Are We Safe….

Are we being governed on the ramblings and hallucinations of a self-appointed representative of God on earth? And should Ghanaians sleep easy, knowing that their president, at his most difficult moments of decision making, rely, not on the sound advice of his advisors, but on that of a self-acclaimed representative of the almighty God on earth?

Prophet T. B. Joshua, the Founder of the Synagogue Church of All Nations, has boasted to a Nigerian Newspaper that he was the inspiration behind Ghana’s recent victory over Brazil in far away Egypt. According to an interview granted by T. B. Joshua to a Nigerian newspaper, President Atta Mills and Coach Sallas Tetteh were in constant consultations with him on what to do and what not to do during the march against Brazil last week.

According to the marabout, the President consulted him several times in the course of the day of the march on what to do and what not to do, and he gave instructions that if Ghana were to score early in the match, we could lose the game!

Victory is now in the bag, and so we may all breathe easy, but many Ghanaians, on the day of the game, wondered why the two strikers Ransford Tetteh and Dominic Adiyiah were left virtually stranded at the top of the field with no credible passes to convert to goals. It has now been explained; they were playing to instructions!

In a football march where you need goals to win, they were under instructions not to score! According to T. B. Joshua, he had specifically warned Coach Sallas Tetteh and the President on the need to avoid scoring a goal in the game, an order that would fly against all reason in a football march! Listen to T. B. Joshua, “I told them to focus on the task ahead of them, with special warning that they should not hustle to score a goal in regulation time.

I warned that if they should look for goals, they will end up losing the game! They called me again at half time and I repeated the same thing!”

Many Ghanaians have wondered why the Black Satellites left the playing of the game to the Brazilians for much of the game and rather chose to stand in their own quarter, totally repudiating all aggressive incursions into the half of the Brazilians. For much of the game, they played the dangerous game of allowing the Brazilians to take the game to them because they were under instructions not to score in regulation time, and even in extra time!

If T.B. Joshua is to be believed, then they were playing to instructions, from, of all people, a man of God who knows next to nothing about football and whose claim to legitimacy is that he says he has visions from God! Whether his claims are true or not is not the issue here. It is the principle. Should we allow our President to be taking decisions, not based on reasonable counsel arrived at by the cold, hard examination of facts, but by visions?

Ghanaians are mainly Christian, Muslim and traditionalists, but whatever the case, all of us are deeply religious, by and large. But sincerely, do we want the business of governance to be dictated, not by hard and calculating examination of facts and reasons, but by the spiritual visions of a man of God or a marabout or a Mallam, whatever the case may be?

That we won this tournament is for me, at this moment, cold comfort, in the light of the emerging and confirmed revelations about the President and the technical handlers of the team.

I feel deeply disturbed that we risked all that was at stake on the hallucinations of T. B. Joshua, because it is clear that without him, our boys and Ghanaians may not have gone through the one hundred and twenty minutes of pure torture that we went through.

This is because instead of going out there and playing to their natural strengths, Sallas Tetteh’s team was under instructions from T. B. Joshua, with the approval of the President, to underplay themselves and wait out for 120 minutes (two solid hours) because of their fear that if they score, they would lose the game! In the game of football, those who score are those who win. It is only in the land of complete unreason (and T. B. Joshua’s visions) that you tell a tournament’s best player and striker not to score because if he scores he would lose!

In any case, what is the essence of a football march if not to score? And, where does it lie to reason that you tell a football team not to score, because they might of all things, lose by scoring, when the essence of the entire game is to score in order to win?!

Finally, I must ask again, should we be comfortable when it is now manifestly clear that our President is depending on his pastor alone for directions on what to do at time of difficulty. What happened to all the many advisors we pay to surround him with?