Tema, Dec. 20, GNA – Reverend Dr Samuel Worlanyo Mensah, an economist, has called on religious leaders to help the government and governance bodies in the fight against corruption.
“Our religious leaders should play a major role in educating people about the values to have in order to prevent engaging in corrupt practices as the majority of the population professes to one religious faith or the other,” he said.
Reverend Dr Mensah, who is also the Presiding Bishop of Christ White House Chapel International, made the call during a discussion in Tema on Monday.
He said religious leaders should take part of the time they used for sermons to educate their followers on corruption.
The discussant, who is also the Executive Director of Centre for Greater Impact Africa, noted that the religious bodies, especially the churches and the mosques, needed to be positioned to inculcate moral values into the young ones.
He said that religious leaders and anyone, who knows how to fast and pray, needed to be engaged in the fight against corruption to enable the country to start corruption reduction at the individual and community level.
“We cannot control how someone would sin against God, but we can control and monitor how an individual relates with other people,” he stated.
Reverend Dr Mensah said that it would be very difficult to fight and eradicate corruption from the system if the government only focused on it at the national level.
“I think that the way we are fighting corruption is not the best because corruption has three levels – individual, community and national.
“But unfortunately, governments over the years have only focused on the national level,” he added.
Reverend Dr Mensah urged the government to team up with religious bodies, dialogue and create new methods to help fight corruption from the basic level before tackling it at the national level.
On COVID-19, the economist and cleric noted that businesses have been destroyed and people were striving for other avenues in terms of having stimulus packages to sustain businesses.
The Rev. Dr Mensah, therefore, appealed to the Government to reconsider the decision and possible defer it for some years.
He noted that ‘we are not at war for the urgent purchase of a presidential jet or a fighter plane.
“We are not in normal times, let’s wait till the situation returns to normalcy, then we can consider acquiring a presidential jet.”
Mr Francis Ameyibor, Tema Regional Manager of the Ghana News Agency, said the GNA had over the years maintained its image of dissemination of accurate, truthful, balanced and credible news for public consumption.
