AfricaPress-Tanzania: OUR Constitution provides that Tanzania is a secular state, which means we don’t have a specific national religion.
But Tanzanians have their own religions and others are, of course, non-believers. We have started this as a background to what President John Magufuli appealed to believers to dedicate three days that end today to pray to God to help us fight effectively against the coronavirus pandemic.
President Magufuli did this through his Twitter @MagufuliJP on Thursday evening.
He said: “My fellow Tanzanians due to the presence of coronavirus, I ask that we spend three days from April 17-19 (Friday, Saturday and Sunday) to pray to God who is the master of everything to save us from this disaster.
Let us pray according to our beliefs.” There are critics who are wary of faith/religion and think that God never interferes in human affairs to the extent of suggesting that in the fight against the deadly disease as we have it God has no place.
They forget that even some great scientists believed in God and were able to reconcile their scientific discoveries with their faith in God.
For instance, Muhammad ibn Musa Al-Khwarizmi (780-850) also known as ‘Algoritmi or Algaurizin’s works introduced Hindu- Arabic numerals and the concepts of algebra into European mathematics’.
Antoine Lavoisier (1743-1794) was a Roman Catholic believer and a founder of modern chemistry.
‘He discovered oxygen’s role in combustion and respiration and that water is a compound of hydrogen and oxygen’.
Willard Gibbs (1839-1903) of the Congregational Church ‘invented vector analysis and founded the sciences of modern statistical mechanics and chemical thermodynamics’.
There are many other scientists who were believers and nonbelievers as well who have contributed greatly to the work of science today.
While scientists who believe in God can reconcile science with faith/religion/God, others don’t.
President Magufuli’s appeal makes a lot of sense–in the sense that if the developed nations with the resources, technologies and other means to fight against the pandemic have been so plagued to such an extent, how about developing countries like ours?
So, President’s Magufuli’s appeal is a way of recognising that we are limited beings. Yes, we can do many things, but we can’t do all of them.
So, it is useless to think that prayer or the involvement of God in the global fight against the pandemic is unnecessary.
In fact, the President had made it clear in his official message to the nation that ‘let us take all necessary preventive measures to fight against the pandemic as recommended by the government and health experts’ and ‘while we do it let each one of us in his or her own belief system ask God to help us find the lasting solution’.
This is because President Magufuli believes ‘God helps those who help themselves’. So, as we help ourselves God will also help us more and more.
