Strictly Personal
Something to die for: Work, colour and music can stop Kenya-style cult deaths, By Charles Onyango-Obbo
Published
2 years agoon
The number of bodies found at the ranch of Kenyan pastor Paul Mackenzie outside the coastal town of Malindi went over 100 as the week closed. Mackenzie, who heads the Good News International Church, told his followers to starve themselves to death to meet Jesus – and they believed.
The death toll is likely to rise as security officials dig up his farm in Shakahola forest in search of bodies, and the more than 210 people missing are accounted for.
The deaths have been met with shock and anger. How could this happen?
The methods of some of God’s men and women on Earth can be unfathomable. But perhaps the minds of their flock are more puzzling.
The story is told of two Kenyan sisters. One worked as an air hostess with Qatar Airways. She quit her job, returned home, sold her possessions, gave the proceeds to Mackenzie, and disappeared into his forest compound.
Starvation cult
Her sister owned a boutique in Nairobi. She left her husband, took her child and embraced Mackenzie’s starvation cult. By press time, their whereabouts were still unknown, but it was feared they might be among the 100 bodies that have been exhumed or those who are missing.
Though he urged his followers to starve to death to hasten their encounter with Jesus, Mackenzie himself wasn’t in a hurry for an appointment with Christ. He is very well-fed. It has been lost in the outrage that his was not your garden variety prosperity gospel church, promising to multiply followers’ money ten times more in future wealth if they tithed it to the pastor. He offered suffering as the ticket for a heavenly encounter.
The void in their lives that the Good News International Church tapped into was deep and complex. One hint is that the former Qatar Airways hostess’ son, who was living with her parents in Kenya, had recently died while she was working. There was a lot of pain and sense of loss there.
Uganda’s Kibwetere
Mackenzie is not East Africa’s first death cult leader. That infamy belongs to Uganda’s Chief Apostle Joseph Kibwetere. Kibwetere led the Ten Commandments of God, a bizarre fundamentalist splinter Catholic church in western Uganda. They believed the world would end dramatically and the Virgin Mary would arrive to carry them away to heaven. Several appointed dates came and passed without an apocalypse.
On March 17, 2000, Kibwetere and his fellow church leaders decided to accelerate the prophecy. They lit a fire in which 778 members of the church were killed. More than 280 bodies were also found and recovered from mass graves in the compound of the faithful who had died or been killed before the big fire, bringing the total death toll to over 1,000.
The whereabouts of Kibwetere remain a mystery. His body was never identified. Ugandan security and rumours suggest he never went to meet the Virgin Mary but had taken off into exile. Several sightings of him from as far away as Malawi have been reported.
Offered heavenly bliss
Like Mackenzie, Kibwetere didn’t promise wealth on Earth, a happy marriage, or career success like prosperity gospel prophets. He offered heavenly bliss and face time with the Virgin Mary.
The loneliness, despair and alienation that drive people to follow Mackenzie are not too hard to understand. They are things that our societies and government can do more to relieve, some of them relatively inexpensively.
Building economies that offer people opportunity and freedom from the degradation and humiliation of poverty and want can go some way to ease the hurt.
However, we learn from the experience with the Carnival in Rio de Janeiro and Notting Hill Festival in London that they can do a great deal for mental health, help foster belonging, create community and networks, and cheer up the lonely with their positive energy and affirmation of beauty.
To have such parades, we will need to considerably reorganise our cities to make space for the citizens who live there. For example, a Rio-style carnival parade is not possible in Kampala or Nairobi. Standing on the side of a street to soak in a colourful parade, some provocatively dressed women wiggling their backsides in extravagant dresses and bare-chested hunks of men in wacky costumes cost little except transport to the scene.
Happiest people
But the pay-off in social goodness is priceless. Evidence shows that getting people involved in worthy causes is some of the best medicine against social isolation and the sense of worthlessness that the Mackenzies of this world exploit. It is one of the reasons why the happiest people in East Africa are Rotarians.
After his release from 27 years in apartheid jails in 1990, South African statesman and president Nelson Mandela attended many music concerts, several held in his honour. He was famous for his trademark jig at the events.
In 1999, after joining late South African singer Johnny Clegg (the “White Zulu”) on stage in France, Mandela was quoted saying, “It is music and dancing that makes me at peace with the world and at peace with myself.”
So it is for many people..
Sometimes when we let the music play, when the censor doesn’t muzzle the free expression of art and culture, lives are saved. The lives of some of those people few will notice are missing, and end up statistics in shallow graves in Mackenzie’s Shakahola forest.
Charles Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer, and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”. Twitter@cobbo3
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Strictly Personal
African Union must ensure Sudan civilians are protected, By Joyce Banda
Published
2 weeks agoon
October 25, 2024The war in Sudan presents the world – and Africa – with a test. This far, we have scored miserably. The international community has failed the people of Sudan. Collectively, we have chosen to systematically ignore and sacrifice the Sudanese people’s suffering in preference of our interests.
