wearing or displaying the national flag without securing prior permission from the secretary as required by the Flag Act.
The beleaguered man of God who made headlines last year after he was allegedly involved in a fight with prostitutes over a US$15 debt for services rendered at a local hotel went to Mkoba Secondary School.
He also studied at the Christian College of Southern Africa (COSSA).
Evan Mawarire
He was born on March 7 1977 and did his secondary education at Prince Edward High School in Harare.
Mawarire is a qualified auto electrician from the Harare Institute of Technology.
He served as child president between 1993 and 1994.
The man started a political project called #ThisFlag that attacked Government in April 2016 and earned him a six-month stay in the US.
Upon his return early this year he was arrested at the airport.
According to a warned and cautioned statement, which was recorded from Mawarire on February 2 2017, Zimbabwe Republic Police (ZRP) officers said the self-proclaimed clergyman insulted the Zimbabwe National Flag by using it to brand his politically-motivated criminal activities.
The ZRP officers said Mawarire would wear the National Flag each time he addressed or incited members of the public or his followers to revolt against a constitutionally elected Government by urging all workers not to go to work and stage demonstrations in circumstances which were calculated to show disrespect for the flag or to bring the Zimbabwe National Flag into disrepute.
With elections around the corner, we are in familiar territory where the Church pokes its nose into the country’s politics.
We need to be wary of these so-called men of cloth.