Two young Malawian women have accused a popular prophet in the country, Shepherd Bushiri of raping them on separate occasions.
One of the women who spoke to eTV in an interview that aired on Wednesday evening, alleged that the multi-millionaire leader of the Enlightened Christian Gathering church would stare at her during the church services and sometimes stood next to her during his sermons.
Not long after that, a church elder allegedly told her Bushiri wanted to meet her at a hotel “to pray”.
She said;
I’m like no you can’t do this to me. You are married. He said, I don’t care, I shouldn’t worry about that. I was like no I can’t. That’s when from there he touched me here (forehead) so that’s when I manifested, I don’t know I was under the power. That I don’t even know. So from there he took off the clothes then he raped me.
The lady alleged that after the Prophet raped her, he gave her R5,000 (N111,709).
The second alleged victim shared the story of how she lured to an hotel by Prophet Bushiri
After one of his sermons in the church, she said Bushiri asked her and her cousin to join a special service the following day.
They were going to meet at the church but then the pastor allegedly suggested they meet at a hotel. When the lady arrived at the hotel, she claimed that she found the pastor naked, stressing;
He then asked me to take my clothes off! He told me to turn around and I did that shaking…afraid… I didn’t know what to do. That’s when he came up to me and everything happened. And then after that, he told me to take out 5K out of the drawer, to go book myself another room.
Both women have opened cases with the police and while they wait for justice, they have stopped attending the church. Police have confirmed they were investigating the allegations.
In reaction to the allegations, Prophet Bushiri stated that the law enforcement officials, who he has been accusing him extortion for the past three years, recruited women and children to come up with false rape allegations against him and his church members.
The Malawian church leader warned the alleged extortion syndicate of a “serious legal suit” that will ensue with all the “overwhelming” evidence against it.
He wrote as he shared the video evidence he has;
Enough is enough! For the last 3 years we have been dealing with extortion. A police officer at the Hawks called Phumla Mrwebi has been intimidating women and children to come up with false rape allegations against us.
This has been done together with members of the media. This woman comes and demands money from us. The supposed victims come and demand money from us. The shameless journalists also demand money from us.
This Mrwebi woman, for the past 3 years, has been running an extortion syndicate against me through sending girls to demand money from us and if we don’t give, she told the girls to go public and accuse us of raping them.
We reported the matter in 2018 to several state institutions such as State Security Agency, Inspector General of Intelligence, police commissioners, and including the Independent Police Investigative Directorate (IPID) to bring this woman to justice and leave me alone.
No action! As we are writing, this woman, working with Mashishi of SANCO, has again recruited several girls to be interviewed by ETV to accuse me of raping them.
Some of these girls, secretly came to us, demanding various amounts ranging from 50 000 to 2million Rands to their masters(as aforementioned) in order to stop the story from being aired by ETV. We recorded them and you can see for yourself.
Well, we told them we are not giving a single coin to them to stop ETV from running this story. Etv must go ahead. We are going to sue you and your extortion cohorts.
This time we want to show you the power of money and justice. We want to warn every party involved in this syndicate that I have overwhelming evidence of all their doings. A serious legal suit will follow and we will fight.
This is not the first time Bushiri has faced rape allegations. In 2018, a Sunday newspaper reported that the police were investigating him after a Pretoria woman had come forward. She later recanted her story.
