Posted: Daily Guide | Thursday, 24 March 2011
www.dailyguideghana.com
By Charles Takyi-Boadu
The Presiding Bishop of the Methodist Church and President of the Christian Council of Ghana (CCG), Reverend Prof. Emmanuel Asante, wants President John Evans Atta Mills to sack his appointees who have cultivated the bad habit of insulting their political opponents.
Bishop Asante believes such individuals and group of persons do not set good example for the youth to follow as they have little or nothing to offer the country.
Rev. Asante was speaking on Accra-based Oman FM in reaction to recent insults heaped on the New Patriotic Party (NPP)’s standard bearer, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo and other people by the Deputy Ministers of the Interior and Works and Housing, Kobby Acheampong and Hannah Louisa Bissiw respectively.
The President has been calling on Ghanaians to shun politics of insults, but strangely, insults seem to be part of the daily assignments of his appointees.
The two deputy ministers are on record to have made very disparaging remarks about their political opponents in the NPP when they addressed members of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) branch of the Tertiary Education Institutions Network (TEIN) of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) in Kumasi.
Kobby, who is notorious for making unsubstantiated allegations, was caught on tape describing Nana Akufo-Addo as a ‘fruit cake,’ and later addressed him (Akufo-Addo) as an untidy person.
Dr. Bissiw, a Cuba-trained veterinarian, on the other hand, described leading NPP activist Ursula Owusu as a ‘disgrace to womanhood’ and Nana Addo as a ‘sexy old fool’.
Both initially denied the comments but when the tape was played to them, they were found wanting.
“People like this should all be sacked because they have nothing to offer us. That’s why I keep saying that people in government, whether members of the ruling NDC or the opposition or whichever individual who describes himself as a politician and would stand on a platform to trade in insults, politics of invectives…we should not think about such people,” he said.
He said it was high time government and especially President Mills stamped his authority and brought such people to order since their utterances did not only augur well for government and the country’s politics in general.
He identified the incidence of insults, threats and lying as the three main issues affecting Ghana’s politics and therefore admonished the country’s politicians to desist from indulging in them.
The Bishop likened governance to a person selling a product, noting that one only had to advertise the product and tell people why they needed to buy it.
“But, if you go and stand somewhere and insult a friend, or excuse me to say, a person who can give birth to you, it doesn’t bring anything, it doesn’t bring development but violence.”
The reverend Minister stressed that it was time Ghanaian politicians stopped these despicable practices since it did not inure to the country’s development, emphasizing, “Anyone who does that does not understand politics.
As pastors, these are the very things we say and people say we are doing politics but there is national politics and party politics.”
“What I want to say is that anybody who wants to use insults to look for power or wants us to vote for him, we will plainly tell our people that they should understand issues and that such people have nothing to offer them.”