Other than the straight-shooting Rev.-Dr. Kwabena Opuni-Frimpong, the Presbyterian clergyman of the Christian Council of Ghana (CCG), who has consistently held the feet of the seemingly narcissistic operatives of the so-called Independent Electoral Commission (EC) to the proverbial fire of ethics, law and order, almost no other prominent religious leader in the country, Christian or non-Christian, has come out to boldly chastise Mrs. Charlotte Kesson-Smith Osei, the EC’s chairperson, for imperiously presuming to play possum with the orders and decisions of the highest court of the land.
And so it can only come as nothing short of the insufferably hypocritical to hear the Ghana Catholic Bishops Conference (GCBC) call on Mr. Kennedy Ohene Agyapong to apologize to the EC’s chairperson, for daring to publicly suggest that Mrs. Osei offered sexual favors to President John Dramani Mahama as a means of having the former unconstitutionally transferred from her coordinate post of chairperson of the National Commission for Civic Education (NCCE) to her present position. I also don’t quite remember witnessing the same torrent of displeasure from the proverbial men of the cloth, when Mr. Maxwell Kofi Jumah, then vigorously fighting to hold onto his Kumasi-Asokwa parliamentary seat against Mrs. Patricia Appiagyei, accused the latter of having offered sexual favors to former President John Agyekum-Kufuor in return for her appointment as Kumasi mayor. Neither did I hear a legion of National Democratic Congress’ women politicians demand an unqualified apology from Mr. Jumah for violating the dignity of Ghanaian and global womanhood.
As an institution whose precepts and principles are predicated on unalloyed truths, as eternally revealed and propagated by Jesus Christ of Nazareth or Bethlehem, the dear reader may choose his/her pick, the first approach that ought to have been taken by the Catholic Bishops ought to have been to call on the accuser to publicly substantiate his accusation with forensically sustainable evidence, in default of which these prelates would then have been justified to unreservedly call on the New Patriotic Party’s Member of Parliament for Assin-Central to proffer an unqualified public apology to the genuinely aggrieved. Instead, these bishops have chosen to facilely prejudice the terms of this admittedly emotionally charged matter by assuming, before all the factual details have been mustered that, willy-nilly, Mr. Agyapong must be in the wrong, simply because this no-nonsense dedicated representative of his people has dared to make public matters that are traditionally deemed to be best kept close to the vest.
Yes, the issue raised by Mr. Agyapong may be aptly deemed to be both unpalatable and embarrassing, but the fact also remains that the accuser cannot be held up to the same moral standards as these clergymen, for the simple reason that Mr. Agyapong makes absolutely no pretense to having been ordained as a bona fide member of the Holy See. I also hope that Bishop Joseph Osei-Bonsu has not so soon forgotten about the very sharply worded response he gave to those who called upon him, at the beginning of this year, to promptly apologize to President Mahama, whose common sense and leadership vision he had quite reasonably impugned. And the Catholic prelate was dead-on-target on this occasion, because Mr. Mahama had absolutely no right to saddle Ghanaians with the unenviable burden of having two Arabo-Muslim terrorists invited to live in their midst, even when the “almighty” United States, far better equipped to police these nation-wreckers, had roundly rejected them.
Bishop Osei-Bonsu may vividly recall yours truly writing a column expressing his full support for the prelate’s flat refusal to apologize to the man who had so offensively presumed to take Ghanaian citizens for granted. Some of our most avid readers may also have so soon forgotten this indelible fact, and so they need to be reminded that it was the same Mr. Agyapong, now being blisteringly lambasted, who exposed the GH? 52 million Woyome Heist in which the most prominent and powerful figures of the ruling National Democratic Congress were exposed for having literally turned the country they claimed to so dearly love into a collaborative quarry for themselves and the foreign corporate Robber-Barons whose business interests they represented at the expense of the well-being of their own country.
In other words, I am disconsolately mortified, and horrified, to hear respectable and astute opinion leaders like Bishop Osei-Bonsu chastise Mr. Agyapong almost as if it was the Assin-Central NPP-MP who created the economically suicidal and unforgivably murderous regime of Judgment Debts. Now we even have brazenly scandalous politicians like Mrs. Betty Mould-Iddrisu, Nana Oye Lithur and Ms. Hanna Tetteh, hardly any honest Ghanaian woman’s role-model, vacuously riding the otherwise sacred crest of the Women’s Rights Movement in hopes of massing up undeserved sympathy against the Honorable Mr. Agyapong.
Ultimately, what this wave of patently bankrupt pretense to moral superiority reflects is the near-total death of honesty and integrity among the ranks of the membership of the highest echelons of Ghanaian society.
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