By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
August 30, 2014
E-mail: [email protected]
If Prophet Emmanuel Kofi Enim, the founder and general overseer of the Word Victory Chapel, had called the Executive-Editor of the New York Times, or any one of the mainstream American newspapers, and recounted his purported prophecy about the political fortunes of President John Dramani Mahama come Election 2016, the concerned editor would have promptly asked Prophet Enim to buy advertising space if he wanted the world outside his chapel to learn about his revelation.
The editor would not have challenged the scientific or even spiritual basis of Prophet Enim's claim of God's having revealed to him in a vision that rank corruption, abject poverty and morbidly insanitary conditions notwithstanding, "God in His infinite wisdom" still wanted Mr. Mahama to remain in office past 2016 and visit Ghanaians with more hardships and untold misery (See "Mahama Is Destined to Win 2016 Election - Prophet" Ghanaian Times 8/29/14). He simply would not have consented to become a part of this purely private act of political kibbitzing, vainglorious brown-nosing or favor currying.
But, of course, there is a fundamental ocean of difference between the New York Times and the Ghanaian Times. The New York Times, founded sometime in the mid-1800s, is privately owned and staffed by the best educated among media practitioners and other vanguard specialists and experts in endeavors across the spectrum. The salary scale of its writers, reporters and editors is also among the highest the world over. Which is, of course, not to imply that being located and published in a Third-World country, somehow, excuses the staff, editors and publisher of the government-owned Ghanaian Times from upholding the highest standards of media practice.
You see, one does not need the pontifical, but hardly scientific, prediction of any latterday "Prophet-Doctor" to accurately figure out the hands-down winner of Sunday's New Patriotic Party super-delegates' preliminary presidential candidacy primary. That can readily and more meaningfully be done by even a quack NDC-sponsored pollster like Mr. Ben Ephson. All one has to do is organize an opinion poll or a statistically scientific sampling of the NPP super-delegates.
Don't get me wrong, prophetic men and women of the cloth, or the Holy Bible, have a place and a significant role to play in our Fourth-Republican democratic dispensation; but this is not simply the sort of dubious partisan political meddling being indiscreetly indulged by the General Overseer of the Word Victory Chapel International. I also don't know that our Judeo-Christian God is in the obstreperous - or incontinent - habit of rampantly revealing to us, earthlings, even the most devout among us, His/Her unreserved endorsement of notoriously corrupt and grossly incompetent leaders whose most commonly acknowledged achievement inheres in the incalculable degree of misery relentlessly visited upon the lives of the tens of millions of the very people whose electoral mandate he confidently and proudly claims to command.
I also don't know that "Prophet-Doctor" Enim has been afforded exclusive authority to pronounce the practical irreversibility of his "prophetic" claim of God's having thrown the 2016 ballot resoundingly in favor of Mr. Mahama. Needless to say, Ghana is replete with legion prophets who daily tout conflicting claims about practically the same events. We had, for example,conflicting "prophetic" claims about the fortunes of the Black Stars at the 2014 Brazil World-Cup Tournament. And so did we have "prophecies" predicting the deaths of two presidential candidates of the country's two major political parties, one of whom was already widely known to be terminally ill in the lead-up to Election 2012.
The terminally ill one would expire well before the prophetic timeline, under "mysterious" circumstances which none of these media-hopping prophets have been able to reveal to the nation and the world at large. You see, the Founding Fathers of the United States of America, as well as some of the other advanced democracies here in the West, anticipated this unsavory meddling and interference in their political cultures some two-hundred-and-odd years ago, thus their sagacious demand for the insertion of a constitutional provision enjoining a Separation Between The Church And The State.
I suspect Ghana's democratic Constitution enjoins the same demand for the Separation Between The Church And The State, or Religion, for that matter. In other words, if "Prophet-Doctor" Enim is to be allowed to unduly influence the decision of who gets to govern our august Republic of Ghana, he had better leave the pupilt and found a political party. Of course, as a moral leader, "Prophet-Doctor" Enim has every right, as well as citizenship obligation, to speak to the need for responsible leadership and patriotism.
As the leader of a congregation, or congregations, with diverse political leanings, "Prophet-Doctor" Enim has absolutely no right to cynically prejudice the minds of the largely vulnerable citizens who have entrusted their moral and spiritual welfare into his hands.
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