Members of a Universal Kingdom of God church in Cape Town say their pastor must “rot in jail” following his arrest on Tuesday last week for the alleged raping his 11-year-old daughter.
The 51-year-old pastor was denied bail by the Khayelitsha Magistrate’s Court when he made a bail application appearance on Friday.
He was arrested on Tuesday after his daughter approached members of the street committee and told them her father had been raping her and her bed-ridden mother for the past two years.
The girls allegations followed her mother being admitted to the Khayelitsha District Hospital for high blood pressure, diabetes, epilepsy and depression.
About 100 residents and church members thronged the passages of the magistrate’s courts on Friday while others demonstrated outside the court against the pastor receiving bail.
Placards saying ‘rot in jail’ and ‘you killed the child pastor, where is your mercy’, and ‘what are you preaching pastor?’ were held aloft by angry residents outside court.
Residents’s committee member Thobeka Lubambo said when the pastors wife needed to be hospitalized on Tuesday last week and an ambulance was called, she insisted her daughter go to the hospital with her.
“I did not understand because the father was around, but she insisted that she wants her daughter.”
Lubambo said the pastor’s wife only relented once the residents’ committee members promised to look after her daughter.
It was then that the girl told them that her father had been raping her “since last year’.
“The father would rape her in front of her sick mother,” she said.
“We always suspected that something was not right but he is a pastor, each and every day he preached to us, even though he was so protective of her (his daughter).”
The child was taken to Nonceba Family Counseling for safety.
Judge Richard Skhiwivhilu postponed the case pending more information. The pastor will appear in court again on March 30.