Maynard Manyowa worked with Prophet Shepherd Bushiri for six years. During this tim, he saw a cleric who knew how to use the media shrewdly to boost his followers. Manyowa writes of his experience of the first time he met Bushiri.
I first met self-styled Prophet Shepherd Bushiri in 2015 and subsequently started working for him. I served his ministry and his interests diligently for six years and developed a very close relationship with him. I would say I became and remain like family.
It has been just under three months since the professional relationship took its final breath. The personal relationship, however, remains. The last six months that I spent with Bushiri allowed me to reflect.
Six years is a long time, and in that time I enjoyed a front-row seat to what was the fastest-growing ministry in the early part of the last decade. It later, however, felt like a ship on turbulent seas.
I have been a journalist for 15 years, writing for my own outlet. Bushiri and I always spoke about me writing about my experiences working for him, which is what I have now embarked on. This cannot be done in one article, and will be broken down into a series that will examine the good, the bad, the ugly, the scandalous and the great escape. I must declare this, so that my bias is clear.
Building it ground up and staging miracles
Shepherd Bushiri is a charismatic man. He has an aura. By 2012, it was clear he would become Malawi’s most popular cleric, easily surpassing the current President Lazarus Chakwera.
I was first head-hunted by Bushiri after his media team placed him in a spot of bother.
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Over a period of a few months, they aired two stage-managed miracles.
The first video, the famous iPad miracle, depicted Bushiri taking a picture of a congregant’s sick child from the sky. The video showed him clicking the camera roll button and displaying an image that had been pre-loaded. The response to this was terrible, to say the least.
But despite that video backfiring, Bushiri went to do another staged video that was even more bizarre.
Walking on air
In this video, Bushiri is seen to appear to be walking on air. In reality, I am told two men, off-camera, lifted him up, as the camera zoomed onto his dangling feet in walking motion.
This video also backfired spectacularly but gave the church hitherto unseen mileage.
When I first met Bushiri at a Pretoria hotel, I arrived convinced he was dim for having attempted these two staged miracles.
But as he spoke, and showed me the number of partners who had signed up from the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom, I was blown away.
People had committed millions of American dollars, and the more fun that was made of his antics, the more people moved from the fence to Bushiri’s side.
For everyone who judged, Bushiri gained at least five people who were certain that “these critics didn’t understand God”
“When Jesus walked on water, people laughed”, one user wrote on the clip. “God always performs questionable miracles to test the faith of those around him”
Other ministries were the benchmark
Bushiri fled to Malawi in November 2020 after he and his wife, Mary, were granted bail at the Pretoria Magistrate’s Court in relation to fraud and money laundering.
Before Bushiri became a fugitive, his Enlightened Christian Gathering Church (ECG), now known as The Jesus Nation Church was second to none.
Before lockdown, the church consistently turned away congregants at the Tshwane showgrounds after going past the allowed 35,000 attendees.
It was truly phenomenal to watch. Especially because I had sat in a room when this was just an idea.
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During our first meeting, Bushiri spoke to me about his strategy. He wanted help building a church that matched Nigerian televangelist TB Joshua’s online presence. He had seen the amazing work I had done, setting up pages that had over a million likes each.
I was scheduled to fly to Philippines at the time, as I was relocating. Bushiri asked me to reconsider and instead work as a consultant for him.
Over the following months, Bushiri committed over R5 million towards building his Facebook page. The target was to hit the 3.4 million followers mark – the same number of followers TB Joshua had.
A lot of other resources were dedicated towards targeting people in the US, UK, Australia, and metropolitan areas of South Africa.
The strategy paid off. By 2017, Bushiri was hot on the heels of TB Joshua.
Discrediting other clerics
But another strategy to discredit other clerics was also put into action. In mid 2016, a series of articles amplifying Paseka ‘Mboro’ Motsoeneng’s claims that he ascended to heaven during a live service were commissioned. The claims first appeared on Mboro’s own Facebook page.
Many years later Bushiri admitted to Mboro after they had become friends, that his media team drafted the stories, and the person behind them was fired. Mboro was understandably not happy.
In mid-2018, Bushiri surpassed TB Joshua on Facebook for the first time. The total amount we had spent on Facebook ads alone by this time had surpassed R15 million.
READ | Guarantee my safety and I will come back – Bushiri
When I had first met Bushiri, I was convinced he was a mad man with an audience. But as I got to know him, I realised he was a powerful man, a critical thinker, who always had a plan.
He was also unusually generous, for a purpose, and knew how to charm anybody. But throughout all of this, his grasp of media dynamics, was second to none. Like Donald Trump, he knew when to court a scandal, and for how to spin it for long enough.
He was, and is, a media genius who knew how to harness the attention economy.
– Maynard Manyowa is a journalist based in the United Kingdom and worked as Shepherd Bushiri’s external media relations manager for several years. His book, “Prophet” is due for release in December 2022.
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