Kagame has accused certain religious leaders and priests of toying with the faith of Rwandan citizens.
Kagame has demanded that all pastors and priests wishing to start a church in the country should at least hold a degree in theology before they are granted a licence to operate as a church.
This follows his concerns about the rapid rise in the number of churches in Rwanda. Kagame is reported to have argued that if these churches were water wells, or boreholes, they would be quenching the religious thirst of his nation, but alas, instead they are impoverishing their congregants and feeding them falsehoods.
The Rwanda Governance Board described the move as “tightening up the rules of registration and functions of churches in his country”. Rwandan authorities said the country aims to reduce the mounting cases of fraud due to many religious leaders bleeding their impoverished congregants dry.
Of course, this sounds familiar and seems to hit close to home, where similar sentiments have been raised by the public about identical shenanigans taking place at the many new churches that have proliferated in our own backyards in the past two decades.
Since the dawn of democracy in 1994, South Africa has been flooded by a large number of unscrupulous priests and pastors who have come up with just about every model of religious formation to cater for the religiously naive.
The members of these new, growing charismatic churches come from poor communities in informal settlements. They have been lured into the fold with promises of instant riches and hazy miracles. This has led to large numbers of conventional religious institutions being deserted and some virtually closing their doors after losing their original members.
Perhaps it is time South Africa’s authorities took a leaf from Rwanda’s book and started a similar purge of the charismatic churches that have defrauded the religiously naive of their hard-earned faith. Without doubt, over the years South Africans have been overwhelmed by churches and religious bodies of all shapes and sizes, all vying for the purse strings of their unsuspecting newly recruited converts.
Just as Kagame is protecting the religious freedom of believers in his country against religious charlatans, so too could South Africa stand up for its religiously exploited citizens against the same charlatans.
