Harare - The leader of the Zimbabwe Divine Destiny (ZDD) church, Bishop Ancelimo Magaya, on Tuesday urged President Robert Mugabe to resign over the reported harassment, abduction and torture of innocent citizens by state security agents.
Addressing a press conference in Harare to as part of marking the United Nations Day Against Torture (June 26), Magaya said it was shocking that Zimbabwe had not ratified the Convention on torture, nor did it recognise the day despite being a member of the United Nations.
He said the reason why people had gone to war was so that they would have free space and the liberty to express themselves freely and to be protected from state harassment and night abductions, even when they differed in opinion.
“If I was given five minutes or less to talk to President Mugabe, I would say, Your Excellency Sir, you have done very well in leading Zimbabwe into liberation and independence. There are different gifts that are peculiar to each ethos and dispensation. God has endowed you with the gifting of fighting and dismantling (Ian) Smith’s regime, but we are in a Solomonic era of building, we are long past the Davidic era of fighting. We are now in the Solomonic era of building.
“Your anointing is fighting, now it is development and building and you need not to eat into your legacy. The Lord will require that you know when to rest,” he said.
Magaya said the church should stand up against despotic governments, adding that the church often misunderstood their biblical mandate and thought that their role was only to preach on Sundays, bury the dead and heal the sick.
Churches, he said, had remained quiet in the face of atrocities against citizens by the government, mostly because they were afraid, However, he added that a few prophetic voices were raising consciousness and needed to be harnessed so that the church could speak with more power.
“I don’t also want to rule out the fact that some of us within the church have received certain gifts, possibly from the government, possibly in the form of land and so on. And I have always said that a dog with bones in its mouth can never bark,” he said.
But Magaya said dictatorship was a complex monster that needed to be dealt with through confrontation.
“I also believe confrontation cannot be ruled out, provided that confrontation is not violent, as long as we don’t throw stones and hold arms. As long we are peacefully demonstrating it is proper, we need to use all sorts of approaches to ensure this machinery is dismantled,” he said.
He said the church had a moral obligation to speak out, admitting that the church in Zimbabwe had been quiet, although it was beginning to speak out now.
“I will understand certainly when you say the greater part of the church, particularly represented by the umbrella mother bodies, have been quiet in the past, possibly except for the Catholic Commission for Peace and Justice. We have also had smaller independent organisations that have been speaking up. The Zimbabwe Christian Council was quite active on matters of justice,” he concluded.
African News Agency