By RABECCA CHIPANTA
BIBLE Gospel Church in Africa (BIGOCA) overseer Peter Ndhlovu has called for stringent measures to help regulate the influx of fake prophets in the country.
Welcoming Minister of Religious Affairs Godfridah Sumaili’s announcement that her ministry had engaged the Ministry of Home Affairs and Church mother bodies to ensure that there was sanity in the Church, Bishop Ndhlovu said there was need to put in place a regulatory mechanism in order to achieve this.
Bishop Ndhlovu said that there was need to bring sanity in the Christian circles by fishing out fake prophets who were misleading innocent people.

SUMAILI

“I think there must be a regulation to curb such people,” Bishop Ndhlovu said. “The Church mother bodies are supposed to bring sanity among the people because someone can just come up and say I am a prophet when in actual fact they are magicians.”
Bishop Ndhlovu said the regulation should critically scrutinise the said prophets from point of registration and that most of them were from foreign countries with a few Zambians incorporated in false preaching.
He said that the influx of false prophets could be attributed to the declaration of Zambia as a Christian Nation and that most of these false prophets came under the guise of Christianity, a vice that could not be condoned in other countries.
Bishop Ndhlovu said involving the minister of Home Affairs to scrutinise and have them deported would be one of the workable solutions, and that it was evident that their purpose was to reap people as most of them operated from temporal structures.
The clergyman said these prophets had been feeding off people’s desperation, with women often falling victim by being sexually abused in the process of looking for miracles.
“Mostly, it is women that are being abused due to the various problems they face and opt to seek help from these prophets who at times even ask for sexual favours from them,” Bishop Ndhlovu said. “No man is a healer, only God is a healer. They cannot keep charging people for healing and only preach about prosperity.”
Earlier this week, Reverend Sumaili noted with concern the number of individuals masquerading as men of God and misleading people with various practices.
The minister said due to this, her ministry had engaged the Ministry of Home Affairs and Church mother bodies to ensure that there was sanity in the Church, and that her ministry would move in and arrest the situation so that the Church could operate within the stipulated legal framework.