By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
The ultimatum allegedly issued by the executive director of a group calling itself the Citizens Governance Network (CGN) to the Moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of Ghana (GA-PCG), Rt.-Rev. Emmanuel Martey, to withdraw, within 48 hours, his call on the Government of Ghana to promptly desist from sponsoring Muslims on their annual Hajj to Mecca, is intemperately preposterous, to speak much less about the dangerously sacreligious and heretical (See "Group: Presby Moderator Must Withdraw His Comments or Else..." Modernghana.com 3/21/13).
Mr. Osumanu Guarantee's ultimatum is intemperately preposterous, because it bizarrely presumes Prof. Martey to have spoken purely out of spite for Ghanaian Muslims, by callling on the Mahama regime to desist forthwith from sponsoring Muslims on their annual Hajj to Mecca. Nothing could be further from the truth. The fact of the matter is that Ghana's 1992 Republican Constitution clearly stipulates the Separation of Chruch and State or, for that matter, Religion and Government.
The latter institution is functionally secular. What this means is that when it comes to matters regarding the activities of religious organizations, at best, the government of the day ought to remain neutral, albeit ideally hospitable in temperament and disposition. Consequently, for Mr. Osumanu Guarantee (I feel more comfortable with this gentleman's first name) to so disrespectfully chide Prof. Martey for exhorting the government of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) to promptly desist from unduly meddling in religious affairs is rather absurd.
My only reservation here is that it appears that the PCG moderator made his alleged comment about the same time that Christian leaders and their respective organizations were in the process of discussing their annual Week of Prayer and Thanksgiving with President John Dramani Mahama. If so, then the executive director of the Citizens Governance Network may clearly have good reason for feeling visibly disturbed about the position of Rev. Martey on the relationship between the Government and the Ghanaian Muslim community at large.
Still, it was rather diplomatically divisive for Mr. Osumanu Guarantee to so crudely threaten to call on Muslim inhabitants of the three northern regions to unleash their "wrath" at the PCG moderator. In other words, what would be the reaction of the CGN executive director, if Prof. Martey also publicly called on all Christians in the country's other seven regions which, by the way, are predominantly Christian, to be prepared to unleash retaliatory measures against their Muslim brothers and sisters of northern descent?
The good news here is that I am quite certain that Mr. Osumanu Guarantee does not speak for the Ghana Muslim Council; likewise am I certain that his views absolutely in no way reflect those of Ghanaian Muslims, both those of northern and non-northern descent. Needless to say, anybody who attended any reputable Ghanaian public, or government-assisted, school and studied history is fully aware of the fundamental fact of the annual Hajj to Mecca constituting one of the Five Pillars of Islam.
In sum, no levelheaded Ghanaian has any problem with Muslims in the country annually embarking on the Hajj in order to fulfill this sacred admonishment from the Prophet Muhammad. We just don't want our government to add on the purely "religious" and "private" burden of a faith-based ritual; there are already way too many secular and mundane problems that the government has been constitutionlaly sworn to resolve or drastically ameliorate, and the partial funding or facilitation of religious pilgrimages, be they Christian or Islamic, is not one of them. And we firmly believe this is where all matters ought to rest.
At any rate, the notion of anybody's calling on the Christian Council of Ghana (CCG) to call the Presbyterian Church of Ghana's moderator to order is rather presumptuous and execrable. For while, indeed, the PCG is a bona fide member of the Christian Council of Ghana, of which it is actually a founding member, nonetheless, the Moderator of the Presbyterian Church of Ghana does not take his marching orders from the Christian Council of Ghana. Rather, Prof. Martey takes his orders from the National Synod of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of Ghana.
Mr. Osumanu Guarantee, who may well have either directly or indirectly benefited from the missionary and yeomanly activities of both the Presbyterian Church of Ghana and its doctrinal associates of the Christian Council of Ghana, ought to take good note of the preceding reality of Ghanaian culture and citizenship.
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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
March 21, 2013
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