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A Catholic Cleric has berated the syndrome of ‘vote-buying creeping into our body politic, the use of intemperate language, propaganda, threat, intimidation and violence, before, during and after elections.’
Rev. Fr. Emmanuel Abbey-Quaye said this while delivering his keynote address during the 2015 Bible Week Celebration themed “The Bible: Guide To Godly Leadership” at the Star of The Sea Parish, Dansoman recently.
He described the phenomenon as shameful and detestable adding that “the monetization of our politics is a disgrace and a disease eating into Ghana’s democracy at an alarming rate and has to be halted.”
Ghanaians, he said, must learn to reject those who use intimidation and propaganda to win political power for they have nothing to offer except to seek the mandate of the people for their own selfish interests and to loot the nation.
To all the leaders in the country he said “we wish to call on them to give us a cause for hope and to inspire us by their good example of servant leadership.”
Africa has not been able to develop the way it should have because of, according to him, poor and uninspiring leadership offered by past and present leaders. He went on “we cannot come out of our poverty, ignorance and disease if we continue to elect for ourselves leaders who are corrupt and only good at propaganda.”
Leadership, he said, is everything, “the rest are effects and so long as we continue to be corrupt in our choice of leaders and our leaders also continue to fail to live by the principles of leadership taught by the Word of God, we will continue to wallow in our poverty, ignorance and misery.”
Leaders, he said, are to lead by example of their own lives and not just by what they say. They are to lead in righteousness and not in wrongdoing for a throne, he went on, pointing out that leaders must be blameless, live beyond reproach, must be temperate, self-controlled, respectable, gentle, reachable, hospitable, free of vice, peaceful and not greedy.
With 70% of Ghanaians professing to be Christians he said “one would have hoped that the values of the kingdom would be evident in daily living but unfortunately, what we see on daily basis is the pursuit of power at all cost, wealth by any means possible and pleasure without boundaries.”
He prayed to God to as the country inches towards the November elections, “God will help us citizens to elect leaders after His own heart and mind, leaders who will try to live by the principles of leadership found in the Bible.”
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