For 18 months, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) have fought a pitiless conflict that has killed thousands, displaced millions, and triggered the world’s largest hunger crisis.
Crimes against humanity and war crimes have been committed by both parties to the conflict. Sexual and gender-based violence are at epidemic levels. The RSF has perpetrated a wave of ethnically motivated violence in Darfur. Starvation has been used as a weapon of war: The SAF has carried out airstrikes that deliberately target civilians and civilian infrastructure.
The plight of children is of deep concern to me. They have been killed, maimed, and forced to serve as soldiers. More than 14 million have been displaced, the world’s largest displacement of children. Millions more haven’t gone to school since the fighting broke out. Girls are at the highest risk of child marriage and gender-based violence. We are looking at a child protection crisis of frightful proportions.
In many of my international engagements, the women of Sudan have raised their concerns about the world’s non-commitment to bring about peace in Sudan.
I write with a simple message. We cannot delay any longer. The suffering cannot be allowed to continue or to become a secondary concern to the frustrating search for a political solution between the belligerents. The international community must come together and adopt urgent measures to protect Sudanese civilians.
Last month, the UN’s Independent International Fact-Finding Mission for Sudan released a report that described a horrific range of crimes committed by the RSF and SAF. The report makes for chilling reading. The UN investigators concluded that the gravity of its findings required a concerted plan to safeguard the lives of Sudanese people in the line of fire.
“Given the failure of the warring parties to spare civilians, an independent and impartial force with a mandate to safeguard civilians must be deployed without delay,” said Mohamed Chande Othman, chair of the Fact-Finding Mission and former Chief Justice of Tanzania.
We must respond to this call with urgency.
A special responsibility resides with the African Union, in particular the AU Commission, which received a request on June 21 from the AU Peace and Security Council (PSC) “to investigate and make recommendations to the PSC on practical measures to be undertaken for the protection of civilians.”
So far, we have heard nothing.
The time is now for the AU to act boldly and swiftly, even in the absence of a ceasefire, to advance robust civilian protection measures.
A physical protective presence, even one with a limited mandate, must be proposed, in line with the recommendation of the UN Fact-Finding Mission. The AU should press the parties to the conflict, particularly the Sudanese government, to invite the protective mission to enter Sudan to do its work free from interference.
The AU can recommend that the protection mission adopt targeted strategies operations, demarcated safe zones, and humanitarian corridors – to protect civilians and ensure safe, unhindered, and adequate access to humanitarian aid.
The protection mission mandate can include data gathering, monitoring, and early warning systems. It can play a role in ending the telecom blackout that has been a troubling feature of the war. The mission can support community-led efforts for self-protection, working closely with Sudan’s inspiring mutual-aid network of Emergency Response Rooms. It can engage and support localised peace efforts, contributing to community-level ceasefire and peacebuilding work.
I do not pretend that establishing a protection mission in Sudan will be easy. But the scale of Sudan’s crisis, the intransigence of the warring parties, and the clear and consistent demands from Sudanese civilians and civil society demand that we take action.
Many will be dismissive. It is true that numerous bureaucratic, institutional, and political obstacles stand in our way. But we must not be deterred.
Will we stand by as Sudan suffers mass atrocities, disease, famine, rape, mass displacement, and societal disintegration? Will we watch as the crisis in Africa’s third largest country spills outside of its borders and sets back the entire region?
Africa and the world have been given a test. I pray that we pass it.
Dr Joyce Banda is a former president of the Republic of Malawi.
Strictly Personal
Economic policies must be local, By Lekan Sote
Published
2 weeks agoon
October 24, 2024With 32.70 per cent headline inflation, 40.20 per cent food inflation, and bread inflation of 45 per cent, all caused by the removal of subsidies from petrol and electricity, and the government’s policy of allowing market forces to determine the value of the Naira, Nigerians are reeling under high cost of living.
The observation by Obi Alfred Achebe of Onitsha, that “The wellbeing of the people has declined more steeply in the last months,” leads to doubts about the “Renewed Hope” slogan of President Bola Tinubu’s government that is perceived as extravagant, whilst asking Nigerians to be patient and wait for its unfolding economic policies to mature.
It doesn’t look as if it will abate soon, Adebayo Adelabu, Minister of Power, who seems ready to hike electricity tariffs again, recently argued that the N225 per kilowatt hour of electricity that Discos charge Band A premium customers is lower than the N750 and N950 respective costs of running privately-owned petrol or diesel generators.
While noting that 129 million, or 56 per cent of Nigerians are trapped below poverty line, the World Bank revealed that real per capita Gross Domestic Product, which disregards the service industry component, is yet to recover from the pre-2016 economic depression under the government of Muhammadu Buhari.
This has led many to begin to doubt the government’s World Bank and International Monetary Fund-inspired neo-liberal economic policies that seem to have further impoverished poor Nigerians, practically eliminated the middle class, and is making the rich also cry.
