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Fight against crimes also needs prayers
2006-02-18 09:01:59
By lawi Jeol
Man is a queer animal. He can deny the existence of God and become an atheist. But when adversity besieges him, he seeks for refuge in that super being he calls God.
If and when man admits God exists, he will form a religion to worship Him.
Recently, as they have done on a couple of occasions previously, people called upon the Almighty to open the bowels of heaven and drench them with rain to give them the fluid of life; water.
This concerted cry to the heavenly Father to come to their aid in time of dire need is interesting.
All science that man has learned to date still fails to give him rain.
And now he stands helpless, pleading to God for help. Cows have died in places in the country. Beasts of the wild too have perished due to drought.
The wild is thirsting and famishing. People are weeping. Has God abandoned them?
God does not abandon His people. It is man that abandons either to hurt or because he cannot be in charge.
The Almighty needs no ear to hear woes and needs of man for ears are for the knowledge through sound by creatures He created.
Am I preaching? Sorry! But God cannot abandon creatures He created for He created them with love.
At least that is what all believers say.
As it appears, God has listened to the pleas of people to give them rain. But did we, in our prayers, say the right thing?
The Tanzania’s urban community that is growing astronomically by the year needs power to live.
Without electricity the urban society titters on the brink of doom.
In other words, they need electricity to live as they would want to live.
The that lack of power begets has prompted them to cry the loudest.
They, oh yeah we, have become a frightened people. This community of ours that forms one single village bigger than any other in the country, gathered together on any single day in prayer as we did recently in Dar es Salaam, has a bigger voice.
We could wake up the Almighty from His sleep after hard work of supervising the difficult mankind in their activities around the globe.
But that does not seem to be what has happened.
They may have said the wrong words in their prayers for the rain that has fallen has inflicted agony instead of relieving them of misery.
Instead of falling on the Usangu highlands to replenish the nearly empty dam of the Mtera hydro-electricity, it rained in torrents in Kilosa, Morogoro region and ruined the central railway, leaving about a thousand travellers stranded in the wild, others in sheds in the city, waiting to travel after the Central Line begins to work.
Well, that may be the Almighty’s way of responding to prayers, for haven’t the believers themselves said God answers prayers indirectly?
Still, why haven’t we prayed for a relief from armed robbery? Or do we not see it as a reality? We are supposed to pray to God for everything.
Sometime ago the people of God were told to pray for the peace of Jerusalem and say, ’May those who love you be secure.
May there be peace within your walls and security within your citadel.’ Psalm 122: 6-7.
Although some leaders do not think the prevailing rate of the crime should be given such a scary note because it is nothing compared to what occurs in other countries, relatively it is shocking to the people and deserves a special response.
We behave as believers in the face of disasters. As believers then we should talk of the matter.
It is only God who can restore true peace by fundamentally dealing with the problem.
The Almighty can relieve us of the vice by changing the hearts of the criminals, completely and thoroughly as we honestly deal with the matter and punish the offenders severely and deterently.
From appearances, this unprecedented wave of armed robbery may have boxed the ears of the society, but it doesn’t seem to have punched the leadership in the solar plexus.
That does not need to happen for the authority to know the true enormity of the vice to the people.
If the crime rate is still small, we still need spiritual strength, our concerted effort and everything else we have to fight it. Even if we look at the evil in relation to the community in which they take place, our rate of crime is still be shocking.
Soweto has a different history. It is a community that the Boer regime systematically forced into abject poverty and disorder.
Its violence is its manner of hitting back only that its vengeful punches are systematically and deftly deflected back into itself.
Compared to the Republic of South Africa, Tanzania is just a province of that country.
If what is happening there did take place in Tanzania, it would be sheer hell, something akin to living the Devil and his children in a telephone booth just because of its concentration not ruthlessness.
Yet the Western tycoon with money to start more business are still investing in the African country with among the highest murder rate in the world.
The fact that Tanzanians are hollering so much about the rate of armed robbery some people call petty and nothing to worry about, shows how peaceful the country has been. We want people to know why we are making so much noise about these crime.
The Prime Minister Edward Lowassa says we should not panic because of the armed robberies.
Thanks for the assurance. But waylaying buses in the wild on trunk roads, stripping naked the passengers before robbing them of every valuable is unprecedented and nothing to laugh about.
We are a peaceful people so sensitive to any amount of violent crimes no matter how little.
That is more assurance to investors than if we insensitively kept quiet in this bloody period.
If and when we do restore the previous relative calm, whoever might be tempted to stir up the trouble once again in the future won’t forget today.
’Be careful! The people will start hollering,’ he may say.
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