The Ahmadiyya Elders Association of Ghana at the weekend condemned corporate bodies for spending more resources on beauty contests to the detriment of education and health care programmes for the needy.

“We shudder at the escalating cost in corporate sponsorship and advertisement in programme such as beauty contests at a time when in many communities, brilliant children are being denied access to education due to poverty and people are dying because they cannot afford the cost of medical care,” they said.

The association, known as Majlis Ansarullah, said these in a resolution passed at the end of a two-day 20th National Rally held in Cape Coast under the theme,” ‘Striving Towards Moral Regeneration.” The meeting called for a total corporate refocusing to give priority to education and medical care delivery in social responsibility programmes.

The resolution, signed by Ahmed Anderson, General Secretary of the association, further said that moral degeneration had affected environmental sanitation, observance of traffic regulations, economic management, and political and social life. They, therefore, welcomed and expressed support for the Vice-President’s declaration of war against indiscipline.

“We wish to state that indiscipline can be checked if laws, rules and regulations are enforced and applied by government agencies without fear or favour. We also urge that government appointees who are role models must set examples in discipline behaviour”, they said.

The resolution also recognised the role of the forum of religious bodies in contributing to religious tolerance and peaceful co-existence in a multi-religious society and called on the leadership of religious bodies in Ghana to recognise their role as sacred duty of bringing “man closer to his maker”.

According to the resolution, the desire to achieve sectarian goals should be subservient to the overall good of society. “This is the way to building a peaceful, just and prosperous society”, they said. The elders said the world was harvesting the fruits of permissiveness leading to promiscuity manifested in teenage pregnancy, HIV/AIDS pandemic and other STDs.

They said rather than dealing with the scourge in the light of abstinence and faithfulness, the world was promoting condom use. “We recommend that the fight against HIV/AIDS must therefore be refocused as the failure to realize the dangers in condom use is undermining the effort to check the spread of the disease”, they said.