The General Overseer of the International Central Gospel Church (ICGC), Pastor Dr Mensa Otabil has urged Ghanaians to be serious with national issues, so as to bring about socio-economic development.
He said: “You have to stop allowing yourselves to make serious things appear funny. Because it looks like one of the ways to satisfy us is to just give us something to entertain ourselves, and we will entertain ourselves with it for life.
“One District Chief Executive makes a comment which we should be angry with, but it has become a national joke and we just carry on and on. And I am wondering what is wrong with us? Can’t we for once be serious and face life and stop joking?
We are polluting ourselves, we have issues we can’t solve, we have problems we can’t solve. We are overwhelmed all around us, yet we have lot of time to joke and to laugh as if this is the normal environment to live in.”
Dr. Otabil therefore challenged the youth to “take life very seriously, especially if you are in Africa… I will wish that we have a month of seriousness, where we say this month nobody is laughing. Let’s start talking about the issue we face and let’s not trivialize them. And let’s put pressure on ourselves to change.”
He expressed these sentiments at the Springboard 2014 Road Show in Accra on the theme: “Re-positioning: Entrepreneurship, Career and Investment”, an initiative of Albert and Comfort Ocran of Legacy and Legacy fame.
According to him, “at the dawn of the new millennium, everyone was predicting this is going to be Africa’s millennium, “Africa rising” was the theme, and for a moment we taught we were, now everybody is giving up upon us, once more, we have contrived to sabotage ourselves, and is a cyclical narrative.”
“For us in Ghana, we are proud of what we have, our history of independence, we can be proud of things that happened 57 years ago when we got independence. And we can be proud of that, and we have the right to be proud. But I don’t think this is the Ghana that the people of 1957 were envisaging.
The Ghana of 1957 worked better than the Ghana of 2014. It worked better. At least we knew how to deal with sanitation in 1957; we didn’t have toxic waste dumped on us in 1957. We knew how to clean our compounds; we knew how to wash our compounds. There were sanitary inspectors who made sure that things were done right, but we don’t have them any longer.”
He explained that re-positioning means shifting from haphazard, unplanned life to purposeful, serious, deliberate and determined life.
“That is what we want to see, a purposeful citizenry, a nation whose citizens are purposeful, are serious, are dealing with the weighty matters confronting us, and can courageously create a better life for themselves; because we must change the African story” adding that “Africa must not become the burden of the world.”
Dr. Otabil stated that a recent media publication has revealed the Agbogloshie area in Accra is the most toxic place on earth, which was endangering human lives.
He recounted that for over 15 years, ICGC wrote to the authorities in government for the area to be turned into a green belt of the city for recreation, but now it had been encroached upon and was killing people.
He pointed out that it is regrettable that in a nation where the people cannot take charge of their destinies and turn their future in a different direction, there must be something wrong about the people and how they see life and how they see their own roles in life and urged the young ones to question their leaders why things are not working.
The General Overseer said: “We must face the things that confront us, we must solve the problems, we must solve that toxic waste problem, because years from now those people who are breathing in all that toxicity, it is not just going to come out as carbon dioxide through their nose. It is going to stay in their blood streams, it is going to affect them and their children, there is going to be deformities with children being born.”
He disclosed that people are going to have all kinds of sicknesses and diseases, we already have health challenges, why should we complicate them?
Dr Otabil questioned how such things by-pass the port authorities and land into the country.
Source: GNA