President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s spokesman George Charamba says Citizens Coalition for Change leader has taken Pentecostalism into politics.
He is running the party the way Pentecostal churches are run. No structures, no collective leadership, and deification of the founder-leader.
Writing in his weekly column under Jamwanda, Charamba said:
Talking about fundamentalism and belief, a friend and workmate who circulates in the universe of Pentecostalism made a telling point.
The subject matter was Chamisa and his claim to Pisgah sight politics, only matched by his aversion of ideology, structure and shared leadership.
“But buddie, this is how most Pentecostal churches are run: no structures, no collective leadership and deification of the founder-leaders by multitudes of supplicants! What you see in Chamisa — himself a pastor — is a transposition of Pentecostalism into the realm of politics.”
Dumbfounded, I recalled Chamisa and his Triple C’s heraldic mantras, like “Behold the New Great Zimbabwe”, “#GodIsInIt” and “#NgaapindeHakeMukomana” which simulates the biblical Triumphal Entry.
Not to refer to his endless prayers and prayerful gestures each of which is calculated to suggest faith in agony or a soul atop a mountain summit in the Land of Moab from which he spies the Promised Land!
The hero-worshipping; the aura with which the little man seeks to surround himself; his coxcombical obsession with dressing; the bevy of yodelling harem; the versification of our politics; the evocative, biblical language laced with pseudo-visions and prophecies; false liturgies and much more! All these are the stock-in-trade of his politics, the amalgam of which yield multidimensional props by which sheer knavery, mediocrity and puniness assumes a dazzling halo of piety and superhumanity!
Yet beneath all that is puny man of countless foibles, wild ambition disguised as acme of democratic impulse. Candidates for 2023, we are told, will come “from you the people”, itself a tired euphemism for vain legitimation of egocentric politics.
Triple C, we are again told, has no structures, no ideology, no leadership yet in reality he is the sole leader, the only structure and the ideology on which all runs, with a handful of tenacious acolytes, largely female.
Ideologically we know he is a true chip off the block of traditional colonial imperialism, which is why his universe is full of Johnsons, Bushes, Trumps and Bidens, while being reflexively hostile to the Putins, the Xi and Musevenis of African Struggles.
By way of political common-sense, his errors of prefigurement and judgement are simply legendary.
Need we go far?
Ahead of Kenya’s just-ended elections, Chamisa committed the indiscretion of predicting the ultimate winner, while colouring the whole social media with images of himself with the ultimate loser!
He hoped events would turn him into a political seer!
Today he cuts a comical figure; a political upstart who cannot see far, indeed whose Pisgah sights pretensions barely go beyond his milky nose-bridge!
We in the animal kingdom seem to enjoy better vision than he does.
We accurately smell where the brew is.
My only warning to mankind: beware of political Pentecostalism whose zealotry can easily burn the village.
