By Saul Gwakuba-Ndlovu

AN Epworth-based so-called ‘prophet’ or ‘man of God’ recently told his congregants that if they fell sick, they should report to him first before they went to any hospital.
Epworth, in Harare, is one of Zimbabwe’s peri-urban localities most of whose residents are people who moved from the rural areas relatively recently.
Many of them are in need of education, as some are actually, while others are functionally, illiterate.
A few have had more than 11 years’ formal education.
Some unscrupulous characters take advantage of poor socio-economic conditions prevailing in such peri-urban communities to enrich themselves.
One of the currently most popular ways of doing so is to launch so-called miracle-performing Christian churches in communities.
Such people take very lightly the global socio-cultural practice separating educational institutions such as kindergartens, schools, colleges and universities from spiritual organisations such as churches, temples and synagogues.
Health institutions such as clinics, hospitals and medical surgeries are the third class that is involved in what we might call a division of socio-cultural responsibilities.
Pastors, including so-called prophets, are responsible for the spiritual welfare of communities, while schools and their sister organisations look after the development of the intellect and hospitals take care of the physical well-being of the people.
However, these days, pastors have somehow convinced themselves and some of their gullible church members that they are also medical experts.
Scores of highly suspect religious organisations have been created in Zimbabwe.
At the head of some of those pseudo-religious organisations are patently shameless men or women whose life passion is to amass wealth by hook or by crook.
Such highly self-centred individuals usually narrate what they consider to be fascinating stories or experiences that made them prophets, or ‘men of God’ as they are called by their followers.
Their stories or experiences are usually about dreams or visions in which some angel or one or other of biblical personalities appeared to them and ordered them to found a church.
Such stories are so bizarre that they cannot be taken seriously by normal minds, to say nothing about the mental condition of those originating them.
Some years ago, a woman in Mashonaland said she had died for a couple of days during which she was instructed by God (Jehovah) to return to her people to start a church.
She did launch a sect whose followers wore a kind of military uniform.
That sect claimed to perform miracles.
In the 1950s, some childless couples would go to the sect’s main centre to be prayed for to have children.
One woman who was obviously well past her menopause went to the centre with her husband who was in his 70s.
On their return, she claimed to be pregnant, and maintained that claim for some three years.
Some observers said she claimed to be pregnant until she died some 10 or so years later, her husband having passed away four or five years earlier.
At the height of that sect, rumours circulated that at the sect’s camp, there were half-a-dozen or so very physically fit young men, ranging in age between 30 and 40 years.
The sect’s camp administrators would secretly facilitate for each of the child-seeking women to spend a couple of hours secretly with each of those men and some of those women would actually become pregnant.
Those pregnancies would be attributed to the women’s husbands, of course, and the sect would attribute those obviously religion-sponsored adulterous activities to the power of the prayers of the sect founder.
In Zambia, a sect founded and led by one Alice Lenshina, shortly before that country became independent in October 1964, claimed physical immorality for its members.
The sect opposed Zambia’s founding President Dr Kenneth Kaunda, whose political party UNIP, it hated most passionately.
Lenshina and her most regrettably ignorant followers publicly opposed whatever the UNIP Government did or said.
Dr Kaunda, who was at that time the Prime Minister of the then Northern Rhodesia, warned Lenshina several times and told her to obey the country’s laws, including anti-small pox inoculation measures.
The sect was defiant.
When the police tried to arrest Lenshina and her lieutenants, the sect moved against them, overwhelming them by sheer numbers. There was something extraordinarily repulsive about the sect’s threatening crowd, a stench reminiscent of the old, repugnant bucket toilets.
The army was called in and a number of Lenshina’s followers were shot dead.
On taking away the war casualties, the security forces discovered that their bodies were smeared with faeces!
Lenshina believed, and so did her followers, that human waste could protect them from bullets!
They actually believed that that most offensive absurdity could work.
No wonder Dr Kaunda and his UNIP team banned the Lenshina sect and rusticated Lenshina and a number of her senior sect officials for a number of years.
