Surely someone we are told was ordained a Bishop should have been conversant with the story of King Nebuchadnezzar, who, when he beheld the awesome city of Babylon from the top of his palace, was overcome with pride, arrogance and a sense of immortality and impunity.
Daniel 4:30 quotes the King: “Is not this the great Babylon I have built as the royal residence, by my mighty power and for the glory of my majesty?” but just then, God’s voice came from heaven, telling him that his authority had been taken away.
Nebuchadnezzar had become brutal and heartless toward his subjects, and all his power was taken away at a stroke. He became a beast of the wild, driven away from the people. He ate grass like cattle and his beard grew like the feathers of a wild bird.
This is exactly the message that Kunonga should have remembered. Even the Islamic Holy Book, the Quran, warns against the personality pitfalls that inevitably face those who are vain, arrogant and brutal.
Like the Bible, it tells the story of Pharaoh, the Egyptian King, who thought he was immortal and supreme over all the races. He ill-treated the children of Israel and even though Moses was sent as the bearer of a warning, he would not take heed. In the end, he and all his army were swallowed up by the Red Sea.
So Kunonga should have taken heed right from the start. God has his way of punishing those who transgress, and the recent Supreme Court ruling that Kunonga is not head of the Anglican Church in Zimbabwe is God’s way of punishing him.
He seemed so busy seizing Anglican properties around the country, disrupting the schools run by the Church and hiring bouncers, movie-style, to the extent of forgetting the bible that he, ironically, relied on to justify his title and seizure of properties.
Kunonga apparently suffered severe delusions, believing that, because of the shifty support he was receiving from Zanu (PF), he had become a demi-god. He should have learned a lesson from the number of people who acted as mouthpieces for Zanu (PF) but were later dumped when expediency called. He should have taken some time off his busy schedule of accusing people of being homosexuals to remember what happened to the likes of Obadiah Musindo and Joseph Chinotimba.
Musindo, all will recall, used to turn every church service of his into a Zanu (PF) political rally. Chinotimba, when he was tasked to run the Teachers Union of Zimbabwe, turned it into a Zanu (PF) commissariat tool.
The two behaved liked madmen who, after being asked to keep the hoe for the master, ran away with it into the forest. Of course, that is not what the master always wants. But then, where are Chinotimba and Musindo now?
Kunonga pressed on, perhaps in the belief that he was indispensable. But then, where are you now Bishop Kunonga? Don’t you think Zanu (PF), for which you sang and spoke louder than Webster Shamu, the National Commissar, and Rugare Gumbo, the spokesperson, has dumped you to eat grass in the wild like Nebuchadnezzar?
How are you going to face the people now, especially those that you chased away from their sacred places of worship, like Pharaoh chased away the children of Israel? Even your activist loyalists will not dare follow you.
In the meantime, Zanu (PF) will proceed as if you were never there. Its leaders will wine and dine and perhaps plot on getting someone elsewhere, maybe from a Pentecostal church this time, to take your place. They will laugh at you and shut their doors in your face.
I wait with much anticipation to see the next time you get into the pulpit and preach. As I am also Anglican, I wonder what you will say to the people – if at all you will summon the guts to go back to church.
Not that Kunonga should lose hope. The Lord welcomes those who repent. Nebuchadnezzar, after suffering so much, looked up to the heavens and asked for forgiveness. He was forgiven. Kunonga needs to put his vanity aside and kneel before God.
Yet his should be a lesson well learnt. Politics is about fleeting riches and authority, but religion is about permanent piety.
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Post published in: Analysis