There is a week when God decides to show a country two mirrors at the same time, and forces it to look. In Kampala, a man named Frank Gashumba held a radio microphone like a sword and shouted, “I have Shs500 million! Let any prophet, any apostle, any man who says he heals, walk with me into the ICU at Mulago, at Nsambya, at Mengo, heal one dying man instantly, and I will get saved today!” It was crude, it was a trap, it was a dare. And yet, the entire country stopped breathing and listened.
In that same week, in Rome, a 71-year-old man in white, His Holiness Pope Leo XIV, stood at the Angelus window, fragile, human, honest, and said to 1.4 billion people, “Doctors have found a small, localised nodule on my lung. It is well-contained. Pray for me. I will go for surgery.” No shouting. No seed. No drama. Just truth. And in that contrast between Kampala noise and Roman nobility lies the whole sickness and the whole cure of Ugandan Pentecostalism.
I have sat and asked myself: why did Gashumba’s crude challenge become a national anthem? Why did even his bitterest enemies in NUP, who have fought him for five years, suddenly say, “We are with you this time”? It is because he did not touch theology. He touched a wound.
As the great Ugandan literary scholar James Kahigiriza once wrote in his meditation on power and pretence, “When a society begins to worship performance more than principle, the pulpit becomes a stage and the people become a paying audience.” That is what happened. Every Ugandan knows that mother who sold her goat for a miracle seed that never germinated. That father who was told to throw away ARVs because he was declared healed, and we buried him three months later. That graduate who has given tithe for three years while jobless because the prophet said his breakthrough was next Sunday.
Gashumba did not say God does not exist. He said, and I quote him, “I have never said God does not exist or that Jesus does not work. I simply condemned these fake prophets, pastors and apostles who use the name of Jesus to rob the poor.” That is not blasphemy. That is consumer protection. That is corporate governance. That is love for the poor.
And what was the response from some of our big pulpits? That is where my heart broke. When Pastor Robert Kayanja, a man many of us grew up watching on TV, reportedly replied, “Your own blood will kill you,” and called it foolishness, I wept. Not because Gashumba is right in method, but because a curse is not a balance sheet. When a nation asks, “Are your miracles real?”, you do not curse the questioner. You open the books. You show the hospital you built. You show the audit.
Thankfully, his son, Pastor Robert Kayanja Jr, spoke the corporate language Uganda understands: “Our books are audited by URA.” That is accountability. That is modern. Pastor Jackson Senyonga of Christian Life Church, himself a Pentecostal, had the rare courage to say, “I 100% support Gashumba,” and challenged miracle-workers to prove it at the mortuary. This tells us this is not an attack on Christianity. It is a cleansing from within.
Now, let me take you to Rome, to show you what transparency and vivid pureness look like. The late, great Ugandan author and former minister Mary Karooro Okurut, in her eternal novel The Official Wife, taught us that “True power does not need to shout its own greatness; its quiet dignity convicts the loud pretenders.” That is exactly what Pope Leo XIV did.
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On October 11, 2026, the Pope did what no Ugandan miracle merchant would ever do: he confessed weakness publicly. No secret flight to Germany. No lies that “the Pope is fasting”. He announced his own sickness at the Angelus.
On October 13, he walked through the main entrance of Gemelli Hospital, waving to ordinary people and greeting patients in wheelchairs, like any old mzee going for treatment. No private elevator. No demand for a seed.
Then the Vatican, in an act of radical transparency that should shame every church in Kampala, released a full medical bulletin. Names of surgeons: Dr Luigi Carbone and Prof Stefano Margaritora. Duration: three hours in theatre, 90 minutes of surgery. Diagnosis: lung adenocarcinoma. Procedure: lower lobe of right lung removed, radical removal. No hiding. No “the devil attacked the Pope”. Just truth.
On October 14, another bulletin: “Blood tests and chest X-ray confirming steady improvement. He has resumed eating, walking, respiratory physiotherapy. Recovery proceeding as planned.” On October 16, they released images: the Pope, thin but standing unaided, celebrating Mass in green vestments, thanking nurses “for taking care of the sick in their fragility”. He did not claim he healed his own lung by shouting “Receive!” He submitted to medicine. He submitted to science. He submitted to humanity.
That, my brothers and sisters, is anointing. As another literary giant of this soil, Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, wrote in Kintu, “Our deepest curses come not from our enemies, but from our refusal to see ourselves as we are — small, frail, in need of mercy.” The Catholic Church, at its highest office, showed smallness. Our Pentecostal stage shows bigness.
So here is the corporate verdict that is emotional because it is true: we have two Christianities in Uganda today. One says, “Pay me, and you will not be sick.” The other says, “Pray for me, I am sick.” One says, “I have the power!” The other says, “I need mercy.” Which one sounds like Jesus, who said, “Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me”?
Frank Gashumba’s Shs500 million will remain uncollected. Not because hospitals will allow a circus in their ICU, but because truth does not perform on command. But morally, he has already collected. That uncollected money is an indictment. It is a mirror.
The miracle Uganda needs is not a man standing up from a hospital bed on camera for money. The miracle Uganda needs is a generation of pastors who are so honest, so audited, so compassionate, so educated, that no one would ever need to offer Shs500 million to believe them.
Until then, as James Kahigiriza warned, we will remain “a people clapping for performers while our souls starve for shepherds”.
And as Mary Karooro Okurut reminds us, the loudest preacher is rarely the holiest. Sometimes, the holiest thing a leader can do is what Pope Leo did: say, “I am weak. Pray for me.”
That is purity. That is power. That is Christ.
Mukama Phillip Kahigiriza | Author, journalist and society scholar | [email protected] | +256 774 279199
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