He is a Word of everyone’s mouth in South Africa now. Yes, we are talking about Prophet Shepherd Bushiri, controversies around him and his assets. While some believe he cannot be trusted, the millions who follow him believe he is an impressive as the second coming. The Malawian born Prophet Bushiri alias ‘Major 1’ is arguably the most talked about Man of the cloth at the moment.

He pulls up in a stately Bentley, with a pair of high-end German sedans tagging alongside. There is always a motorcade with him, Prophet never travels alone. When we visited his waterfall estate in midrand, north of john’s berg to meet Prophet Bushiri of Prophet Shepherd Bushiri ministries looks a tad emaciated than the man we are used to seeing on television.

We meet at his house in an estate off the R55 in Midrand, Johannesburg. It’s very large and grand with trappings of state-of-the-art design and décor.

A press search reveals that he has a fleet of luxury cars and private jets, in addition to his mansion. What’s more, he’s a billionaire and basically a man who’s made good in life. We go for the kill and ask him how he made his money.

“I’m not just a Prophet,” he begins. “I’m also a human being who is a responsible person, married with kids. I am very business-minded.

“For example, the Bentley you saw earlier – I managed to buy it before I came to stay in South Africa. I bought houses in South Africa way before I opened the church less than two years ago in Pretoria.

“In short, I am a businessman. My wife, Mary, is a chartered accountant. She used to work for a big institution as a director of finance. I made her resign because of the business we do.

“I started out in business doing farming on a small scale,” he says. “It grew into a big scale operation, and from the profits we bought a small piece of land that had minerals. As it panned out, we sold that piece of land, but before we sold it, we did evaluation on the deposits there and they were worth quite a lot of money. We sold that land and, from the money we got, we’ve been investing in mining.”