Source: Baptist News Global, November 9, 2021
In South Africa, free analog-broadcast community television stations whose programming caters to low-income majority Black townships are broke. To keep the lights on, they take advertising money from startup Pentecostal pastors who promise bewildering miracles and changes of fortune for jobless audiences.
Anele Heli is a 20-something charismatic prophet-pastor in Cape Town, South Africa’s most racially and financially gentrified city. He goes by the moniker Sir Anele, and his weekly TV sermons on Cape Town TV, the largest nonprofit community channel in the city, attract thousands of viewers and thousands more offline. Worshipers are desperate for him to touch their heads and to ease their pain in a country with the world’s highest joblessness rate. “I’m here to change lives on TV,” Heli said. “My sermons heal diabetes, restore lost jobs, reverse divorces.”
Nearly a dozen dubious South African township TV prophet-pastors are on trial for rape, murder, extortion, immigration fraud, and “fake miracles” stunts.
Poor, majority Black township residents in South Africa can’t afford high-quality pay-per-view TV or home Internet broadband. Broke community TV stations are their only source of information. Therefore, fraudster prophet-pastors lie in wait for desperate township TV viewers beset by joblessness, lack of health insurance, or mental health ailments.
[Kudakwashe Magezi, a poet and tech critic in Johannesburg, explains] “Prophet-pastors recoup their money by performing TV ‘miracles’ and aggressively requesting cash donations to a bank account. Cellular phone corporations get a cut of the cash revenue from desperate viewers [through] text messages.”