Last week, the Independent Electoral Commission, led by Justice Simon Mugyenyi Byabakama, announced a ban on fundraising in churches, mosques and other places of worship during these five months of the general election campaign season. It should be curious that religious institutions and priests have not made noise, but taken it lying low as if during the election God doesn’t need the money from politicians seeking office. However, I am not sure that Byabakama is in position to monitor or prevent politicians or their agents quietly passing financial donations to religious institutions and priests, in which case even a superficial accountability will be hard to obtain. During COVID-19 lockdown 2020-22, priests shifted prayers to people’s homes, where tithe and donations simply got tucked into their personal pockets.

This should all be well, after all, over the years, experience has taught us that church, mosque, religion, and priests leading them, have not all been truthful or even correct in universal upliftment, emancipation and liberation of humanity. Religion, of every shade particularly as practiced in Uganda, is mostly superstition, invented to manipulate and control the mind, and keep us in failure.

Poor people have donated the only pence they have to their church, mosque, and these days to predator ‘pastors’ who live large lifestyles, only for the givers to beg total strangers for money for food, health, or children’s school fees, while those priests give no damn. Religious faith has for centuries been a business model, often with no start-up capital, that no one has ever told you about or publicly admitted, and it is the reason religious institutions and leaders are rich, opulent yet most of their followers wallow in extreme poverty and want basic necessities of life.

Yet it is in seasons like this that the religious, civil society and so-called democracy groups raise the tempo of their dubious activities, in such of money, usually under the dubious claims that Uganda is on the brink of election chaos, violence, and perhaps disintegration.

Africans, especially Ugandans, should stop hiding behind prayers as a possible solution to many of the intractable problems we have historically gone through or are currently doing so. The God of Europe, Arab, or Asia, we have worshiped so much since the advent of colonial domination, subjugation and exploitation just like the gods of Africans who did not protect us from foreign predators, do not owe us a miracle just because we avoid our own responsibilities.

Ugandans should stop honoring their priests than planning, hard creative work, and productivity. Religion and unquestioned faith are nothing more than mere imagination and manipulation that have built empires around obedience and loyalty. See, it is absurd that in Uganda today we can question the government, state institutions, and their leaders who hold instruments of coercion, yet we cannot vigorously question a man wearing a white collar passing for a religious priest. Churches, mosques and their leaders now raid our government coffers of the taxes you have paid in order for them to live in additional opulence including brand new SUVs, yet public schools and health facilities are not fully equipped, and you blame the government.

Now don’t wonder anymore that schools under religious institutions, called “Church Founded” are declining in academic, management and discipline standards, while churches, cathedrals and bishops’ residential houses are expanding and looking really magnificent. And when church-run medical facilities confiscate dead bodies whose owners have not paid up the bills, it is a business model, not philanthropy as we had been made to unquestionably believe. Likewise, when priests refuse to preside over burial of the dead because they are not fully paid up, it amounts to retributive justice.