Yet the World Bank, which is not letting up, recently pontificated that “previous domestic policy missteps (based mainly on its own advice) are compounding the shocks of rising inflation (that is) eroding the purchasing power of the people… and this policy is pushing many (citizens) into poverty.”
It zeroes in by asking Nigeria to stay the gruelling course, which Ibukun Omole thinks “is nothing more than a manifesto for exploitation… a blatant attempt to continue the cycle of exploitation… a tool of imperialism, promoting the same policies that have kept Nigeria under the thumb of… neocolonial agenda for decades.”
When Indermilt Gill, Senior Vice President of the World Bank, told the 30th Summit of Nigeria’s Economic Summit Group, in Abuja, Federal Capital Territory, that Nigerians may have to endure the harrowing economic conditions for another 10 to 15 years, attendees murmured but didn’t walk out on him because of Nigerian’s tradition of politeness to guests.
Governor Bala Muhammed of Bauchi State, who agrees with the World Bank that “purchasing power has dwindled,” also thinks that “these (World Bank-inspired) policies, usually handed down by arm-twisting compulsions, are not working.”
What seems to be trending now is the suggestion that because these neo-liberal policies do not seem to be helping the economy and the citizens of Nigeria, at least in the short term, it would be better to think up homegrown solutions to Nigeria’s economic problems.
Late Speaker of America’s House of Representatives, Tip O’Neill, is quoted to have quipped that, at the end of the day, “All politics is local.” He may have come to that conclusion after observing that it takes the locals in a community to know what is best for them.
This aphorism must apply to economics, a field of study that is derived from sociology, which is the study of the way of life of a people. Proof of this is in “The Wealth of Nations,” written by Adam Smith, who is regarded as the first scholar of economics.
In his Introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of “The Wealth of Nations,” Andrew Skinner observes: “Adam Smith was undoubtedly the remarkable product of a remarkable age and one whose writing clearly reflects the intellectual, social and economic conditions of the period.”
To drive the point home that Smith’s book was written for his people and his time, Skinner reiterated that “the general ‘philosophy,’ which it contained was so thoroughly in accord with the aspirations and circumstances of his age.”
In a Freudian slip of the Darwinist realities of the Industrial Revolution that birthed individualism, capitalism, and global trade, Smith averred that “How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principle in his nature which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasures of seeing it.”
And, he let it slip that capitalism is for the advantage of Europe when he confessed that “Europe, by not leaving things at perfect liberty (the so-called Invisible Hand), occasions… inequities,” by “restraining the competition in some trades to a smaller number… increasing it in others beyond what it naturally would be… and… free circulation of labour (or expertise) and stocks (goods) both from employment to employment and from place to place!”
Policymakers, who think Bretton Woods institutions will advise policies to replicate the success of the Euro-American economy in Nigeria must be daydreaming. After advising elimination of subsidy, as global best practices that reflect market forces, they failed to suggest that Nigeria’s N70,000 monthly minimum wage, neither reflects the realities of the global marketplace, nor Section 16(2,d) of Nigeria’s Constitution, which suggests a “reasonable national minimum living wage… for all citizens.”
After Alex Sienart, World Bank’s lead economist in Nigeria, pointed out that the wage increase will directly affect the lives of only 4.1 per cent of Nigerians, he suggested that Nigeria needed more productive jobs to reduce poverty. But he neither explained “productive jobs,” nor suggested how to create them.
In admitting past wrong economic policies that the World Bank recommended for Nigeria, its former President, Jim Yong Kim, confessed, “I think the World Bank has to take responsibility for having emphasized hard infrastructure –roads, rails, energy– for a long time…
“There is still the bias that says we will invest in hard infrastructure, and then we grow rich, (and) we will have enough money to invest in health and education. (But) we are now saying that’s the wrong approach, that you’ve got to start investing in your people.”
Kim is a Korean-American physician, health expert, and anthropologist, whose Harvard University and Brown University Ivy League background shapes his decidedly “Pax American” worldview of America’s dominance of the world economy.
Despite his do-gooder posturing, his diagnoses and prescriptions still did not quite address the root cause of Nigeria’s economic woes, nor provide any solutions. They were mere diversions that stopped short of the way forward.
He should have advocated for the massive accumulation of capital and investments in the local production of manufacturing machinery, industrial spare parts, and raw materials—items that are currently imported, weakening Nigeria’s trade balance.
He should have pushed for the completion of Ajaokuta Steel Mill and helped to line up investors with managerial, technical, and financial competence to salvage Nigeria’s electricity sector, whose poor run has been described by Dr. Akinwumi Adesina, President of Africa Development Bank, as “killing Nigerian industries.”
He could have assembled consultants to accelerate the conversion of Nigeria’s commuter vehicles to Compressed Natural Gas and get banks of the metropolitan economies, that hold Nigeria’s foreign reserves in their vaults, to invest their low-interest funds into Nigeria’s agriculture— so that Nigeria will no longer import foodstuffs.
Nigerians need homegrown solutions to their economic woes.
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