Catholic Priests in Lusaka ask lay faithful to help remove Bishop Alick Banda
“YOU SHALL BE MY WITNESSES” – NOT PREDATORS OF YOUR SHEEP: LUSAKA CATHOLIC PRIESTS’ REJECT BISHOP ALICK BANDA
Dear Catholic lay faithful of the Lusaka Archdiocese. We write to you as priests of the archdiocese as we are not happy about the leadership of Bishop Alick Banda. The man lacks wisdom, moral strength and discipline to be a leader of such an important diocese. As such, we humbly request that you may join us in calling upon the Vatican and Pope Francis to intervene and save the diocese.
In his admonition to Catholic Bishops during his visit to Madagascar on September 7, 2019, Pope Francis asked the Bishops, “can a pastor with the heart of Jesus be indifferent to lives entrusted to his care?” The Pope, like St. Paul in the Acts of Apostles in the opening quote of this statement, challenged the bishops to, like Christ, manifest an inseparable bond between their faith and the poor. This scriptural and papal admonition re-echoes the foundations of the vocation to Christianity and priesthood in the Catholic Church. In this spirit, we return to the matters affecting the administration of the Archdiocese of Lusaka under his Bishop Alick Banda.
In addition to the misdeeds of the Bishop we mentioned in our earlier statement we released in September, 2022, we would like to list the following:
1.The bishop is in a threesome relationship with a nun, Sr Agness. It’s a love triangle involving the bishop, the nun, and Fr Laston Lupupa SJ. The relationship is in the open and embarrassing and scandalising the lay faithful. The nun often sleeps at the bishop’s house. Unlike other bishops who live with other priests in order to be of good example to the priests, Bishop Banda has been living alone in luxury in order to hide his misdeeds. But for the good of the Church, in which we serve, and for the good of our faithful people we serve, we shall not divulge more on this. Our main concern, however, is the toxicity this relationship has caused in the church. For example, based on her proximity to the Archbishop, the nun in question has become a feared leviathan among her religious peers, and dismissively ill-treats parents and workers at the school she runs. She has practically abandoned her religious vacation and commitment to Christ to a lifestyle of extravagance and power with the bishop. Those aware of the relationship have even nicknamed her as the Deputy Archbishop. Unfortunately, this is not just a love affair but a joint money laundering scheme as the bishop opened bank accounts in her name which he used to receive money from the former ruling party PF which he used to help campaign for PF. The Catholic church has never had such a bishop of low moral standards in Zambia. We urge the Vatican to thoroughly investigate this. We also urge DEC to investigate this clear case of money laundering.
2. Unfortunately, Bishop Banda has a string of other women. He has a very rich CV when it comes to women, which goes many years back. While he served as a deacon in Chingola, he was clobbered by a man whose wife he was going out with. People of Chingola can confirm this story. We wonder how he was vetted and allowed to be a bishop when all this was well known. While he served as bishop of Ndola, he had an open affair with a lady known as Mwila. When he was moved to Lusaka, he relocated Mwila to Lusaka as well. In fact, he makes no distinction between single and married women.
3. Abuse of Seminarian fund: we are grateful for the faithful who continue to donate generously to the church. One such fund Christians donate generously towards is the Seminarians fund, which is money used for the training of priests. In 2022, the faithful donated more than K3million towards this fund. This is an annual exercise. Unfortunately, the bishop uses part of this money to fund his misdeeds. For example, part of this money is used to support his daughter who is in University. He disguises the daughter as an orphan. A total lie. Let the Bishop deny this and we shall produce evidence. Unfortunately, this is not the only daughter he has. He has legion and is even more productive than married men. (We have never seen a bishop sink so low). We urge our faithful to demand audited financial reports from the bishop about the use of this money. The auditors should be chosen by independent people and not him. Then the faithful will see daylight robbery. For example, the faithful do not know that the cost of training one seminarian per year is about K23,000. Rome still pays a small amount towards each seminarian so each diocese only pays about K16,000 per year per seminarian. Each year, Lusaka diocese has an average of less than 30 seminarians. 30 x 16,000 per year is K480, 000. What then happens to the remainder of the K3million raised annually? The faithful should demand for answers. Since Bishop Alick likes criticising corruption in government, he should lead the way in terms of transparency and accountability over the utilisation of church funds.
