Ghanaians are well-noted for our fanatic religiosity which makes it easy for us to adopt this ‘fama nyame’ attitude even in the face of clear bullying by plain-faced cowards and fictitious pious people. With this typical Ghanaian religiousity, we have often been hoodwinked by extremely hungry hyenas that come to us in sheep-clothes. These people present themselves as true embodiment of character of the almighty God only to lead us astray and into the abyss. In recent times, there have been numerous cases of ‘men of God’ going on rampage and sexually abusing married women, young girls, and in some cases, complete infants who have absolutely nothing sexually attractive about them. These despicable cases of sexual abuse by these pastoral charlatans have been possible, largely on the account that, the average Ghanaian married woman will be prepared to forego the needs of her husband under the instruction of her so-called pastor.

A married woman who probably has not undertaken her domestic assignment required of her as a wife, will hurriedly rush to deliverance service by a new ‘prophet’ in town. Some of them get so engrossed in such practices to the extent where the survivals of their very marriage lives begin to suffer. And when this happens, the old lady sitting her somewhere and minding her own business then becomes the obvious target of senseless witchcraft accusations. Such accusations have also resulted in completely innocent aged people being tortured, with some of them, often murdered.

Abusing God’s name

These unfortunate incidents are taking place in our nation just because some extremely wicked people who know absolutely nothing about the gospel of Christ, have realized that the average Ghanaian will quickly swallow, hook-line-and-sinker, even cow-dung only if it is presented in the form of the gospel. As a result, these ‘men of God’ invest heavy resources in securing airtime on Radio/TV and only thing they do with these airtimes is to simply invite people into their churches by announcing their phone numbers on air and giving directions to their locations.

On air, these so-called men of God will extol their personal healing prowess and how they can bring instant relief to every troubled soul. Some of them will claim they have been to Israel and are back with special anointing oil mixed with special herbs plugged from trees planted on the grave of Jesus Christ!!Some of them even go to the extent of claiming that their special healing anointing-oil was squeezed out of olive trees planted on the exact location where Joseph(the father of Jesus Christ) met and proposed marriage to the virgin Mary(the mother of Christ).

Such embellished lies, in the final analysis, do have some effect on some gullible individuals in our society who then end up falling pray to these wolfs!!As a matter of fact, some men too, in their attempt to travel abroad in order to change their economic circumstances, have fallen prey to these charlatans when they are duped of hard-earned resources that could have rather been put into a useful venture here at home.

In the end, these evil men of Satan masquerading as pious men of God, end up destroying once peaceful homes, turn bosom friends into bitter foes, thriving entrepreneurs into abject paupers, stable minds into sad illusions, perfect dreams/visions into mirage and self-confidence into self-pity. Unfortunatlety,evil practices of these ‘men of God’ are being replicated, on a rather massive scale, by some individuals within our political class who go about shouting on roof-tops, their self-acclaimed piety, ‘asomdweeheneship’ and Christian divinity.

The people of this nation went to the polls in 2008 to elect a president to lead us. A little over 50% of the voting population voted for Atta-Mills, based on what he and members of his party told the people of this nation. Ghanaians were made to accept the argument that the NPP administration had come to worsen their economic woes and for their human dignity to be restored, it was incumbent on the citizenry to massively vote against the NPP.

The people of this nation were told that they were being governed by evil people who had no sympathy for the down-trodden and also had no fear of God in them. As a result, a man born of a woman and is therefore susceptible to every fallibility under the sun, was consciously packaged and presented to the people of this nation, as someone who had just descended from heaven with no blemish. The great deception of 2008 And just like how these fake pastors ply their trade, the people of Ghana were deceived into believing that someone with the qualities akin to that of apostle Paul, had been discovered after painstaking search in the holy land of Christ’s ancesstory and carefully transplanted here in our land.

They said this super-pious being was going to deliver us from all our socio-economic woes. We were also promised of a paradise-like Ghana where corruption, immorality, hunger, homelessness, sickness and ‘pocketisis’ (empty pockets) shall be a thing of the past. We were also to have government officials who hate 4-WD vehicles, multi-billion dollar mansions, juiciest contracts et all. Bachelors and spinsters who were finding it almost impossible to secure marriage partners due to lack of resources, brought about by joblessness, were promised of a ‘better Ghana’ where every indi vidual was guaranteed a beautiful/handsome bride/bride-groom respectively.

And with such juicy promise of a land where there is plenty of milk and honey, and that poverty and squalor were going to be a thing of the past for every Ghanaian so we could simply lie in bed for honey to be dripping, constantly, into our mouths, you can certainly bank your hopes on being swarmed by eagerly expectant legion. The NDC, in addition to this wicked deception, employed other ‘bugabuga’ tactics as banishing NPP polling agents from their Volta Region stronghold and invasion of EC with murder weapons. In the end, the results went in their favour.But just like these fake pastors, the NDC, after deceiving the people with sweet promises to vote for them, have ended up duping them of the little resources they had, by way of imposition of wicked taxes, high fuel prices, astronomic road tolls, exorbitant food prices and so on. Novelties vrs empty promises The little line of social nets as NHIS,MMT,LEAP,school feeding programme, antenatal care and so on, have all been allowed to collapse by people who presented themselves as saviours but have turned out to be just like these ‘men of God’ who go about defrauding people. As a result of current joblessness, inspite of ‘creation’ of multi-billion job placements as announced by ‘pikin na boloo’ Ablakwah, existing marriages are collapsing like packs of cards. Unmarried young-women promised of blissful matrimonies, by the NDC, are fast going down the menopausal hill while the young-men are fast losing their testicular-virility with its resultant fading libido.

The streets of our nation’s major cities and towns that were to be transformed into the likes of Paris and Geneva, within a period of one-hundred days, are now sanctuaries of decaying mountainous filth. Fatalistic cholera disease has now become the lot of the already suffering Ghanaian.

The gold-paved roads of a promised paradise where we were all to be walking hand-in-hand in perfect love and happiness have now been turned into grounds of mass murder through horrific road accidents. Our modest places of work and humble abodes have come under mysterious hellish infernos. Poverty-induced Suicides and stress related spousal butchering have become the order of the day. Lately, the greatest of all abomination in the sight of God, which is homosexualism, as our Asante folks will fittingly put it; ‘ate atesei wo Ghana’. Appointees of the current administration are going on rampage with guns at the heads of young-women and subjecting them to ferocious bouts of sexual abuse.HIV-carrying managers of state institutions are demanding sex from job-seeking young female graduates and infecting some of them in the process.

What the current Mills-Mahama administration has done, and continues to do to the people of this nation, is flawlessly akin to activities of these fake pastors who are wreaking havoc in homes, inflicting pain on people and shattering hopes of already hopeless citizenry.

And inspite of all these, the president still goes about proclaiming that God is the president of this grand deception that has landed us in the current mess we find ourselves in as a people. The question then is: will God, in His infinite wisdom, preside over such downright chaos and grand deception? Oh, what a sacrilegious hypocrisy!!!

Justice Abeeku Newton-Offei

E-mail: justnoff@yahoo.com