Meet Prophet Seer1, The Man Who Harnessed Zambia

The flamboyant Nigerian self-styled prophet Andrew Ejimadu, popularly known as Seer 1, arrived in Zambia around 2010, grew his ministry over the next seven years and became part of the protestant Christian community.

As well as rooting himself in the country’s spiritual fabric, he also began to rub shoulders with the powerful political elites in president Lungu’s Cabinet.

Somehow, he fell out with the authorities, who deported him in April 2017. By that time, however, he had become a Zambian by faith and learnt three things about many of the people he was leaving behind: their gullibility, hypersensitivity to the occult and Christian fundamentalism.

Using South Africa as his base and Facebook as his organizing platform, Seer1 held a series of online meetings in which he railed against the then ruling PF. Initially, many saw his antics as motivated by vendetta following his deportation.

As such, in the beginning, his live chats provided the much-needed comical relief in what was a highly polarized and depressing pre-election environment. Things changed in 2021 when Seer 1transformed himself into a well-informed analyst of Zambian politics, mixing the ultra-bizarre (claims that the PF would lose because he had withdrawn the black magic that he gave them to win power in 2015 and 2016) and the sensible (sound understanding and analysis of the country’s geopolitics, economic issues and how Lungu’s failure to tackle corruption made his electoral defeat an inevitable reality). At his peak, his online live rallies would attract as many as 30,000 viewers on a single platform – a feat that no Zambian influencer, artist, or media institution has ever achieved.

Whatever his intentions and motivations, Seer 1, through his persistent rantings against the governing elites, made two significant contributions to Zambians’ struggle to rid themselves of a repressive regime and achieve political change. First, he raised the levels of civic awareness in a population that is prone to clerical mobilisations and where political messages are sometimes more effective when delivered in a religious language.

Second, he exploited Zambians’ deep connection to faith to generate a national psyche of expectation that president Lungu would, regardless of whatever attempts he makes to stay in power, lose the election. In an environment in which the governing party had looked invincible insofar as their removal from office was concerned, the Nigerian prophet presented God as a proud partisan who was set to deliver a miracle: the destruction of the invincible via the ballot!”