It's about time god issued a disclaimer

I spent New Year with two visiting friends, both of them Ugandan, who have been living outside of the country for most of their lives. One is more Nigerian than I can ever claim to be. He is married to a Nigerian, and I am not. He has lived in the country for the past 30 years, which I have not done. Having left home at 22, I could not go back for a decade and a half. I have never spent more than one month there since 1999, when I was ‘allowed’ back. The other friend crossed over to yankee-land, studied, worked and became famous - though he has never lost his Kabale roots. The former is Professor Okello Oculli and the latter is ‘Mr Terrific’, the hugely popular anchorman of VOA’s mass audience programme, Straight Talk Africa.

We were invited to dinner by an Eritrean sister, the immediate director of the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Nairobi, Aki Aseghedech, and her visiting brother, the former long-term minister in the EPLF government of Eritrea, Tesfaye. Tesfaye - like a few other prominent refugees from president Afworki’s one-man rule - is now working with the UN.

They say opposites attract in marriage but there are more opposites than cupid could conjure up between these two siblings. Aki is a hot-blooded radical who sometimes makes me seem like a ‘moderate’! But the brother is more sedate - though no less a revolutionary. He is one of those stoics who can keep his brains on ice while his heart is on fire.

You can just imagine the kind of conversation, intellectual and political exchanges around that dinner table that night. Five widely travelled and politically committed Africans, none of them in their country of birth, but feeling no less African. All angry because they know that their individual countries and Africa as a whole can and deserves to do better than it is doing at the moment. Our heated conversations and passionate exchanges over all kinds of topics and themes from the global to the local gave me more hope than anything that although this continent might be down, it is not out: not yet, and it will not be, so long as there are many Africans not giving up on themselves, and on Africa. But it also confirmed to me the necessity to heed Karl Marx’s advice and move from ‘interpreting the world’ to ‘changing it’.

I had promised a friend that I would come to their church. So soon after honking in the New Year, we left Aki’s beautiful home in one of the most posh areas of Nairobi - which residents call Nairobbery - because of the high rate of crime! Since I was the driver, my two guests had no choice but to go to where I was going. And that’s how we arrived at the Parklands branch of the Nairobi Pentecostal Church, joining the faithful in their midnight service for the New Year. There were hundreds of worshippers who had been keeping vigil all night, pouring out their hearts to God in anticipation of good tidings. One would have thought that I, being born a Muslim, would be the most uncomfortable in the church. But thanks to my missionary education, lifelong love of Christmas carols and Christian choirs, I acquitted myself well. But one of my guests was more uncomfortable. He cannot remember when he was last in a church. Just imagine a scenario in which a Muslim was trying to placate the nerves of a person born and christened in a church! But that’s another story, to be continued another time. Anyway, we survived the service.

Okello has again been visiting Nairobi, and we got involved in church-related conversations again. A few days ago, in my office, we were engaged in a half day discussion about God in Africa. A firebrand Anglican reverend, responsible for mobilising 45 million Anglicans on this continent, came to my office to say hello. We were still halloing three hours later. Our discussions soon veered towards the church in Africa. The context is a Kenya that has been gripped by the story of a very popular born-again reverend, Rose Wanjiru whose desire to marry another Charismatic priest from South Africa had been the subject of a very public legal tussle. It turns out that this self-proclaimed bishop has been married before and had children. The husband in question went to court to stop the marriage, and also demand ‘his conjugal rights’ from a woman he had married under customary law and had never divorced! The courts stopped the marriage. The battle continues both in the law courts and the court of public opinion. However it has raised questions about the role of the church, and the ever-growing born-again, Pentecostal charismatic church across the continent.

Okello, our Anglican reverend sister, and I spent hours discussing this. There were no conclusions to our exchanges, though a number of issues are becoming clear. First, the Pentecostals are occupying a vacuum created by the established churches, which focus more on delivering their herd to heaven. Whereas, the Pentecostals offer God’s kingdom on earth. Second, while the established churches preach humility, poverty and guilt, the born-again (or mulekole as they are called in Uganda) preach prosperity and ‘feel good’ ideologies. For instance Bishop Wanjiru admits to fornication, children outside marriage, witchcraft and all kinds of failings, but then says, ‘see what God has done in my life, if I can make it so can you’.

These ideologies offer hope to the hopeless in a way that no government, president or CSO activist can do. We know many of them are fraudulent but their supporters believe they are God’s ‘little angels’ with all kinds of miracle prayers that can solve their immigration problems, marriage and other relationship challenges, barrenness, even HIV/Aids. And even but more importantly: their poverty. They offer bargain priced prosperity, as captured in one of their more popular slogans, 'a giver never lacks'. The more you give to God the more you are entitled to expect. They proclaim ‘Jesus is the answer’; but never quite tell their believers what the question is. What can or should we do about it? It is not enough to say ‘religion is the opium of the masses’, because it is both the rich, the very rich, the poor and poorest who are flocking to be saved. It is not just the ‘uneducated’ masses, but our highly educated and professional classes who are seeking salvation and refuge from the helter-skelter rat race of their lives.

And it is not only these churches that are witnessing revivals, but all religions. Many Muslims are becoming radicalised thanks to Bush and Blair’s ‘wars on terror’, that has made Islam and Muslims targets. Are the manmade problems of the world so out of control that ‘Only God’ can solve them? Or are we inventing God as a shield and convenient excuse to avoid facing up to these problems, both personally and politically? What has God got to do with poverty? What has he got to do with rapacious globalisation, intolerance, Iraq, the Niger Delta, Darfur, Palestine and Lebanon? It is about time God issued a disclaimer!

* Dr. Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem is the Deputy Director for the UN Millennium Campaign in Africa, based in Nairobi, Kenya. He writes this article in his personal capacity as a concerned Pan-Africanist.

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