Taking name of the Lord in vain on radio, TV

Plagued by a slight insomnia the other night, I decided to listen to radio to while away the time. I turned the dial from one station to the other but every station, apart from the BBC and a couple of others, were offering a very muscular type of Christian worship.

The first thing that strikes you is that they are very identical in format and content. Apart from a negligible few, they are all male voices hectoring either God or the audience at the very top of their voices.

Many of them were “delivering” people from all kinds of bad situations but many appear to have specialised in curing male impotence and its many variations. Something doesn’t square with the male potency profile in Ghana.

Daytime radio is filled with adverts for all kinds of herbal concoctions also aimed at curing sexual impotence among men while night time radio offers spiritual healing for the same thing.

 Meanwhile, Ghana’s population rate of 2.2 per annum, while not being the highest in Africa, is quite high. On the average, we have more than 4.1 births per woman in Ghana compared with 1.9 per woman in Germany. In a country in which men need medication by day and prayers by night, it is a surprise that there is such a high birth rate per woman.

Another regular “problem” for “delivery” is the female sexual anatomy and anything related to it, such as the menstruation, ectopic pregnancy, childbirth, or as is often the case, infertility.

The pressure on young women to go into childbearing mode immediately after marriage, or sometimes outside of marriage is well known.

However, the pressure used to come from family members; now nighttime preachers have become another source of egregious pressure on young women.

Not only are they made to feel that some evil force is at work against them, they are also made to accept the blame and guilt for what is happening to them.

I am not against genuine preaching, which however hard it may be to define, is easy to spot by the content and the method of delivery. Neither am I crusading against people exercising their faith when they seek spiritual solutions to their ailments.

However, one has to worry about the constant harping on sexual potency or lack of it in men and the refrain about supposed infertility in women.

Is it possible that these preachers, like the daytime peddlers of aphrodisiacs, have latched on to an area of psychological anxieties in order to exploit people?

It is likely that even atheists would want a miracle cure from any illness, so it is normal for people who are unwell to respond to the promise of any cure no matter where it comes from. And there are countless cases of people being cured by their faith. So we are not discounting the possibility of genuine healing by spiritual means.

However, the main point of these nighttime radio preaching is to drive people into the fold of the preacher; in that sense, they are mostly adverts because the main messages communicated forcefully throughout the night is the location of the preacher and very precise instructions about how to get there.

We have to be worried that the liberalisation of the airwaves, which held such promise for the development of our economy, society and culture, has now led to a most devious abuse of broadcasting in this country.

Thus, today, one of the main characteristics of the broadcast scene in Ghana is the huge number of religious preachers who take over our airwaves, especially at night.

I find it intriguing that there is almost no other kind of broadcast after midnight; perhaps this has something to do with the widespread belief that the devil is especially effective doing bad things at night.

 For whatever reason, this means that in any given 24 hours, a large part of broadcasting in this country can be classified as “religious broadcasting”.

Ironically, there is no “code” of conduct or practice for this category of broadcasting, especially on commercial radio or TV.

However, now thanks to an initiative by the National Media Commission and the Religious Broadcast Advisory Council (REBAC) of the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation, sanity may soon be brought into the religious broadcasting scene in Ghana.

 The two bodies together with stakeholders from several state and non-governmental faith-based organisations representing all religions in Ghana met in Accra last Monday to begin a process of establishing a code on religious broadcasting in Ghana.

I think we must all feel relieved that at long last we are about to do something about this obvious manipulation and exploitation.


Akro Rolls Back the Years for the Comrades
We buried H. P. Akrofi last Saturday at Tutu Akuapem. The CPP came in full force, led by the Chairperson, Samia Nkrumah. The NPP delegation was led by Dr Mahamadu Bawumiah.

Another group whose presence could not be ignored was a band of mostly former student political activists calling ourselves “comrades and friends”.

We were mourning although Akro, no one watching from afar would believe that we were anything but a group of ageing men who were all being young again.

This would just as H. P. Akrofi would have it, and in a sense it was as if he was there with us. The banter was our way of dealing with the grief and indescribable pain, confusion and inability to make sense of Akro’s murder.

This was perhaps the first time this group had got together like this for more than three decades. This is not a precise roll call but we had with us Kabral Blay Amihere, D. S. Boateng,  Baffour Asase Gyaima, Kofi Totobi Quakyi, Kojo Appiah, Nana Fredua Agyeman, Steve Akuffo, Kwame Annor Kumi, Maxbillion Aboagye, Obrafo Abaka Quansah, Sonny Asante Sakyi, Steve Akuffo, Kojo Haizel, Kwasi Anhwere, Frank Busumtwi, Yaw Donkor, Kojo Yankah and many others.

I mention all these names because these people have stories to tell, and in the emotional moments of sharing these stories, we were goaded by Kabral to agree to do a book project together. A book of mini-biographies will be a splendid window into a little part of our country’s history from the 1970s to the present. Coming to a bookstore near you.