4.Bishop as a PF Vuvuzela: One of the three core duties of the episcopate in the Catholic Church is teaching. Bishops are teachers of the faith. As teachers of the faith, bishops are called to preach the gospel and to side with the poor. As Pope Francis put it to the bishops in Madagascar, “bishops sow seeds of hope and of peace”, always siding with the poor and the weak in their preaching. Contrary to this, Bishop Alick Banda has been a high priest of the Patriotic Front (PF), now and before. For those who follow Archbishop Banda’s homilies (or sermons), they are close to embarrassing. They do not only lack profound basis in scripture or Catholic theology; they are hollow and without basic common sense or catechetical relevance. Often, their content is word-for-word from blogs of the Patriotic Front or related websites. Happily, our faithful are not docile and, for the first time in recent history, Catholics of good standing and without known partisan political persuasion have taken to social media to denounce Archbishop Banda’s partisan rants given as homilies, that sound more like political party rally messages than Catholic homilies based on Scripture. Most disturbing is that the Archbishop elected to be silent throughout the ten years of horrendous terror, torture, abuse, killings, and corruption of the previous regime. As priests, we are not opposed to our bishops playing their prophetic role, but what we do not support is clear hypocrisy and partisanship clothed in episcopal regalia.
5. Corruption in Construction of Bishop’s Private School: We appreciate that our Archdiocese is, unlike most dioceses in the country, privileged with wealthy resident Catholics who can make financing of projects easy. However, we all know that the construction of the Adrian Mung’andu School in Njolwe in Lusaka East was built from funds from the Archbishop’s corrupt friends in the previous administration of PF and their business allies without established accountability mechanisms. First, the previous administration irregularly assigned the Zambia National Service to clear the area for construction of a private property. The assignment was botched after an alarm for abuse of the ZNS was raised. President Lungu himself gave the bishop K700, 000 cash. Later during the 2021 election campaigns, President Lungu gave Bishop Banda K6million to share with priests to help campaing for PF in the church. Let the Bishop deny this. Even his vicar general, Fr Solomon, is aware of this. Bishop Mpundu is right to say Bishop Banda is the first Catholic Bishop in Zambia who succumbed to the culture of brown envelopes from politicians, abandoning all moral judgment.
6.Poor Governance of the Church: Bishop Banda uses his power to appoint and transfer priests to either punish those who are independent minded or reward those who don’t use their brains and willing to do anything for him, however immoral. Priests he does not like are sent to poor or rural parishes while those like Fr Kabungo and Fr Chitoshi who are his boys are given nicer and wealth parishes. It is for this reason that he got rid of Fr James Zulu and Fr Leonard from the Curia and brought in people who can do his bidding. He expects all priests he assigns nice parishes to raise money for him. Those who do not meet his targets are moved and sent to poor parishes. It is the first time the Catholic church is seeing such corrupt governance of the church in Zambia. More worrying, the Bishop has deliberately been avoiding establishing the Finance Committee for the archdiocese to preside over finance matters, as required by canon Law. This is in order to give him unlimited access to church funds, without any transparency and accountability.
We, as Catholics priests, have never before been subjected to such divisive leadership that feasts on abuse, corruption, financial lust, and political bitterness and vindictiveness. While we will continue to keep you our Catholic faithful updated of our observations of the Archbishop, we implore the Holy Sea to act decisively to remove Archbishop Banda and, with his, the toxicity that bedevils our church. The Church in Zambia is rich with more credible and well respected bishops like George Lungu, Raphael Mweempwa, Charles Kasonde, Valentine Kalumba and even Benjamin Phiri (although he often thinks after words have already escaped his mouth).
Yours in the Lord,
The Clergy of the Lusaka Archdiocese