Children, Women Disgraced As Witches On MetroTV

I am amazed, appalled and shocked by what I have been seeing on Metro TV every Saturday morning between 10.30am and 11.00 am.

One of those self-styles prophets called Apostle Ebenezer has bought airtime on Metro TV to air his church service, Ebenezer Miracle Centre in Kumasi, Ashanti Region, where he claims to “catch witches” and exorcise them.

As one of my former A-level lecturers said, “some of these churches, where miracles and all kinds of negative prophecies over peoples’ lives, rather than sound preaching of the unadulterated word of God is the order of the day, you see all women and a few irresponsible men.”

Apostle Ebenezer, as they call him, obviously has a very big following and I do not doubt that he may have God’s anointing upon his life but the demonstration of the anointing and the power of God, which I personally believe in, is not an excuse to violate peoples’ rights, tarnish their image and in the case of children destroy their future.

If you watch the program I am referring to, you would see that at every meeting, Apostle Ebenezer uses the time to show to the whole public how one woman or the other and or one child or the other had been found to be a witch.

What is more appalling is that these people claimed to be witches are brought on public TV and made to confess to their witchcraft under duress amidst boos from the thousands of congregants and in the glare of the TV watching public.

In one particular instance, one child (less than 10 years) accused of being a witch, pointed to another child (a teenager) as the source of her witchcraft and she (the teenager) also pointed to a certain woman, a mother of two grown-up daughters, as the one who put the witchcraft into food and fed her with it when she was a baby. Can you believe this?

The woman denied the accusation on TV but the Apostle insisted that God had revealed to him that what the children claimed was true. He then put some olive oil on the floor and did some semblance of a ritual with the oil on the floor and rubbed the woman’s feet with some of the oil but the women continued to deny the accusation.

He then asked the two daughters of the woman to take their mother home and convince her to tell the truth. Meanwhile the woman was screaming in twi, “the disgrace is enough I have insisted I’m not a witch but nobody believes me.”

Later on another shot, obviously taken outside of the church auditorium, was inserted into the program and the woman was seen admitting to being a witch as the children said.

Another week I saw another child also accused of being a witch and being taken through the ordeal of confessing all the “witchcraft activities he had been engaged in, in the past, live on Public TV.

I thought to myself, are there no laws in this country that protects the rights of women and children - Why should a station like Metro TV allow the rights of children especially to be abused in such an appalling manner on their network?

Even if those children and women are really witches as was claimed, why should it be on TV? Couldn’t the Apostle’s lawyers advise him that yes, you can identify and exorcise witches all you care, but those people have rights, which cannot be violated in that manner? Their image and future is at stake.

Someone must tell the over zealous anointing-without-knowledge Apostle that society finds it very hard to accept and reintegrate anti-social characters like witches into the community and that is why even when a child is raped or defiled, the child’s identity is not revealed in order for people not to judge her in the future based on what they know of her now.

Moreover witchcraft, even though the bible says is a work of the flesh, is not something that can been determined in the court of law. So in case someone takes the Apostle to court how can he legally prove that those people are witches, except to make claims to his spiritual prowess, which the courts will simply not admit as evidence.

Psychologists will tell you that the mind plays such dangerous tricks on us to the extent that if one, children especially, is called a witch, a thief, stupid and all kinds of names for a long time the mind imbibes that thought and the person tends to believe and accept that they must be what people and their minds say they are. That is not to say there are no foul spirits, which have taken possession of people.

I am a Christian myself and I belong to a church where the engrafted word of God is preached and miracles happen rampantly. Indeed people with foul spirits are caught in my church sometimes. But we do not put such people on TV just to show how powerful God is. Those people have rights, they have families and those rights and families must be protected.

The bible says Jesus destroyed the works of the devil and made a public show of him, not the people possessed. Rather in the process he saved those possessed with the demons and shamed the devil. Claiming that someone, especially a child is a witch in front of a large congregation is enough abuse of that child’s right, much more putting the child on TV. That is too much.

If the purpose is to show how powerful God is, then the purpose is defeated because those few “irresponsible men” in the Apostle’s church keep chanting the Apostle’s name and giving him accolades like “You are a champion – you are great – you are powerful – you are anointed…” among others, giving the glory to the Apostle instead of to God.

I think this is something the Christian Council of Ghana, Ghana Pentecostal Council, Ministry of Women and Children Affairs, WAJU (I am told they have a new and more cumbersome name), Child Labour Department of ILO, all the child and women’s rights activists and organizations in the country and indeed Metro TV should rise up and do something about.

I am not suggesting that the Apostle should be taken off air but he must be made to stop violating the rights of the women and compromising the future of the children by showing them on TV in that manner. He can tell the story without showing the people. After all he is not the only one with the anointing to arrest and exorcise witches. People have been doing it before he came on the scene and people will continue to do it when he is gone. The devil is the enemy, not the women and children.