Mugabe’s church faithful pray for him

IN the church where Zimbabwe’s founder Robert Mugabe used to worship, people prayed yesterday for him to be forgiven following his death two years after he was toppled in a coup.

Mugabe, who had been receiving treatment in a Singapore hospital for months before he died on Friday aged 95, dominated Zimbabwe politics for almost four decades from independence in 1980 until he was removed by his own army in November 2017.

Revered by many as a liberator who freed his people from white minority rule, he was vilified by others for wrecking one of Africa’s most promising economies and ruthlessly crushing his opponents.

At the packed Sacred Heart Cathedral in downtown Harare, where Mugabe used to attend Catholic Mass with his first wife Sally and second wife Grace, congregants remembered him as a devout man who played a role in the church’s upkeep.

A plaque in the church commemorates Sally’s death in 1992.

“We are praying for our relatives who have died. Without forgetting to pray for our former president, Comrade Robert Mugabe, we bring him forward to God. We are asking God if there is anything that he did wrong in his life that he be forgiven,” the priest said.

Chris Sambo, a former soccer administrator who used to arrange matches for Mugabe in his home village of Kutama, said the southern African country’s Catholic community had lost one of its most important members.

“To me, he was a father figure. We are so saddened . ... He was a very staunch Catholic,” Sambo said.

(Reuters)