A 46-year-old pastor of Good Shepherd Church, Mpumalanga, John Philane Masilela, was sentenced to 55 years in prison for four counts of rape and seven counts of sexual assault of seven male youth congregants aged between 17 and 26.

These assaults were reported to have taken place between 2012 and 2018. The conviction and sentencing recently took place in the KwaMhlanga Regional Court.

The Mpumalanga spokesperson for the NPA, Monica Nyuswa, says Masilela had portrayed himself as a prophet and the pastor of the church in the Suncity extension of KwaMhlanga.

He was successfully arrested in 2020 after all the victims had opened cases against him.

“He would pray for his victims by touching and fiddling with their private parts, under the pretext of preventing them from living immoral lives. He told the victims that he could see their future and had received instructions from God to pray for them in that manner. He also told them that if they refused, bad things would happen to them,” Nyuswa explains.

In court

Masilela pleaded not guilty and claimed consent.

“The regional court prosecutor, Bianca Harmse, led testimonies of seven victims, who told the court how Masilela would quote scriptures from the Bible and claim for them to be protected from being with the wrong partners, he needed to pray for their private parts. Some of the victims even broke down and became emotional when testifying. The state submitted that he had abused his power as a pastor and used the victims’ faith and religion to break any resistance they showed to sexually violate them for his lustful pleasures.”

Nyuswa says the regional magistrate, Merlene Greyvenstein, found Masilela to be a sexual predator among the youth of his congregation.

“She found him to be a blatant liar who told his victims bad things would come their way should they not comply with his instructions. The court found his acts to be disgusting, as he claimed to be a Christian, yet he saw no wrongdoing in his actions to prevent them from immoral acts. A presentence report detailing the emotional impact of the victims was presented in court.”

Masilela received 10 years’ imprisonment for each of the rape counts and five years’ imprisonment for each of the sexual assault counts.

The court ordered four of the sexual assault sentences to run concurrently with that of the rapes, relating to the same victims. This results in 55 years in total. He was also declared unfit to possess a firearm.