Manakonako

SABHUKU'S EYE : THE FALSE PROPHET WHO BECAME A PRAETORIAN There are Sundays when a man goes to church to hear the Gospel, and there are Sundays when he goes to church and finds himself, unknowingly, at a rally. Last Sunday at the Hippodrome was the latter for Christ Embassy congregants. Uebert Angel spoke thus: "The vitriolic attacks against Vice President Constantino Chiwenga is a disgraceful exhibition of political impropriety. And a display of intellectual bankruptcy. Contempt masquerading as criticism is diabolic, it's evil." One listens, and one wonders. Since when did the pulpit become the place where the citizen is taught what he may not say about his own Vice President? For the Bible which Angel invokes is not, whatever his exegetes may claim, a handbook of deference to power. To come to his field, Nathan did not seek an appointment to see David. He walked in and said, Thou art the man. Elijah simply pronounced judgment upon Ahab. John the Baptist did not temper his language because Herod wore a crown. He simply called the king's marriage unlawful. Yet here, Angel has inverted the office. And he does so with a distinction that collapses the moment you touch it. Criticism, he says, is allowed. Contempt is diabolic. But who decides where one ends and the other begins? That is not theology but censorship! If he wishes to be judged as a prophet, let him be judged as a prophet. Deuteronomy is merciless on this point: the word must come to pass. In July, Angel spoke of a successor "walking, but dead inside." Another one, he assured us, "is coming after August." August came and went. Chiwenga is still VP& no successor has come. A prophet whose prophecy fails does not get to reinvent failure as mystery but must be ignored. Yet the theological fraud, grave as it is, is not the gravest fraud. The political fraud is graver still. For Angel's sermon rests upon a constitutional amnesia so convenient one must assume it is deliberate. In this Republic there is one centre of executive power, not two. President Emmerson Mnangagwa is Head of State, Head of Government, Commander-in-Chief of the Defence Forces, and First Secretary of ZANU-PF. The Vice President is his deputy and holds no independent mandate. He commands no parallel centre& serves, constitutionally and politically, at the President's pleasure. If Angel's doctrine is to mean anything then it must apply first, and most severely, to the undermining of the President. But who, pray, undermined whom at Chinhoyi on 16 October? It was the VP himself who stood before a full house of his own party and went offside, full throttle, as if the Presidency were a debating society and not an office to be respected. It is the Vice President's camp, not the citizenry, that has turned the Presidency into a waiting room& made succession a daily briefing, while the incumbent still occupies State House. Angel is silent on all this. His sermon thus amounts to this perverse doctrine: Let the President be undermined from within. Let the centre of power be attacked by its own deputy but let the citizen who notices it be told to hush, to save his bundles, to stop listening to "nonsense." That is not neutrality nor prophecy but factionalism in a cassock which brings us to the larger decay. Every succession battle in Zimbabwe now produces its own prophets and apostles. Every Sunday, another "prophetic voice" pops from a random bush to bless one politician and curse another. Yet, that is not the Gospel. The Gospel is sin, repentance, salvation, and truth that does not bend. Christ did not commission His disciples to become public relations officers for competing establishments in Harare as we are seeing today. Let politicians settle succession in the Party, in Parliament, in the courts and let the Church return to its first work: preach Christ. And when it must speak to power, let it speak to all power, without calculating which faction will be inconvenienced. Angel's intervention was never really about protecting Chiwenga. The General does not need a preacher in a white suit to protect him from criticism. He commands an office, a party, a history, and a state apparatus quite capable of defending itself. Instead, it was about protecting Angel; his access, relevance& proximity to power. Yet in defending the deputy while the President is being undermined, he undermined the very centre he claims to serve! Until the Church withdraws from this theatre and returns to the Gospel, it will continue to produce ecclesiastical praetorians.