BULAWAYO – Zimbabwe is ruled by a “toxic and oppressive political system” but it will soon self-destruct, President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s adviser, the cleric and businessman Shingi Munyeza, said on Sunday as his position in the 77-year-old leader’s advisory panel increasingly looked untenable.
Without naming him, Munyeza compared Mnangagwa to the Egyptian Pharaoh, saying the Zanu PF leader sees Zimbabweans as “slaves”. He warned that Zimbabweans would soon “rise up” and bring an end to his rule.
“At a national level, Zimbabwe has been ruled by a toxic and oppressive political system. Enough is enough! The occult cannot continue to subjugate, abuse and oppress us as a people anymore because God wants to deliver us as a nation,” Munyeza said in a sermon to his Borrowdale Community Church streamed online.
Invoking popular musician Winky D whose searing political commentary through his lyrics has earned him cult status, Munyeza said Zimbabwe today was similar to the time of Pharaoh and Moses.
“The Egyptians of old had a system of slavery in the days of Moses, they had a system of how they had to put the entire children of Israel under subjugation, under abuse, under brutality. We have the same system even in our time, in our nation, we have an Egyptian system,” Munyeza said.
“Winky D once sang ‘Ijipita’ (Shona name for Egypt), that is a cry of a society that knows bondage. That is a cry of communities that have suffered immensely under a system of subjugation, brutality, corruption and lack of leadership to take them out of their squalor and poverty.”
Mnangagwa came to power through a military coup in November 2017, ending Robert Mugabe’s 37-year iron fist rule. Initially offering himself up as a candidate of reform, rights groups say repression under Mnangagwa has worsened.
Munyeza was appointed to a 26-member Presidential Advisory Council (PAC) by Mnangagwa in January 2019, but he has in recent weeks publicly voiced disquiet as an economic and political paralysis continues to envelope the country.
“When systems of brutality and oppression are in place, the strongmen and women running them don’t think the day will end. Pharaoh didn’t know that this system was about to end when Moses arrived on the scene. When the enemy is seeing us as slaves, as those that are down and out, God in his sovereignty is going to start seeing us as a mighty army. As a people, as communities, as families and indeed as a nation, we are going to rise up as a mighty army of God,” Munyeza said.
Munyeza said young people would be the catalyst for “this change, dismantling of the system, the disgorging of the strongmen.”
He added: “It’s going to happen because of the younger generation. Our young people need to rise-up. I’m praying that the strongmen and strongwomen who have sustained evil and brutality will fall on their own sword, like Haman who had orchestrated the annihilation of Jews (in the Book of Esther).
“Haman had prepared gallows for Mordecai, because he was the leader of the Jews. But the tables turned overnight, and guess who was found hanging in a not-so-distant future, overnight? It was Haman himself. I would like to say these strongmen and strongwomen must hang from their own gallows, the gallows they prepared for others.”
Describing Mnangagwa’s regime as “oppressive, corrupt, inhumane, brutal and ruthless”, Munyeza said the system he was presiding over cannot be rehabilitated.
“They have no point of return because they are satanic, and eventually they go into self-destruction. They don’t turn back. They continue to go forward to their end, to self-destroy. We’re going to see the same thing in our time, even in our very nation, we’re going to start seeing the brutality, agents of darkness, agents of strongholds of brutality falling one by one. This is what God says,” Munyeza continued.
“They are going to start collapsing one-by-one because they know no repentance. These are agents who have no heart to repent, who have no desire of remorse and yet God in his wisdom is going to use the same things they think they have got to self-destroy themselves. This is what happened to Pharaoh and his army.”
Mnangagwa and his shock troops “are unlikely to repent because they see themselves as invincible, they sit on almighty power,” the pastor said. “They are demigods. But God is going to turn the tables around.”
Mnangagwa is reportedly facing growing opposition within his Zanu PF party over his mishandling of the economy, particularly from his ambitious deputy Constantino Chiwenga, the former army general who led the 2017 coup.
The 77-year-old has so far managed to contain the rebellion, strategically shuffling out Chiwenga’s allies from the military and other strategic government agencies.
Chiwenga and his allies fear a popular uprising could also consume them, and are reportedly stepping up their efforts to ease Mnangagwa out of power, although he is determined to resist his removal before seeing out his first term which runs until 2023.
