The Sunday Mail
You had to be there, and if you weren’t, then definitely you should not have been in Harare that Friday night.
Though the jury is still out as to the actual figure of how many congregated (the 300-thousand figure has largely been dismissed as hallucinatory), what has generally been agreed is that Prophet Walter Magaya has the power, at least in the interim, to draw crowds.
Unlike predecessors like Mathias and Mildred Ministries, who used to bus people in, with Magaya it is voluntary attendance.
As people sat in bars, kombis, churches, workplaces and on social media, trying to digest the Friday night that was the “Night of Turning Things Around”, the consensus has been that the prophet has power, though opinion is largely divided as to whether that power is divine or secular.
Addressing the media on the eve of the all-night prayer, Prophet Magaya skirted the question around the “divinity” of his powers when he was asked why local prophets seem to find common ground when it comes to spiritual fathers, these being Nigerian or Ghanaian prophets, of which these countries are well known for sorcery.
“As much as we speak of Nigerians, rather West Africans in the same context with witchcraft, when you go to these same countries, they all also say the same about countries in Southern Africa,” was his reply.
Questions have been raised as well on why one should have a spiritual father who is human? And then who becomes the spiritual father of the spiritual father?
Those who argue along these lines, often end up mentioning the word idolatry.
Some Christian elders who had the privilege of attending and seeing for themselves the miracles on the night were of the opinion that if Prophet Magaya’s powers are indeed divine, then they should and will last forever.
That his powers should be a basis for broad-based growth of his ministry’s movement, that with time he should open circuit churches around the country, region and world, and that he should not be the centre of power.
They went on to list a number of “prophets” from the era gone by, “prophets” like Boniface Muponda (who changed roles between secular and divine prophesy), the earlier-mentioned Mathias and Mildred, Madzibaba Nzira, whose reign was cut short by a jail term, etcetera.
But as Prophet Magaya has said several times, probably paraphrasing Hebrews 11 vs 1, (“Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the things not seen”), healing and believing is, in large part, a function of faith.
That said, for one to believe in Prophet Magaya’s healing powers, they need to have an element of faith in the first place, faith that they would be healed.
Pretty Xaba, now receiving treatment for cancer in India, might not have had that faith when she was given the option to choose between medicine and spiritual healing. She placed her faith in medicine.
In the discussions dissecting the all-night session, as much as there were some who believed in the night’s happenings, some dismissed them as mere illusions, and blamed the media for giving one side of the story, the story of the healing session, without follow-up stories on the healed. The hard-to-please ones pointed to rented crowds.
“Why are all the crutches seemingly new and of a similar type?” someone opined on social media, in reference to a picture that appeared on the front page of The Sunday Mail last Sunday. This, the observer pointed out, could be because the “healed” were a hired crowd, those who were given money to come and pretend to be healed.
The same arguments were raised around those who were raising flags from neighbouring countries.
“One can buy or print flags of Botswana, Zambia and South Africa, so there shouldn’t be much fuss about people having travelled all the way from those countries, they could have been people from within our borders,” noted another hard-to-please critic.
To which Prophet Magaya had a ready answer going into the Friday all-night prayer. In fact, it is a constant message that he preaches at most of his sermons. “If you think I am paying people to pretend to be sick and be healed, I would urge you to bring any of your relatives or someone whose medical history you are aware of, and then we take it up from there.
“Or else, you can get into the crowds, note their names and addresses, and then make follow-ups.”
Though there is some form of agreement that the prophet does possess healing powers, there is a seemingly unanimous voice that he is not endowed with preaching powers, that preaching is not his gift.
When compared to Prophet Emmanuel Makandiwa, those who had the honour of listening to both men preach contend that Makandiwa is a better preacher.
These godly gifts are generally classified into three: those with the gift of healing, those with the gift of preaching (ministry work) and lastly those with the gift of praising and worshipping, especially through singing. The Charambas, on face value, fall into the praise and worship category.
Though Prophets Magaya and Makandiwa have constantly argued that the church needs money to run itself (Magaya said his church has a staff base of around 4 000), some have argued that the manner with which the prophets have gone on to raise the money borders on profiteering rather than prophesying. Arguments are made as to why a church would have an ATM on site (CBZ has one at PHD Ministries, which for good effect is connected to other banks through ZimSwitch), why a church would need a biller code for EcoCash (in fact, there are two merchant codes at PHD), why a church would hire a cash-in-transit vehicle (at Prophet Makandiwa’s Judgment Night and at the recent All-Night, cash-in-transit vehicles were a common feature).
Then the killer must have been last evening’s birthday dinner where tickets cost $150 per head and $1 500 for a table of 10.
If you wanted it cosier, you had to part with $300 and many were just wondering what kind of audience one received for $1 500 per head.
Those who see a business side to these prophets go on to argue why money-spinning paraphernalia like wrist-bands, anointing oil, testimony magazines and prayer cards are on sale.
If the oil is to heal the sick, as it is supposed to, why not just bless water and give it out for free? Why oil?
Then to cap it all — that is to those who argue that there is a showbiz side to all this prophecy — they see the propensity with which Prophet Magaya draws himself, or is drawn into controversy as a marketing tool.
After all, as they always say, there is no bad or good publicity, publicity is just publicity.
In what might have been a veiled admission, he said the Denford Matashu incident, in which Magaya was accused of bedding Matashu’s wife, helped to keep him in the media for 23 days running.
If that isn’t free publicity — whether good or bad — then heaven knows what is.
The controversy-seeking might have started around the raunchy dancer Beverley Sibanda’s days.
No matter what, there was going to be only one outcome out of that relationship; and as it turned out, the outcome was indeed controversial.
Then as if to stoke the fires, Prophet Magaya had Tocky Vibes entertaining the “300 000-strong” crowd at the Night of Turnaround 3 prayer meeting last week.
He might have his explanations, that when you are Christian you must be all-inclusive, but there are some who still see the inclusion of Tocky Vibes, though arguably the man-of-the-moment on the local music scene but drawn from the violence-prone dancehall genre, as nothing but an attention-seeking move.
As we await next year’s night, which he said should draw close to a million people, that is about a tenth of the country’s population, the nation will debate to no end as to the powers of Prophet Magaya, whether they are divine or secular.
