Opinions of Thursday, 24 March 2016

Columnist: George Sydney Abugri

Good people, bad people and popcorn bishops

We are all good people aren’t we? Surely, you cannot deny that this is indeed the case or try to argue that there are good people and there are bad people.

If you did that, you would quite naturally count yourself among the good people and since that is precisely what everyone else would do, the substance of my original argument is easily proven, isn’t it?

Yet if you wrote the political history of Ghana forward and backwards through time and space a thousand times over, you would find the very same tales of intrigue, dishonesty and multiple standards thrown up again and again in this unrelenting war between the good guys and the bad guys in Ghana.

Who are the good guys and the bad guys? Hey, I just told you who they are! They have got us well and truly trapped in their war to establish their true identities and rendered us involuntary participants in a very bizarre, high-speed circus:
For example, a ruling government assures us that its predecessors had kept a list of collaborators in the media on an illegal payroll to conceal the truth about its actions and inactions while working mainly through media-facilitated propaganda to entrench itself in power.

A new government comes along and the old government now in opposition, which had itself been accused of paying bribes to a select group of powerful journalists, now, turns the guns of accusation on the new government and says the new government is paying hefty bribes to journalists.

It is a thought about life and come to think of it, about politics in Ghana, which any enterprising songwriter could craft lyrically into a piece of chart-topping music.

Me, I love good music. Great soul and mind food if you ask me. The mind takes the message of the lyrics into the heart and digests them right in there, and the soul does the same with the rhythm.

When my spirit takes a bit of a dip, I listen to tracks at the vertical tip of the market charts and frequency modulation radio stations in town always pay the cost.

Unfortunately, I sometimes tune into a radio musical programme and find a DJ who seems to think his skull packs greater wisdom than old Solomon ever had and he cannot keep the teeth over his gums for even half a second either.
He just keeps blabbing on some cranky philosophy of sorts of his own while the music is playing and is soon in such fierce competition with the playing artist for the ears of listeners, that his hollering drowns out the music.

Pardon the digression. Age is catching up with this writer. What is it I was telling you about before all this rubbish about DJs? The good guys and the bad guys in town!

These days, you cannot help wondering which of the two categories of people some self-proclaimed prophets of God fall under and our media is of no help at all.

If a jobless tramp were caught in the act of rape, that would most likely not make a hollering front page headline for a newspaper with a reputation for mighty scoops but if the tramp were called a bishop, now, that would be hot-selling news.

The result is that media-created pastors, prophets and bishops now come a dozen for one Ghana pesewa these days. The media routinely lumps the country’s clergy together with cranks, nuts, chronic troublemakers, bare-faced criminals and outright perverts.

The very strange thing is that the Government and the Christian Council of Ghana appear inexplicably reluctant to speak up more animatedly against the intrusion of God’s kingdom on earth by charlatans and plain swindlers purporting to work for Jesus!