Uganda pastor: I Helped Top Pastor Con Aids Patients

A prominent female Kampala pastor bribed and blackmailed worshippers to fake health ailments as serious as HIV/Aids so that she could then claim to have healed them, a parishioner alleged in a recent interview.

The same pastor is being accused of using spies to learn secrets about members of her congregation and then using that information to extort funds- allegations that threaten to further discredit Ugandan pastors, several of whom have come under fire in recent months for dishonesty and improper use of funds.

“She [the pastor] told me that she wanted me to confess in church that I had been cured of HIV/Aids through her prayers,” said Ms Grace Kashemeire (pictured), 55, in an interview with Daily Monitor recently. “She asked me never to tell anyone.

She used to pick me out of the crowd. She used me to give as testimony that I lost three husbands but I recovered from the ailment (Aids). It was a quiet deal between her and me. She promised to give me money and to look after my kids.”

The pastor would then use this information, that Ms. Kashemeire had been healed of HIV/Aids through the pastor’s prayers, to solicit money, according to Ms Kashemeire.

“She recorded my testimonies, which she then used to take abroad to make money,” she said.

Ms Kashemeire added that she had been given use of a house in Lubaga during the period of her collaboration with the pastor to deceive the public.

Multiple attempts to reach the said pastor - first through her lawyers and then in person at her church - failed to elicit a response.

Ms Kashemeire said the pastor recently ordered someone to break the leg of her eight-year old daughter, which was what she said finally convinced her to speak out.

Ms Kashemeire’s daughters leg was allegedly broken in the church so that she (Kashemeire) is forced to spend the money the pastor suspects she did not remit after collecting from one of their extortion victims, on medical bills.

Pastors in Uganda have lately come under fire over charges of impropriety, sodomy and fraud, which have discredited many church leaders.

Police said they would investigate whether pastors use tricks to defraud people of their money and property.

But no action has been taken, apart from the questioning of Pastor Yeboah Nana Kojo, a Ghanaian who allegedly procured an “electric touch” machine that is believed to deliver Holy Spirit-like shock.

Ms Kashemeire is currently suing the pastor over unpaid salary for work she claims to have done at the church. She claims that among her responsibilities in the church, she was to visit homes to tell her story of having been healed of HIV/Aids.

But in reality, she said, her task during such visits was to learn secrets about the families, which the pastor would use to extort funds. The pastor has denied the charges through her lawyers.

The pastor’s lawyers denied Daily Monitor access to her for comment on the allegations of dishonesty and blackmail against the pastor and attempts to find the pastor in church late last week were unsuccessful.

Ms Kashemeire reported the matter first to Lugala LCI office on June 1 and then later to Lugala Police Post. According to a policeman at the post, the file was forwarded to Old Kampala two weeks ago for further action. Ms Kashemeire told the Daily Monitor that her woes began when the pastor suspected that she had been given money by one of the church members in 2006 to ’sow’ on her behalf.

This church member died three weeks ago at International Hospital Kampala of an HIV/Aids-related illness. She had reportedly already spent an unspecified sum of money in payments to the pastor for a miracle healing.

Ms Kashemeire explained that “the pastor said she only needed Shs5 million from her (the dead woman). She refused to give her the money for she had already paid her too much. She also asked for one and a half years of full tank of fuel supply.”

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