Africa-Press – Uganda. At Simba Radio’s Saturday 10am-to-midday talk show last weekend, the Butambala legislator Muwanga Kivumbi narrated how Parliament and other government offices were rampant with witchcraft and the fear of demons.
Kivumbi was reinforcing old stories of politicians and workplace rivals deploying the supposed forces of the occult against each other.
Many frightened bigwigs are said to reject ‘haunted’ chairs and official vehicles their predecessors have used, even when these items are in excellent condition, regardless of the replacement cost to taxpayers.
The same weekend, on Sunday, Joseph Serwadda, a Pentecostal preacher who trades as an ‘apostle,’ was on his Impact FM/Dream TV, highlighting a survey that had ranked Ugandans as the heaviest consumers of alcohol in the East African region.
Uganda’s Pentecostals are obsessed with alcohol. Many Pentecostal preachers consistently fleece their followers to enrich themselves. They do not mind tithes or ‘seeds’ from stolen money. Many are overt philanderers.
Virtually all of them fraudulently claim miraculous healing and wealth-giving powers. They all falsely claim to exorcise demons. And they encourage people to believe in witchcraft to sustain their business as anti-witchcraft champions.
While Serwadda dutifully congratulates our traditional leaders at their anniversaries on his broadcast platforms, the same platforms are relentlessly used to undermine these leaders with weirdly hateful obscenity.
Understandably, as Serwadda spent much of his November 14 Sunday morning talk show ingratiatingly pleading for two UPDF soldiers who have been sentenced to death for murder in Somalia, Impact FM was often cynically used to mock the Ugandans massacred by our security forces in November 2020.
To our Pentecostals, merely touching alcohol is far more disturbing than these contradictions.
Serwadda said that if he were the President, he would close Nile Breweries. Presumably, the other brewers and distillers would follow. He said tax loss considerations would not stop him.
To demonstrate his great wisdom, he cited Solomon’s. Proverbs 20:1 calls wine a “mocker” and “brawler”, a “noise-maker”.
Well, anyone can reach that wisdom without Solomon’s help and even broaden it. An excess of power, or religious fervour, is potentially as intoxicating as wine.
For instance, all the other painful things about Covid-19 aside, people who work or live in big commercial city buildings and crowded suburban neighbourhoods enjoyed some peace when the Pentecostal churches were not ‘mocking’, ‘brawling’, or making too much noise.
These contradictions make Uganda funny.
As President Museveni sings about a science-driven country, many of his ministers, MPs, RDCs and so on are desperately chasing shadows in the world of the occult.
And Serwadda, an ‘apostle’ who cannot spend a single day without broadcasting that he exorcises demons and demolishes the power of witchcraft (in the name of Jesus!), has forgotten the biblical wisdom about doing unnecessary things and leaving undone the things we should have done.
He is dreaming of abolishing alcohol, which he cannot do, because he is not the President. And he has left undone what we thought he had the capacity (and I am sure has the liberty) to do; which is to drive out all the demons afflicting our VIPs, and casting a spell of the Holy Spirit through every wall to cleanse all government offices of the scourge of witchcraft.
All he needs is one VIP Prayer Breakfast for the performance. Our VIPs will win by getting clear heads. These heads will make Museveni win. Taxpayers will win.
And, of course, Serwadda will have distinguished himself among the other Inter-Religious fellows and also separated himself from Uganda’s horde of fake prophets and apostles.
Mr Tacca is a novelist, socio-political commentator.
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