It Is a matter of context and competence, not age and elephants

The Brong-Ahafo Regional Minister must be a very confused man. At a meeting at Acherensua with some chiefs, imams and party executives of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC), Mr. Eric Opoku is reported to have said that real Muslims cannot be members of the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) – (See “NPP Muslims Are Not ‘Real Muslims’ – Minister” Atinkaonline.com 4/13/16). The Regional Minister’s rationale was that Surah (or Verse) 105 of the Holy Quran, the Islamic holy scripture, counsels all devout Muslims to stay away from elephants. Maybe somebody more cognitively puissant and intellectually enlightened needs to educate Mr. Opoku about the stark and incontrovertible fact that the New Patriotic Party is a modern political organization and not a Mosque or a Muslim association. Neither, of course, is the NPP a Church or a Christian association.

The Brong-Ahafo Regional Minister also needs to be schooled about the constitutional stipulation of the “Separation of Church/Religion and the State,” and stop playing dangerous and divisive political games with the chiefs and Muslim community leaders of both Acherensua and the Brong-Ahafo Region at large. At any rate, the real question that needs to be asked is this: Where were the Christian community leaders of Acherensua at the said meeting? Are we to take this to mean that the National Democratic Congress is inveterately anti-Christian? This may very well be the case, especially when one reckons the legion attempts made by the leaders of the NDC, seasonally, to stage manage the Hajj or the annual pilgrimage of Ghanaian Muslims to Mecca, the global capital of Islam.
It is also rather amusing for the leader of a party that facilely offers refuge to certified Islamist terrorists, on the blind side of the overwhelmingly Christian majority of the country, to presume to lecture Ghanaians, and especially Alhaji Mahamudu Bawumia, the 2016 Presidential Candidate of the New Patriotic Party, on who qualifies to be labeled a “real” Muslim or a “fake” Muslim, for that matter. Needless to say, it would have been more meaningful for Mr. Opoku to have also explained the context in which adherents to the Islamic faith were counseled by Prophet Muhammad to stay away from elephants. You see, Mr. Opoku clearly does not seem to appreciate the significant fact that irrespective of one’s religious faith or suasion, every nation of worshippers reserves the inalienable right to interpret its holy scriptures according to the temper and/or exigencies of times.

One does not need to be a Muslim to appreciate the fact that the elephant is not a desert beast of burden, but rather a veritable denizen of the tropical rainforest. That the elephant is geographically and culturally more relevant to Ghanaians than to the people of the Arabian peninsula does not seem to have mattered to a clearly geopolitically and culturally ignorant Mr. Opoku. We also have a problem with the fact that President Mahama would appoint a Member of Parliament as a Regional Minister, especially with unmistakable reference to the fact that the official seat of the Brong-Ahafo Minister is at least some 300 (three-hundred) miles from the location of our august National Assembly. For instance, how often does Mr. Opoku get to fully and actively participate in parliamentary proceedings in Accra for which he is comfortably salaried, without egregiously and even criminally shortchanging the people of Asunafo South whom the Regional Minister claims to represent?

Couple the preceding with his job as Brong-Ahafo Regional Chief Executive, and it readily becomes clear that “competence” was the farthest word from the mind of President Mahama when he decided to appoint Mr. Opoku as Minister for Brong-Ahafo. Which, of course, is just another long-winded way of saying that Mr. Opoku’s appointment as Brong-Ahafo Regional Minister could not be more insulting to the intelligence of the people and indigenes of the nation’s agricultural breadbasket. It is also rather silly for Mr. Opoku, who sports a “Euro-Christian” first name, to presume to play Ghanaian Muslims against their Christian majority brothers and sisters.

Regarding the question of whether Nana Akufo-Addo is too old and weak to effectively govern the country, relative to President Mahama, maybe somebody needs to remind the Mahama hanger-on that productive or “real” leadership is a matter of one’s generous endowment with intellectual and cognitive skills and creative imagination, not raw youth and sheer muscles. It is a matter of competence and wisdom-tempered outlook on life, not sheer exuberance and the ungoverned riot of temperament.

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