In Zimbabwe, the Government is so tolerant of these religious organisation leaders some of whom have been convicted of multi-rape and sentenced to decades in prison, but their sects are still operational.
We are talking about a religious sect whose topmost leader has been, or was found, guilty of rape and locked up for a long period.
Why allow his sect, which he was using as a cover-up, to continue to exist?
Some people may compare such Zimbabwean cases to the worldwide Roman Catholic Church’s cases of children abuse. That would be misplaced and inappropriate in that whereas the Catholic Church is headed by the Pope, Zimbabwe sects are headed by those found guilty of rape or whatever else.
Most religious organisations, including all pentecostal and apostolic churches, are what are called in English law ‘ecclesiastical corporations’, all of whose members are under the authority of one person, the founder.
The office of the founder usually becomes non-functional after his or her death.
In some cases, the whole corporation is dissolved or breaks into factions, unlike the Roman Catholic Church where the office of the deceased continues in perpetuity.
It is because of that fact that one would be quite justified to call for the legal dissolution of a religious sect whose founder or topmost leader is convicted of a criminal offence such as rape, or a serious breach of such a law or laws that can endanger the public by claiming to be able to cure or to control a disease or a natural phenomenon or phenomena.
Some pentecostal churches are literally owned by their founders, some of whom have been using them as cover to commit a variety of crimes ranging from extortion to mass rape.
Some, if not many of the people who call themselves prophets or pastors, are just lazy, mentally unbalanced extortionists, and shameless, sexual marauders.
Just about all of them preach prosperity, but virtually none of them utter a word about the need or necessity to work hard in order to prosper.
They all talk about the need to pray in order not to be poor! Unbelievable!
While it is certainly true that prayer has a very strong role in every Christian’s life, it is undoubtedly true that hard work plays the (repeat ‘the’) most important role in every person’s economic advancement that Pentecostal preachers refer to as ‘prosperity’.
It is from the sweat of one’s brow that wealth comes.
There is a sort of belief in some sects that all herbs and charms are evil, that is to say that their use to treat illnesses is against the Christian doctrine and practice.
Many beliefs, particularly religious ones, are prejudices, most of which are caused by sheer ignorance.
Many herbs are derived from plants and/or fungi many of which we consume as food or as beverages.
Let us take the ordinary tomato as an example.
We all consume tomatoes, (originally found only in Mediterranean countries) either while they are raw or after they are fried or as a sauce or in stews or however else.
Tomatoes are rich in vitamin C and mineral salts.
Tomatoes are very effective blood alkalisers and also diuretics.
They neutralise and help to eliminate waste matter created by the metabolisation process.
They are also anti-oxidant and prevent the oxidation of cholesterol conveyed by what students or human biologists term low-density lipoproteins (LDL) which cause the hardening and narrowing of arteries, leading to arteriosclerosis.
Tomato consumption protects against cancer of the mouth, cancer of the stomach, cancer of the esophagus, cancer of the rectum, of the colon and also that of the prostate.
We mentioned fungi, an important example of which are edible mushrooms.
They are very rich in the ‘B’ group of vitamins as well as the minerals potassium, iron and phosphorous.
Mushrooms are used to cure diabetes because of their low carbohydrate content.
They are also recommended for the obese.
Green leaves and the soft fibre – part of bark of some trees are known to be medicinal and have been used by the Bantu as either cough expectorants or as cough suppressants.
Some part of some plants are boiled and used as purgatives.
Yet others are either sun-dried or roasted and ground and introduced into sick people’s bodies through incisions made by razorblades.
These as well as many other plants and vegetables that grow naturally in the wild are God’s gift to His people to help themselves against illnesses.
Pastors can, and should, pray for the rapid and effective recovery of the sick, and certainly stop pretending that prayers can replace clinics or hospitals, including tried and tested treatments and innoculations.
Education is very essential for some of the pastors to enable them to understand and appreciate the relationship between the body, the spirit and the intellect.
Saul Gwakuba-Ndlovu is a retired, Bulawayo-based journalist. He can be contacted on cell 0734 328 136 or through email, sgwakuba@gmail.com