Ascension to power comes in many forms: voting, wars, plots, coups, political chicanery, and the list goes on and on. While many people maintain that it comes through these and other diverse designs, there are some people who hold that God cast the master ballot that determines who and who alone will preside over what.
Zanu PF National chairperson Oppah Muchinguri stood before a cheering crowd at a rally in Redcliff last weekend and told fellow janissaries that God anointed his Excellency President Emmerson Mnangagwa and was waiting for him to rule Zimbabwe to open vast opportunities for all.
Muchinguri said the country is still a virgin yet to be discovered and to be blessed abundantly with Mnangagwa’s continued rule.
“We are still a virgin country which is yet to be discovered. The country offers limitless opportunities and God was waiting for President Mnangagwa so as to unlock his blessings,”
the National Chairperson claimed.
“He (Mnangagwa) didn’t campaign for the presidency. Leadership was handed down to him by God,” she said.
Muchinguri went on and chronicled how Mnangagwa suffered disgrace at the hands of the former First Family, his escape from the country after being stripped of the Vice Presidency but remained resolute.
“As a country, we refused to be ruled by a 94-year-old. After the realisation of what was important to us, we marched calling for the removal of Mugabe. During all that period, Mnangagwa was out of the country and we marched on our own. He didn’t campaign to be president, we didn’t vote for him. It was God and the general populace in the country who chose him as our leader,” she said.
Zimbabwe, Muchinguri said, is no longer isolated because of President Mnangagwa.
“He is our Messiah. We are no longer in isolation and the prospects of our country are improving. Zimbabwe is no longer a risk country,” Muchinguri said.
Muchinguri went further to dismiss opposition parties as dreamers.
Particularly, we would love to direct our attention to the part where she outrightly professed that His Excellency is our Messiah who did not even tilt a finger to get to where he is now as God took care of it all.
Inasmuch as we understand that God is in command, we may not want to sideline the fact that the November 2017 events were a bit foggy to say that God was upbeat about what ensued and the outcome because while the departed President Robert Mugabe was in power, echo chambers and big lies of him working in harmony with God were very much around and pervasive.
It is somewhat astonishing, to say the scantest, to observe that the same crowds who cheered him as a god-sent are the same people who are vitiating his Messiah-ship and declaring ED, and not Mugabe, is or was godsent.
Let us take it back to the nub: taken to its logical conclusion, the fundamental that God is in control of earthly events leads to noxious moral positions and bad public policy, thus theologians across faith traditions have taken the question of God’s role in human affairs quite earnestly for millennia. His responsibility in politics, they postulate, begs bigger questions — about the nature of God, and if and how God influence or becomes involved in all these earthly affairs.
It is also a question of comfort. For some believers, a God who picks the president is a God close at hand.
Thus, assuming that Muchinguri is a saint of some kind, the claim could be rationalised as we would say that she believes God intervenes in mortal lives in grand terms and that his plan that the human story has a specific ending, for example, as illustrated in the New Testament.
Sadly, indistinguishable to Linda Masarira, who besotted over her assumed powers as Khupe’s spin doctor, showered compliments on MDC-T President Thoko Khupe likening her to the Biblical Hannah and Esther earlier on, there’s a meagreness of faith premises in Muchinguri’s claims.
Responding to Muchinguri’s claims et al. in a work entitled Leave God out of it ran by NewsDay, Harare-based columnist Conway Nkumbuzo Tutani admonished conjectural politicians for scrupulously bringing God in their discreditable politicking. He, tête-à-tête, rubbished her claims and called them effusive flattery.
He wrote:
‘If I were Mnangagwa I would have cringed in embarrassment on hearing such effusive flattery, which in many cases has been found to be mere religious cant, because the person saying it does not really believe what they are saying.
I am not suggesting that Muchinguri was play-acting, but how many times have we seen politicians holding forth with their usual hypocritical cant?
Leave God out of it, especially when you are conveniently wearing your partisan political party hat in view of the looming elections.
Zimbabweans, in their maturity and wisdom, should not buy that. They should be suspicious of anyone who conflates politics with religion.’
Sending this political furore to slumber once for all, Tutani concluded by saying:
‘So it ought to be said here and now that leave God out of it (politics) because neither ED norChamisa is God-anointed — that’s why they are campaigning.’
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